If you think improv is just for extraverts and wannabe actors, think again. Learning improv skills can be a great investment in your career too. From marketers to management consultants, from startup founders to the NHS, people are taking the skills of improvisation offstage to help them communicate more clearly, act more confidently and think on their feet.

The organisers of Europe's startup-investor matchmaking event, Arctic15, have brought its conclave virtual. The new online summit takes place from the 19th-21st October. The innovative event will bring together over 2,000 virtual attendees, 300 investors, 450 startups and 150 corporates, all of which are seeking to connect with the next generation of Nordic and European startups.

The Purposeful Project, founded and run by serial entrepreneur Simon Squibb, has launched a new initiative to create specialist entrepreneurial hubs in local libraries, with Belsize Community Library forming the first of its kind in the UK.

The University of Exeter Business School is involved with a project to automate Gift Aid donations and potentially unlock more than £560m for charities every year.

One year on from launch, fit-centric underwear brand, Nudea is reaping the rewards of responding to the challenges of lockdown as well as celebrating new line launches. By disrupting traditional bra fitting through innovation and by modernising the measuring process with custom-designed tools, direct-to-consumer and online-only, Nudea has seen exponential growth during the lockdown period with sales of the brand’s Fit Tape up 500% since March and post-lockdown growth averaging 80% MoM.

WeWALK, the smart cane designed for people who are blind or with low vision which is now in use across 37 markets, has joined Microsoft’s AI for Accessibility programme to accelerate WeWALK’s capability by developing and validating a human behaviour model for visually impaired users.

Code First Girls, the UK social enterprise working to close the gender gap in technology, has today announced it has surpassed its 2017 campaign goal to teach over 20,000 young women how to code in the UK and Ireland. Over the past three years, Code First Girls has become the largest provider of free coding courses for women, having delivered over £14m worth of free technology education. The announcement comes at a critical time to close the IT skills gap, only 19% of those pursuing Computer Science at higher education level are women. 

Wondercise, the advanced smart fitness service, launches globally with Apple Watch and Garmin wearable support, from just 10 cents a day.* Featuring world-first Motion Matching technology complete with on-screen heart rate data, it analyzes your movements and compares them with those of an on-screen trainer in real-time. 

Today, one in seven UK workers are on flexible contracts, up 25% in the last two decades. To meet the demand of the modern workforce, Quantum Employment Design company My Digital is announcing its real-time digital accounting cloud service focused exclusively on the needs of contractors.

London-based startup, SilkFred wanted to take all the things customers love about shopping with them and distill this into a simple concept: the latest fashion from brands you haven’t yet discovered, for the moments that are special to you and shoppable video content showing you how to wear from the SilkFred team.

According to new research from Pluralsight, the enterprise technology skills and engineering management platform, 43% of UK office workers are worried they will be left behind as companies seek new skills to cope with the rapid pace of change.

Evidence suggests street and sexual harassment have worsened during lockdown. The majority of that harassment will go unreported so there will be no response and little can be done to fight it. Something has to change if increased harassment is not going to be part of the ‘new normal’.

Condense Reality, a virtual reality startup developing technology to transform how viewers watch live entertainment and sports, has raised a seed round of more than £800,000, including £220,000 from SFC Capital, the most active seed-stage investor in the UK.

Stream, the creator of enterprise-grade activity feed and chat APIs, recently closed its $15m Series A financing. The funding round was made possible by the startup’s rapid growth amid COVID-19.

The international outlook for R&D is remarkably promising despite strong headwinds, according to research released today by Ayming Group, the business performance consultancy specialising in innovation. Ayming’s second annual International Innovation Barometer (IIB) reveals that R&D departments are being empowered by the creation of innovation ecosystems, new funding methods, and the deployment of technology.

The pandemic has caused significant disruption to communities, businesses and the economy on a scale that has never been experienced before. The economy shrank 20.4% between April and June as ongoing lockdown measures led the country into recession.

Despite COVID-19, the Swiss Market Entry Bootcamp happened yesterday in Zurich. Representatives of 40 startup companies from 20 countries worldwide, including the US, Canada, Brazil, Turkey, and numerous European countries, attended the kick-off event online and physically at the Kraftwerk Zurich.

The Gift Card & Voucher Association (GCVA), supported by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and the Association of Town and City Management (ATCM), has urged Government to take action to save the high street, in a move that could safeguard thousands of jobs and add £2bn into the high street economy.

Vimcar, the fleet management software for small and medium-sized companies, has released new research into how new driving behaviour, adopted as a result of COVID-19, has impacted on the potential for electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids in SME fleets.