1. The industrial property segment continues to be the strongest performer in Malaysia’s real estate market for 2025. Based on NAPIC’s Q1, H1, and Q3 2025 snapshots, the data shows a healthy industrial pipeline, stable demand, and sustained construction activity—even as other sectors like residential and serviced apartments face oversupply challenges.
1. Tallinn has been named the world’s best city for start-ups in the prestigious Monocle magazine’s 2025 Quality of Life Survey. Making its debut in the rankings, Estonia’s capital received top marks for its advanced digital infrastructure, supportive start-up ecosystem, low cost of living, and inclusive international community, writes Startup Estonia.
1. In a January speech at a Siemens Healthineers factory outside Oxford, Chancellor Rachel Reeves — Britain’s equivalent of an American treasury secretary — laid out her vision for the region. “This area has the potential to be Europe’s Silicon Valley,” she said. “To make that a reality, we need a systematic approach to attract businesses to come here and to grow here.” She argued it was time to go “further and faster to unlock the potential” of the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor, which she said could add over $100 billion to the U.K. economy by 2035.
1. The above-average success of start-ups from the Brainport Eindhoven region can be directly linked to the specific characteristics and conditions within the region. The high degree of mutual cooperation and the presence of talent and knowledge stand out the most. This becomes evident from research among the 70 former winners of a Gerard & Anton Award, presented annually, since 2014, to ten promising start-ups from the Brainport Eindhoven region.
2. The main distinguishing factors of Brainport are, according to the start-ups surveyed:
- availability of talent and knowledge
- cooperation across the ecosystem (vertical and horizontal)
- availability of suitable work locations (including labs)
- the focus on solving major societal problems (impact-driven)
- the accessibility of knowledge institutions and technical support
3. The study also reveals that the benefits of Brainport have the greatest impact in the early years of a start-up. As the start-up grows, the bottlenecks also become more prominent. These are in areas such as housing, access to money, bureaucracy, low diversity, and customer relations with corporates.
1. Espoo is Finland’s second biggest city. With close to 300,000 inhabitants, it is home to many education and research institutes as well as global corporations including Nokia. Interestingly, all Finnish unicorn startups have emerged in the city. Read more about what makes Espoo smart!
1. What makes a robotics cluster successful? Proximity to university research and talent, government support of entrepreneurship, and a focus on industry end users are all important. Around the world, regions have proclaimed initiatives to become “the next Silicon Valley.” However, there have been relatively few metrics to describe robotics hubs — until now.
2. This week, Odense Robotics in Denmark released a report on the economic returns generated by its member companies. Both the amount of exports and the number of employees have increased by about 50 percent, according to Mikkel Christoffersen, business manager at Odense Robotics.
3. At the same time, the report is realistic about the ongoing challenges facing every robotics cluster, including finding qualified job candidates. As locales from India to Israel and Canada to China look to stimulate innovation, they should look at their own mixes of people, partnerships, and economic performance.
1. With a combined market value of over $7 billion, the life science sectors in Sweden and Denmark are thriving, with over a thousand healthcare companies being set up over the past few years. Much of this is owing to the cross-border cluster that spans regions of eastern Denmark and southern Sweden, the Medicon Valley.
2. Racking up more than DKK 45 billion ($6.64 billion) in investments, the Medicon Valley is home to Danish multinational company Novo Nordisk, which runs the world’s largest insulin plant. A driver in diabetes treatment, its diabetes pill Rybelsus was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a first-line treatment to lower blood sugar levels, earlier this year.
3. In the frontline of this cluster is the Medicon Valley Alliance, a non-profit organization that works to strengthen collaboration between the Danish and Swedish life science sector, with an interest in promoting the hub as an attractive destination for setting up healthcare companies, according to David Zepernick, director, member engagement and communication at Medicon Valley Alliance.
1. The success of the Brainport region is leading to significantly more jobs and residents in the coming years. The region is gearing up for a jump in scale, putting pressure on society. Every resident must be able to participate, but that does not happen by itself. In addition to support from the national government, the business community is investing in measures in the areas of talent development, accessibility, housing and equal opportunities through the Brainport Partner Fund. NXP is one of the companies that have joined the fund. Director Jean Schreurs of NXP Netherlands: “Brainport should not only be an economic success story, but also a place where everyone gets opportunities.”
1. RailTel, a Central Government PSU, said on Wednesday it will create 'edge data centres' at Railway premises across 102 locations, especially Tier-2 and Tier-3 towns in the country.
2. The 'edge data centres' will be set up by RailTel jointly with partners.
3. The prospective Business Associates/partners should be a company registered in India. This activity will entail an investment opportunity of around Rs 500 crore, RailTel said in a statement
4. The process to establish the edge data centres has been set in motion with the floating of Expression of Interest (EOI) inviting the industry to partner in this exercise, it said.
5. Edge data centres are small data centres located at the edge of the network, where they are closer to end-users and devices. Having such kind of facility at the edge would enable faster performance and lower latency as organisations will not have to move the data to far-flung data centres to process it.
1. A new Equitable Transit-Oriented Development (ETOD) Pilot Program to support community-driven projects that promote healthy, affordable, and accessible development near transit. The pilot program supports the implementation of the City of Chicago’s recently adopted ETOD Policy Plan.
2. Three-part ETOD plan was developed over the last two years to foster more equitable transit-oriented development citywide. The plan’s goals include driving investment in transit-oriented projects on the South, West, and Southwest sides while also preventing displacement and promoting affordability in the North and Northwest sides of the city.
1. The term ‘front-loaded’ refers to costs that are applied disproportionately to elements of the work that take place early on during a project or part of a project.
2. There are a wide variety of different construction costs that must be built into a project’s budget. Many of these can be divided into two categories; hard costs and soft costs.
1. In the United States, The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) announced the availability of approximately $10 million in competitive grant funds through FTA's Pilot Program for Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Planning.
2. FTA says the funds will support comprehensive planning efforts that help connect communities, improve access to public transportation and affordable housing, combat climate change, advance environmental justice, and promote equitable delivery of benefits to underserved communities.
1. Pursuing TOD is a core requirement for cities to achieve a significant modal shift away from reliance on private vehicles. It requires long-term vision and investment. Cities as diverse as Portland, Cape Town, Curitiba, Tokyo and Stockholm are leading the way, and this is how cities can join them.
1. Transit Oriented Development (TOD) is a way of developing, financing and delivering transport infrastructure projects.
2. It has gained popularity – particularly in the Far East and parts of the United States – over the last 15 years.
3. This popularity is set to soar as project owners and governments continue to search for novel ways of financing transport infrastructure developments.
The Government is introducing greater flexibility in land use so as to accommodate the diversifying space requirements of the innovation economy. It is introducing the Master Developer approach to develop districts based on land use and gross plot ratio.
1. The past decade has seen residential Master Developers (MDs) playing an increasingly important role in the UK’s development market, helping to accelerate housing supply through the delivery of strategic housing led developments.
2. Those acting in the role of MDs are responsible from first conception and planning, all the way through to the implementation of these major projects, either through direct development or serviced land sales.
3. We find that there have been many factors that have contributed to a prevalence in this kind of large-scale strategic development in the past decade.