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Europe has experienced a major boom of new breweries over the last thirty years, with thousands of new breweries being set up, even in regions where brewing has no history. So far, however, this microbrewing wave has not been systematically mapped. This paper presents a unique database of European breweries from 1990–2020. Using a series of maps and statistical analyses, it shows how breweries have gradually spread across Europe. Initially, microbreweries were being established in countries that are in a declining stage of the beer life-cycle from industrial breweries. After 2005 (and particularly in the 2010s), breweries reached other regions through neighbouring and hierarchical spatial diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Favoring innovation by making timely medical technology available to people and by securing patients' safety is a challenge. The new European Medical Device Regulation (MDR) will have a central implication in the development of new devices and could affect their innovation and availability, as well as discourage investment in research within Europe. Start-ups and small companies might not be able to cope with the increasing complexity and the required changes of perspective. Health-care institutions are facing an increasing availability of complex technologies, while data on their clinical efficacy and cost-effectiveness are rarely provided. A partnership/collaboration between health-care institutions, academia, and private industries will enhance their own specific interests with the common goal of improving overall health and quality of life. The complexity of the subject combined with the variety of specialists and stakeholders involved requires the implementation, in hospital centers of clinical excellence, of units dedicated to the whole path of the medical device innovation. Stakeholders should quickly provide adequate measures to facilitate the complex medical device innovation path under the more stringent MDR aimed to increase safety and quality of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores aspects of the relationship between business history and urban history through a discussion of the seaside resort as a type of town that might also be regarded as a business (as might other kinds of town specialising in leisure and tourism). In the process it looks comparatively at aspects of the development of such towns across Europe, at the range of ways in which an understanding of seaside tourism contributes to a more satisfactory grasp of how businesses and societies function, and at the reasons for the enduringly marginal status of research in this sector and its limited integration into the perceived ‘mainstream' of all kinds of history, including business history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]