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A study has perhaps surprisingly put the Czech capital Prague and its Slovak counterpart, Bratislava, out there as some of the top locations for the concentrations of so-called brain business in Europe.

Over the past week Prague was the focus for discussions between experts and businessmen from Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia, about their experiences with the medicinal cannabis market. It’s a global market that’s growing fast and reckoned to be soon worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But the story in the Czech Republic and in many other places is of growing pains and the early expectations not being realised.

A Czech designer has won acclaim by bringing her talent to the intimate world of women’s sex toys, But is not been an easy path from idea to final sales and although new products are on the way the world market is still beckoning.

A Czech inventor is behind what is claimed to be a revolutionary lithium battery which could be the answer to the world’s energy storage problems. And the dream of inventor Jan Procházka is now taking shape with a high tech factory being constructed for the production of those small, high powered but low cost batteries in the far east of the Czech Republic.

Twenty years ago, SCS software was a small company just starting out, founded by three friends with programming backgrounds. At the start, the company took small contracts designing games for other publishers, often under a tight schedule and limited budget. In those days, one of the founders admits, the company was more or less invisible, with IPs going to the client. Not so anymore.

This week Radio Prague staged a special debate about Czech economic convergence with the most developed West European economies. While other Central European countries have almost caught up the Czechs, it has been a stop-start and slow process to try and achieve the economic development and prosperity of economies such as Germany or France. The lag is especially striking with respect to average Czech wages and those, for instance, in Germany.

Czechs are among the world leaders for so-called contactless cash payments. The use of such payments, such as on city trams and buses, is soaring and has sparked arguments about whether the writing is on the wall for traditional notes and coins issued by the country’s central bank.

It’s pretty clear that European agriculture is bracing itself for a further wave of reform which will trim and re-shape the famed Common Agricultural Policy. But early discussions on what form the reforms should take have already highlighted deep divides between Czech farmers themselves and with the agriculture ministry.

The electric car revolution is clearly on the horizon although their sales take off in the Czech Republic has been hesitant so far. Even so, one of the major stakeholders in that transformation, electricity producer ČEZ, is pushing ahead with a programme to have the required infrastructure in place when the brakes on electric car sales finally come off.

Prague is undoubtedly a hub for the use of the alternative cryptocurrency Bitcoin. But Bitcoin is now very much at a crossroads as some of its technological flaws start to catch up. A sort of civil war has developed around its future development with, as the cliché goes, only likely to tell who the victor will be.