1) What two or three external factors do you think will impact small business innovation over the next 5 years? Think about technology, globalization, and social concerns. Your response should be around 250 to 300 words.  comment this; Three external factors that will impact small business innovation over the next 5 years are inflation, new strains of COVID, and restricted physical interaction due to COVID. With the rising costs of money and resources, innovation can then be costly. This may hinder the ability to continue innovating with rising costs. Innovation itself can sometimes cost a substantial amount of money and resources to innovate. The ability to do so can then be hindered by the rising costs of resources and money. With the addition of new strains of COVID can affect business performance overall and even considering innovation. On a positive note, this offers a situation worth innovating for as being able to innovate within these worldly epidemics would have a positive growth for a business in this kind of situation. On the other hand, this can slow certain innovations which require physical activity of some sort. It can also slow the business down itself as we have seen this first hand during the first phase of COVID with the addition of state lockdowns, affecting small businesses across the country. With these lockdowns, we saw that non essential businesses were forced to shutdown, overall shutting the business down temporarily. We have then seen some businesses even prosper during these times as they were able to innovate through these shutdowns of non essential businesses. With the addition to this, other businesses like DoorDash raised in popularity as people could not be out or did not feel like going out as the nation was under lock down.  and this one: Three factors that I think will affect business over the next five years are Cryptocurrency/NFTs, self-driving cars, and social media. Cryptocurrency is significant because it offers a financial currency and system outside of government control or the same amount of regulation. Cryptocurrency will bring power back to the people which has been called by the central banking system for a long time. It's an opportunity to make money when inflation has been sky high and with almost a negative interest rate. I expect a cryptocurrency to be here for a long time but it's difficult to estimate the size of its future impact. Self-driving cars are another one because car crashes lead to an insane amount of deaths every year and resources usually transported by trucks will be driven by AI instead of humans. The need for truck drivers may go extinct in the near future as technology continues to evolve. Finally, social media has gone through many changes over the recent years and I expect more to come. Social media has a huge impact on the spread of information around the world and has lost the trust of most of the public since it hasn't been regulated fairly for years. Hopefully, social media can become more free speech with better regulations since it has such a significant impact on society.