Talk of the demise of the world’s largest industrial-machinery maker is probably overdone. Fanuc Corp., the low-key Japanese automation giant whose machines pepper factory floors across the globe, has fallen from investors’ grace: The stock is down more than 30 percent from its January high, while the Topix index has lost less than 6 percent. Much of the gloom stems ...

It’s said that banks stopped inventing anything useful after the ATM. Yet bailed-out lender Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) has given us not just one valuable payments processor, but two. Its Worldpay business was sold to private equity and changed hands again last year for $10 billion. Now Amsterdam-based Adyen BV — whose founders worked for Worldpay — ...

The researchers who pioneered insulin injections for diabetes sufferers in 1922 were dedicated to making the life-saving treatment widely available, and gave away their rights to profit from the discovery. Yet almost a century later, the medicine is still beyond the reach of roughly half of the 100 million people around the world who need it. Governments should be asking ...