Innovation Hub

Is a patent troll coming after your idea? Well, maybe you should check out Alex Reben's algorithm.

Buy this! Drink that! Does it ever feel like advertisements are becoming more and more omnipresent? Author Tim Wu explains.

Money and politics have always been paired. But journalist Jane Mayer and professor Theda Skocpol both say that something new is afoot, thanks in part to a couple of very rich brothers.

Judy Cockerton saw a problem and decided to do something about it. At 48, she shut down her toy store and created a village of sixty homes. The catch? They were reserved for seniors and families with foster kids. We visited Cockerton's village to learn how she built it.

What would your personal utopia look like? Well, it probably wouldn't involve furniture making and no sex. Chris Jennings talks 19th century American utopias.

The Industrial Revolution spawned more than just machinery. Author Chris Jennings says it was a catalyst for a pretty old idea: that heaven could be found on Earth. Plus, Judy Cockerton saw a problem and set out to fix it. And finally, something surprising: the Amish have wildly successful businesses, often without using cell phones, websites or email addresses.

Even without cars and computers, the Amish have managed to start and grow successful businesses. Professor Donald Kraybill tells us how they've developed a surprising culture of innovation without the help of the latest tech.

Our leaders should be deeply empathetic people, right? Well, according to Paul Bloom, empathy can actually get in the way of helping people. Mandatory voting, a council of presidents, more bureaucrats... Parag Khanna says that this is what American democracy should look like. Man-made climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time. So why exactly aren’t we doing more about it?

Parag Khanna believes technocrats get a bad rap in America, and our country could improve - and recover from what he calls “degenerative politics” - if it had more of them in office.

Empathy is an inherently good human quality. So, why is Yale psychologist Paul Bloom against it? We talk with him about why feeling others' pain makes for bad public policy.