The economist: Has the ideas machine broken down?

BOOM times are back in Silicon Valley. Office parks along Highway 101 are once again adorned with the insignia of hopeful start-ups. Rents are soaring, as is the demand for fancy vacation homes in resort towns like Lake Tahoe, a sign of fortunes being amassed. The Bay Area was the birthplace of the semiconductor industry and the computer and internet companies that have grown up in its wake. Its wizards provided many of the marvels that make the world feel futuristic, from touch-screen phones to the instantaneous searching of great libraries to the power to pilot a drone thousands of miles away. The revival in its business activity since 2010 suggests progress is motoring on.

Meet the Visionary Venture Capitalist Who's Inspired by Marx and Keynes

 Lynn Stuart Parramore

Interviewed by AlterNet, William Janeway believes that tackling big challenges like climate change means overhauling the way we think about innovation

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William Janeway is no ordinary businessman.  In his view, waste can be good, efficiency is the enemy of innovation, and government investment builds the platform on which venture capitalists and entrepreneurs can “dance.”  A Cambridge-educated economist whose career as a venture capital investor has spanned four decades, Janeway has been called a “theorist-practitioner” by the great Hyman Minsky. As an investor, he built and led the Warburg Pincus Technology Investment team that provided financial backing to some of the companies that sparked the Internet economy.  

Innovation Crisis or Financial Crisis?

CAMBRIDGE – As one year of sluggish growth spills into the next, there is growing debate about what to expect over the coming decades. Was the global financial crisis a harsh but transitory setback to advanced-country growth, or did it expose a deeper long-term malaise?

Illustration by Chris Van Es

Recently, a few writers, including internet entrepreneur Peter Thiel and political activist and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, have espoused a fairly radical interpretation of the slowdown. In a forthcoming book, they argue that the collapse of advanced-country growth is not merely a result of the financial crisis; at its root, they argue, these countries’ weakness reflects secular stagnation in technology and innovation. As such, they are unlikely to see any sustained pickup in productivity growth without radical changes in innovation policy.

Economist Robert Gordon takes this idea even further. He argues that the period of rapid technological progress that followed the Industrial Revolution may prove to be a 250-year exception to the rule of stagnation in human history. Indeed, he suggests that today’s technological innovations pale in significance compared to earlier advances like electricity, running water, the internal combustion engine, and other breakthroughs that are now more than a century old.

Why crazy ideas are critical: A Nobel-winning chemist's view

Roald Hoffmann talks to Fortune about the benefits of accepting complexity and how to make sure your team feels comfortable with offering seemingly batty ideas.

FORTUNE -- Nobel-prize winning chemist Roald Hoffmann has had anything but a simple path to success. He was born in Poland, and survived the Nazi labor camps. He came to America at the age of 12, attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in New York, then Columbia, then Harvard.

Hoffmann received a Nobel in Chemistry in 1981 at the age of 44, but certainly didn't rest on his laurels. The 75-year-old scientist has advised over 200 graduate students, Ph.D.s, and postdocs, taught introductory chemistry at Cornell, co-authored plays, and published poetry. Currently, he helps run a science and performance event on the second Sunday of every month at the Cornelia Street cafe in New York. He recently talked to Fortune about leadership, molecules, and the psychology of enabling crazy ideas. Here is an edited transcript of the conversation.