Article:
What does Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt have to say about prison reform? Quite a lot, it turns out. In HBR’s 2012 List of Audacious Ideas, he offers an intriguing proposal to address America’s disgraceful rates of incarceration and recidivism: Let the profit motive incentivize private businesses to own the problem.
Schmidt’s is one of 13 bold ideas for addressing seemingly intractable problems, from how we reward CEOs to how we think about dying. The Yale economist Robert Shiller, for example, outlines a way to solve the debt crisis by selling citizens shares of GDP. The venture capitalists Bruce Gibney and Ken Howery argue that VCs have a special role to play in a healthy society: making huge bets of a kind we haven’t seen in some time.
