Serendipitous encounters with unfamiliar ideas while browsing for books often leads to new discoveries and inventions. With the decline of brick and mortar bookstores, can these chance encounters move online?

During the creative process, the brain shuts off its normal inhibition of new ideas. Most of the time, it's important to self monitor so you don’t say everything you think or do everything you consider. But when generating new ideas, this function gets in the way.

Three social entrepreneurs decide to make the world a more generous place in real time. Will you help?

Young people in America are increasingly qualified to follow in the great inventors footsteps--yet fewer think they'll do so. A survey probes why.

The Social Network is not the feel-good movie of the year--certainly not for Mark Zuckerberg, or for the dozens of exceptionally talented men and women who created Facebook. They were, and are, brilliant, hardworking and imaginative people who managed to survive the uniquely fraught early moments of an online start-up. It was a swirl alright, but not the way the film would have you think.

"You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do that!" the common phrase goes. "C'mon man, this isn't brain surgery after all."

I started wondering why these two disciplines--rocket science and brain surgery--are so highly regarded. They both involve tremendous precision, years of study, mathematical calculations, complex directions, excessive memorization, and level-headedness under intense pressure. In other words, it's like the Left-Brain Olympics. The X-Games of Logical, analytical, linear thinking.

Networking is a critical skill in any field, especially in entrepreneurship and innovation. What follows is an email exchange between a high school student and myself that I thought others might enjoy.