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The human drive to invent new things has led to pathbreaking achievements in medicine, science and society. But our desire to create can keep us from seeing one of the most powerful paths to progress: subtraction. In a favorite conversation from 2022, engineer Leidy Klotz shares how streamlining and simplifying is sometimes the best path to innovation.

Have you ever wondered why some companies fail, while others succeed? This week, organizational economist Raffaella Sadun reveals one of the overlooked ways that businesses can grow and help their employees to thrive.

If you've missed any of the episodes in our Innovation 2.0 series, you can find them in this podcast feed, or on our website: https://hiddenbrain.org/

Most of us love to brainstorm with colleagues. But so often, our idea-generating sessions don't lead to anything tangible. Teams fill up walls with sticky notes about creative possibilities and suggestions for improvement, but nothing actually gets implemented. Some researchers even have a name for it: "innovation theater." This week, we explore the science of execution. Psychologist Bob Sutton tells us how to move from innovation theater . . . to actual innovation.

Think about the last time you asked someone for something. Maybe you were nervous or worried about what the person would think of you. Chances are that you didn’t stop to think about the pressure you were exerting on that person. This week, we continue our Innovation 2.0 series with a 2020 episode about a phenomenon known as as “egocentric bias.” We talk with psychologist Vanessa Bohns about how this bias leads us astray, and how we can use this knowledge to ask for the things we need.

We all know what it's like to be in the grip of fear. And while our intuition is to avoid the things we're afraid of, this can paradoxically make the problem worse. We recently talked with psychiatrist Arash Javanbakht about how we can cope with these intense feelings. This week, he returns to the show to respond to listeners’ questions about everything from spider-related fears to anxieties over air travel.

If you missed our original conversation with Arash Javanbakht, you can find it in this podcast feed. It's the episode called "Fear Less."

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt that people wrote you off? Maybe a teacher suggested you weren't talented enough to take a certain class, or a boss implied that you didn't have the smarts needed to handle a big project. In the latest in our "Innovation 2.0 series," we talk with Mary Murphy, who studies what she calls "cultures of genius." We'll look at how these cultures can keep people and organizations from thriving, and how we can create environments that better foster our growth.