Innovation & Invention: Keys to the Future

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2:15 | Play Now | Meet a very wise man, Michael Novak. He says that capitalism rewards visionaries.

Washington, DC and around the world: Let us go where commercial television doesn't go and even PBS is reluctant. Let's look at our core belief systems and see how these shape our business thinking and behavior.

What drives people to challenge the status quo? ...to go out into the unknown? ...to try to create things that have never been seen before? Why do these people work so hard and stretch so far? Everybody talks about them, saying things like, "Crazy!" "They'll kill themselves."  "They're in a world of their own."  Yet, these daring people, driven by principles and dreams, are changing our world for the better.

Michael Novak is a reflective person. For his writings about the foundations of faith he received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion (always larger than the Nobel Prize). So trusted among leaders, he was twice appointed U.S. Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission.

Today he lives near all the world's ambassadors to the USA, all people seeking to get some advantage for their people. Yet, the biggest advantage any country could give her people is the power to unleash their unique, deep-seated creativity.

Through his prodigious research Novak realized there are very particular historic roots within the USA, unique orientations to universal belief within this Judeo-Christian culture, that gave rise to the rapid growth of the sciences and of democratic capitalism in this country.

Novak would like to see this innovative spirit take root throughout the world.

Today, with the ubiquity of communications, small business formation is better understood and much of the global community is finding their own unique ways to stimulate small business start-ups and even capital formation. 

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