For centuries, plant breeding has been a labor-intensive process that depended largely on trial and error. To find the most successful variety of corn, for example, a breeder might pollinate hundreds or even thousands of plants by hand to see what happened. Syngenta had been involved in a large-scale version of trial-and-error research and development, conducting field tests on hundreds of thousands of plants each year in more than 150 locations around the world. But given that the results of experiments are often shaped by quirks and idiosyncrasies, it was sometimes difficult to draw meaningful conclusions. Syngenta's idea was to use data analytics to study a wide range of plant and seed varieties so it could identify the most desirable plants early and make optimal use of resources (everything from capital to labor to land to time). Rather than investing time and resources on more and more testing, its aim was to make decisions about plant portfolios using hard data and science. The vision, write authors Joseph Byrum and Alpheus Bingham, "was to create a suite of software tools that would replace intuition in plant breeding with data-backed science." The authors describe how open innovation can help companies tackle complex business problems that they can't solve on their own. They also discuss lessons Syngenta learned as the company turned to several online crowdsourcing platforms to find talent that could help it increase its R&D efficiency. The effort paid off: Within eight years, Syngenta tripled the average annual improvement rate of its soybean portfolio. In April 2015, an independent panel of academic and business experts in operations research validated the company's efforts and their applicability beyond agriculture, awarding Syngenta the 2015 Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Operations Research and the Management Sciences.

HBR's annual ideas collection, compiled in cooperation with the World Economic Forum, offers 10 fresh solutions with the potential for a huge positive impact on business and the world. Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer reveal what their research shows is the true key to employee motivation-and it's not what most managers focus on providing. Ronald Dixon proposes that the real performance breakthrough in health care will come when the medical community adopts the everyday communications technologies patients already use. Lawrence M. Candell asks why the U.S. has a Lincoln Laboratory to put public-spirited experts across the table from profit-motivated defense contractors, but no such entity to do the same in the financial sector. Eric Bonabeau, Alpheus Bingham, and Aaron Schacht urge players in the pharmaceutical industry to treat drugs as information assets; big pharma could orchestrate drug-development networks to promote innovation. Jack D. Hidary describes a market solution to achieve what no government handout can in the greening of existing buildings. Robert E. Litan and Lesa Mitchell advocate that universities' technology transfer offices loosen their monopolistic grip on their scientists' taxpayer-funded discoveries. Bill Jensen and Josh Klein urge frustrated professionals to "hack work" by adopting the mind-set and tool kit of the hacker to achieve the positive outcomes their employers want but make difficult to achieve. Sendhil Mullainathan notes that we have the tools to spot bubbles about to burst, but individual firms have little incentive to sound the alarm. Why not appoint a "bubbles committee"? Paul Romer proposes that "charter cities" be established to show the citizens of failed and languishing states the merits of market economies and to provide an option for change. Carne Ross questions why only nation-states are allowed to shape international affairs and reveals the need for independent diplomacy.