Economists disagree over whether the U.S. can keep driving the productivity gains that lead to higher incomes. To learn whether we're on track or in trouble, we should look at the number of business starts.

Unemployment rates remain high in this sluggish recovery period, but many places in the United States require more and more workers to be licensed in order to offer their services or open a business. Two of the worst areas are health care and law.

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.

Two arguments against low trade barriers - that U.S. manufacturing is bound to lose out to places like Korea and Taiwan because they pay rock-bottom wages, and to Japan and other aggressive foreign competitors because they help favored industries with subsidies - don't stand up to the facts. The United States imports less from low-wage countries now than it did in 1960; protection levels haven't changed much since 1981, the year the United States last had a surplus in manufactured goods. What is at the bottom of our massive trade deficit? The huge gap between our production and our spending, fueled largely by the enormous federal budget deficit.