This week, Dan is joined by Dr. Kerry Healey, President of Babson College. In this podcast, Dr. Healey discusses her path from 70th Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts to first female president of Babson College. Babson is a small liberal arts school located in Wellesley, Massachusetts that is world-renowned for its entrepreneurship education. Dr. Healey’s initiatives like the Global Scholars program have helped globalize the student body at Babson; international students now comprise 28 percent of the student body, with 87 different countries represented in 2018 alone. Under Dr. Healey, Babson has spread its entrepreneurial spirit and knowledge abroad through 14 MOOCs (massive online open courses) that have reached 150,000 students in 226 countries and districts around the world.

In this episode, Dan sits down with Harold Rosen, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Grassroots Business Fund. They discuss Harold’s career at the World Bank and the Grassroots Business Fund, which grew out of the Grassroots Business Initiative at the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Harold was at the forefront of bringing impact investment and small-and-medium-businesses financing to the IFC, and he talks about how measuring and delivering impact and microfinance have evolved in development finance institutions (DFIs). He also discusses blended finance and the importance – and difficulty – of crowding in capital to finance small businesses and help lift people out of poverty.

In this podcast, Dan is joined by former Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman. Secretary Lehman served under President Ronald Reagan and took office at the age of just 38 years old. This podcast explores the influence of the U.S. Navy during the Cold War and Secretary Lehman’s new book Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea. One of Secretary Lehman’s greatest achievements was Ocean Venture ’81, a naval exercise that took place in 1981 that involved 120,000 service personnel, 250 ships and about 1,000 or more planes from 14 countries. Listen to the full podcast to hear the untold story of the U.S. naval efforts during the Cold War and the important role of deterrence to U.S. national security.

In this episode, Dan sits down with Lindsay Lloyd, Deputy Director of the Human Freedom Initiative at the George W. Bush Institute, to talk about the health of democracy worldwide. Mr. Lloyd was involved in the Democracy Project: a joint national survey by the Bush Institute, Freedom House, and the Penn Biden center that examines American attitudes toward the state of democracy at home and the importance of promoting democracy abroad. Dan and Lindsay discuss some of the survey’s findings and extend the conversation to questions of democracy in countries such as China, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Tune in to this episode of Building the Future: Freedom, Prosperity and Foreign Policy with Dan Runde to find out why Americans value democracy – although youth increasingly value it less – and why there is reason to be optimistic about the future of democracy all around the world.

This week Dan hosts Rick Barton, former U.S. Ambassador to the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations and author of the recently published book, Peace Works: America’s Unifying Role in a Turbulent World. Rick discusses his extensive career trajectory at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) – where he founded the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) – the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations, and the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO) at the State Department. His experience at these organizations and his dedication to foreign policy inspired his latest book, in which he discusses the need to match American ingenuity with local ingenuity to be a catalyzing – and not a colonizing – force in international affairs.

On this episode, Dan is joined by Hank Meijer, author of the book “Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century.” Hank discusses the life and legacy of an unsung hero, Senator Arthur Vandenberg --- the legislative architect of several critical pieces of foreign policy including the Marshall Plan. Vandenberg played an important role in obtaining bipartisan consensus in Congress and first coined the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’. He sacrificed his presidential ambitions to stay in Congress and hold hearings on the Marshall Plan. While unknown to many, Vandenberg was an integral part of the conversations that began to conceptualize a post-war alliance, which eventually led to the formation of the United Nations. Hank Meijer spent over two decades researching Vandenberg’s legacy and wrote the Michigan Senator’s first biography in honor of his public service.

Over the next few decades, much of the rapid population growth in the developing world will be concentrated in megacities and urban centers. This reality, along with rapid technology-driven disruptions, will bring about economic stratification within urban communities while reinforcing the divides and inequalities between urban and rural communities. Without adequate investment and the right structural conditions, this widespread rural-to-urban migration will only foster pools of problems such as pandemics, a greater strain on urban infrastructure, and environmental pollution. In this episode, Jessica Brandt (The Brookings Institution) and Sara Lawrence (RTI International) consider the impact of massive migration and urbanization in securing sustainable and equitable innovation-led economic growth.

This is the fifth and final installment of our five-part series on Rebooting the Innovation Agenda. This series has been produced thanks to the generous support from RTI International.

As science and technology continue to make progress, it raises new questions about the extent to which the existing regulatory environment can deal with the broader impact of new technologies on societies, the kinds of interventions they need to make without impairing the innovation-economy. In this episode, Philip Auerswald (George Mason University) and Jeffrey Alexander (RTI International) consider the inherent tension between the regulators and the innovators in creating an enabling environment and look at the role of ethics guiding in technological advancement.

This is the fourth in a series of five episodes on Rebooting the Innovation Agenda and has been produced thanks to the generous support from RTI International.

The playbook for innovation envisions a role for the private sector, the academic community, and public institutions. Current models of balanced economic development and the norms that create and sustain the innovation ecosystem are fast getting disrupted and transformed by new technological forces. This disruption transcends into the socioeconomic and political realm and is impacting the existing state-society relationship and the social capital that is generated through it. In this episode, Klaus Tilmes (World Bank) and Paul Weisenfeld (RTI International) consider the vital role played by social capital in consolidating the political economy and explore how the ongoing technological revolution creates new opportunities to change the current social contract in order to preserve and strengthen our institutions.

This is the third in a series of five episodes on Rebooting the Innovation Agenda and has been produced thanks to the generous support from RTI International.

The playbook for innovation envisions a role for the private sector, the academic community, and public institutions. Current models of balanced economic development and the norms that create and sustain the innovation ecosystem are fast getting disrupted and transformed by new technological forces. Moreover, this period of technological advancement will likely leave emerging markets struggling as two-thirds of their jobs are estimated to be lost eventually to automation and technological disruption. In this episode, Steve Zausner (Fission Ventures) and Jason Norman (RTI International) consider and discuss the risks posed by the incoming technological disruptions and how the international community can mitigate these risks to foster an innovation-economy.

This is the second in a series of five episodes on Rebooting the Innovation Agenda and has been produced thanks to the generous support from RTI International.