Audacious ideas for 2012

This week's 14-minute Harvard Business Review Ideacast is well worth your time as it summarizes the magazine's "2012 List of Audacious Ideas." 

Among the grand thoughts are:

• Blowing up the concept of investing in a country's GDP growth, instead of debt. Sounds boring but leading economist Robert Shiller argues it would profoundly rethink global investment and could have minimized the current global economic crisis. 
• Getting real about any manned mission to Mars oor further expansion into space. Not gonna happen without revolutionary breakthroughs in space travel, journalist Gregg Easterbrook argues. Instead of blindly funding NASA, a better alternative would be to invite the private sector to help discover new ways to explore new worlds. 
• Changing how we handle death by having everyone conduct "end of life" conversations with a loved one. The result, argues journalist Ellen Goodman, would be improved interpersonal relationships and improved health care. 
• Closing off portions of oceans and seas for extended periods, ala letting farmland go fallow for a few years to regain nutrients, so that overfished areas can recover before their ecosystems are destroyed.   

Big challenges beckon big thoughts.