Last week marked the 100th anniversary of the introduction of a moving assembly line at Henry Ford’s Highland assembly plant, an innovation that inaugurated mass production.

The U.S. economy retains myriad sources of innovative capacity—but not enough of the innovations occurring in America today reach the marketplace, according to a major two-year MIT study.

You may have seen little squares of Tcho chocolate in their brightly colored wrappers decorated with futuristic parabolas of gold and silver. They’re easily found: Starbucks has sold them; Whole Foods sells them now.

Prizes have long been used to induce solutions to national challenges. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, prizes yielded vaccine inoculation, lifeboats, a method of calculating longitude at sea, new food-preservation techniques, and more.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced nearly $2 million in Phase I and Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards to 12 U.S. businesses.

It was 2003, exactly 56 years after Ole Kirk Christiansen bought the first plastic injection molding machine in Denmark to start manufacturing plastic bricks for building-block toys.

Not long ago, MIT political scientist Suzanne Berger was visiting a factory in western Massachusetts, a place that produces the plastic jugs you find in grocery stores.

Innovation is a tough word to define, but most would say they know it when they see it.