Dark matter, grand unification, and string theory strongly suggest that Nature should be supersymmetric at high energies. Meanwhile, the rather large mass of the Standard Model Higgs boson as well as the null results of searches for supersymmetry (SUSY) at the LHC call on us to let go of the notion that SUSY's main purpose is to stabilize the electroweak scale. Instead, model builders are urged to reassess SUSY's role in Nature and study its implications in case it is spontaneously broken at very high energies. As I am going to demonstrate in this talk, one intriguing option which comes into reach---once we adopt the emerging paradigm of high-scale supersymmetry---is the possibility that the spontaneous SUSY breaking as well as cosmic inflation may have one and the same dynamical origin. In this scenario, which I shall refer to as "Polonyi inflation", the exponential expansion during inflation is driven by the vacuum energy density associated with the spontaneous breaking of SUSY. At the same time, the pseudoflat Polonyi direction in the scalar potential of the SUSY-breaking sector acts as the inflaton. To keep the gravitational corrections to the inflationary dynamics under control, it is imperative that R symmetry be broken only at the end of inflation. As I am going to show, the chronological order of SUSY and R symmetry breaking then automatically provides a dynamical answer to the important question as to why cosmic inflation takes place in the early universe in the first place. In the present talk, I will illustrate the idea of Polonyi inflation by means of a minimal model in the context of strongly coupled supersymmetric gauge theories. Moreover, I will briefly comment on the phenomenological implications of Polonyi inflation for dark matter and the baryon asymmetry of the universe.
