In this week’s Bloomberg Business Week, Esme Deprez highlights a few of the more innovative sources now being explored for fuel. In the wake of the gulf oil spill and the coal mining tragedy, it makes sense to look at more of these options: 1) Chocolate: a Formula 3 racecar that runs on biodiesel from chocolate waste in Britain. 2) Turkeys: ...

This is the sixth year of Business Week’s Innovation Awards, and there are some disturbing signs in the data they’ve gathered. They highlighted the fact that 15 of the top 50 are now Asian companies—a statistic that was fairly predictable. Much more significant, however, is that one third of the American companies on the chart just five years ago ...

Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, What the Dog Saw, I was struck by his descriptions of infomercial king Ron Popeil and the famous copywriter, Shirley Polykoff, who made hair coloring acceptable, and changed women’s looks for half a century. These were not middle-of-the-night inspiration people—they were hard workers who kept looking for new ...

Yesterday in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman’s column defined the new untouchables—the people who are in such demand that employers sacrifice to keep them, or who readily find new jobs in the worst economy. They are the top half of the class, he says, not the ones who can do routine engineering, but the innovative thinkers who create the new ...

On the same day the world is mourning the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who started the green revolution that transformed Asia and saved billions of lives, the Wall Street Journal is also honoring the 2009 Technology Innovation winners. The Gold goes to a sensor that can instantly identify pathogens, even ones it hasn’t encountered before, ...

In the latest McKinsey digital newsletter, Mark Marino muses that innovation is like a coral reef: nobody quite understands what causes reefs to form, but human actions can nurture or harm the process. Silicon Valley, he says, is an innovation reef, started by Dave Packard and Bill Hewitt in their Palo Alto garage during the depression — an ...

This week’s Wall Street Journal special report on innovation has two interesting insights. First: advances in technology in the last decade make innovation both more important and easier. With better computer prototyping, infinitely more data, and instant feedback, companies can test more ideas, more cheaply and more accurately. ...

In Business Week’s July 27 issue, there’s a simple chart that tells a big story. Creative Beginnings in a Downturn shows that Hewlett Packard learned to buy game-changing companies in recessions, that Genetech leaned to use strategic partners when they couldn’t afford research labs, and that Google snagged top talent after the tech bust. In ...

Business Week calls them under-the-radar start-ups in alternative energy, and warns that they may not be the ground floor opportunities that investors are seeking. What’s amazing about this list, however, is the wide range of approaches these companies are taking. Geothermal energy. Making ice at night. Cylindrical and thin film solar cells. Wind ...

On my way to an Ikea exhibit in Stockholm last month, I took a plane, train, taxi, subway, and ferry to the art museum. Once there, I was impressed by how both experiences underlined the Swedish approach to design, and what we can learn from them. First the Ikea part. It started with a young entrepreneur who tried to sell cheap furniture through ...