Check out a slideshow of all the IDEA winners for 2008.

The design of Bloomberg screens by Antenna is really insightful as well. It's a great video by co-founder Masamichi

My lead piece analyzes the shape of the winners group this year. European, Asian and Brazilian design consultancies, corporations and schools did exceptionally well.

And don't miss Jessie Scanlon's piece on Design for Democracy, which won a gold. It's a book showing the US states how to design better ballots and voting spaces. Critical for the upcoming November Presidential election.

She gave a short speech on design, describing traditional design categories, such as architecture, interior design, landscaping, as important.

OK, here's something new. In the hallway, Mrs. Bush said that the Bush Presidential library would be "the greenest" Presidential library ever, "with geothermal" and other good green things. Remember that the Bush ranch house in Texas has geothermal heating and is pretty green. Mrs. Bush also said that Robert Stern would be the architect. Stern, who's taught at Yale for many years, is, of course, a well-known architect and writer. His latest work is 15 CPW--the most residential expensive condo in Manhattan. It just opened. I just read that an apartment bought for $30 million when it was in development is on the market for $90 million.

I had skipped all the tours of the White House when I was in grade school so this was my first time. It's incredibly ornate, at least the Green, Red and Blue rooms that I visited. All the people guiding us were military personnel in dress uniforms. David Rockwell and I both were taken by this. The President and his family live surrounded and protected by the military. We don't. The 20-somethings in uniform were incredibly helpful--and commanding. When they told us we had to move on and clear a room, we moved. And rather fast for a bunch of "cultural creatives."

Sorry, no photos. The White House doesn't post on the web and I have to wait 6-8 weeks.

Of course, I disagreed with him at the time but now I think we need to seriously examine what he was saying. Innovation assumes the creation of positive value, whether it's revenue and profits in business or a better experience for consumers or patients or students. This, I believe, is different from invention or technology, which is neutral in its design. High-tech advances can be used to make life better--or worse. Think nuclear.

So the question is whether or not all the innovation in structured finance--the slicing and dicing of mortgages--that went on in Wall Street and ultimately exploded, leading to the current financial crisis was good or bad. Put another way, what went wrong with financial innovation?

I don't have the answers and truly welcome your analyses. I think those in the innovation/design field should really think about the meta question of the impact of innovation in society. And in fact, lots of us are doing that in terms of sustainability and making life better in Third World countries. But thinking about financial innovation is very important because it gets to the issue of what can go wrong in innovation.

My initial thoughts are these: 1) Innovation and design methodology use prototyping to test new concepts, reduce risk and improve chances of success. This is where financial innovation failed. The intentions were good. Slicing and dicing mortgages and selling them

Two things went wrong in the prototyping of the structured finance products. First, they weren't transparent. No one really knew what they were because banks and credit rating agencies mixed and matched good and bad, low risk and high risk, stuff in products that really couldn't be seen or evaluated. Proper prototyping didn't take place and the financial products sold in the marketplace were seriously deficient.

Second, the prototypes that were designed were improperly tested. The credit rating agencies used their traditional methods of evaluation for mortgage related financial products--credit history of losses on mortgage payments. They have always been very low so the credit rating agencies gave the new financial products high ratings. But the real issue turned out not to be losses on mortgages but liquidity in the mortgage market. And they didn't test for that. They should have because the opaque nature of the structured finance products made them hard to price and sell once trouble began. In fact, even today, banks are having a hard time putting a price on them. That's why the housing and financial crises continue.

It's a little like people buying something that seemed OK when they opened the box and took it out but wasn't what was advertised when they turned it on.

These are my beach ruminations about the failure of innovation. I'm back now and would really like to know what you think on the issue.

So what we are seeing is a brand reshuffle--and recognition that customers relate to brands of cars, not car corporations. You are your brand, as Yves Behar says. Nothing more. Nothing less.

GM didn't quite understand that, until recently. It bought a wonderful brand, Saab, and undermined it. It built a great new brand, Saturn, then starved it. It brought one old brand back from the dead--Cadillac--but couldn't take the design lessons learned and apply them to all its other brands. And it didn't invest in the leading brand today--hybrids--fast enough to have them out in force when oil skyrockdeted and consumers dove for higher mileage autos.

The innovative Volt plug-in electric car could still pull GM back from the brink but it's getting very late for Detroit.

Supplying these cars from China or anywhere around the world quickly and then investing in new models to capture market share might have saved Chrysler. But squeezing pennies out of a shrinking operations base cannot.

My guess is that GM will pick up Jeep and a couple of Chrysler lines--and that will be the end of that. Business model innovation is often the most powerful kind of innovation. It requires imagination and guts. Implementing old, tried and true, strategies in a time of dramatic change rarely work.

Here is Matt's list:
1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash. Don't overwhelm the viewer.
2. Thou shalt not hide content. With advertising.
3. Thou shalt not clutter.
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections. Apple.
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels. Meebo?
6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography. Check out Daring Fireball.
7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences. Perhaps the most important.
8. Thou shalt be social. Hmmm. Maybe this is the most important.
9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies.
10. Thou shalt make content king. Content trumps pretty.

What else are we missing? How would you prioritize the list?

You can even Twitter and get an inside look at an insiders look at what is important to millions of Americans who are usually invisible to most of society.

HBR was behind for a time in covering innovation and design but it is running some very interesting pieces now and Brown's article brings it up to date/a>. I think that lag reflects the reluctance of business schools to embrace design thinking and innovation process. This is now changing, but slowly. Harvard Business School is making efforts to incorporate innovation, but in the end, we are talking about a sharp paradigm change embodied in curricula and teaching, and that is happening in only one B-School that I can think of--the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto run by Dean Roger Martin.

The main story, by the brilliant Jessie Scanlon, focuses on context--meaning it's not about the mobile thingie, the mobile iPhone, the mobile web but about mobile PEOPLE. Designing mobile web apps for their needs and desires. Check out this quote from her story: " As Nadav Savio, now a user experience designer at Google (GOOG), and mobile usage expert Jared Braiterman, founder of Jared Research, wrote in a 2007 paper, "we must focus… on mobile people, not mobile devices. In other words, we are not merely shrinking in size a Web experience, but creating an entirely new platform for communication and interaction."

Most corporations are rushing into social media in search of "community" and being one with their consumers. But the truth is, there are very few successful social networks and those that succeed require a lot of hours and hard work to manage. The amazing Helen Walters, who runs the I&D channel, has a story on just what it takes for a company to build a successful social network. The one-word answer is RESEARCH. Here's a quote: "For Giudice, the key to successful community design—and Web design as a whole—lies in research. That means the designers take a step back to question clients' expectations and needs. For instance, Hot Studio ended up recasting the Open Architecture Network from its initial brief as an open-source community for architects. "Through research we realized that it wasn't a Web site they needed, it was an ecosystem of sites," says Giudice. "There was a bigger vision that wasn't just about a community, but about accomplishing discrete goals for different people in a holistic way."

Exactly right. "Running Together," the Nike Plus tag, says it all.

He's looking for venture capital to get his "Betty" off the ground. OK people, this is one project worth funding.

This is lots of research showing that being connected adds years to your life. The oldest people on the planet, those at 100 plus, have lots of connections to people around them. It's not yogurt, it's yakking. Social media is make for the old--and helps them even more than the not-so-young.

And who is this guy Ben Arent anyhow?

So I propose we set up a contest to design a OLPG--Old Laptop Per Grannie. It would enable people in their 80s and 90's to easily connect to their families and friends, plug into communities of interest, play games (virtual mah jong anyone?), and jabber on about the old days as much as 20 and 30-somethings blah blah about their current lives.

This is a challenge in simplicity and ease of use. We need to get students and designers to live with people in their homes or assisted living rooms and really understand their needs, capabilities and limitations. We need touch-screen monitors that easily connect to grandkids' laptops, movies and music from the 30s and 40s (their youth). We need programs that help with medical care (keeping track of taking those 15 pills a day and the never-ending doctors' visits).

You get the picture. This isn't rocket-science. We have all the design and technology available right now. What we lack is the initiative. Nearly two decades ago, Patti Moore donned an old woman's get-up that made her look and act like an old person. Her research led Smart Design to create the OXO brand of products for Sam Farber, a major visionary. We need that kind of vision today. It will all flow back into how we design and operate the things around us and make them simpler and easier to use.

Great to hear him just weeks before we announce the winners of the 2008 IDEA gold, silver and bronze awards. We have some fascinating surprises.

The Economist has criticized the idea of a National Innovation Policy--and my post--in an ill-informed essay.
The article, is called "Can America Keep It's Innovative Edge? Yes--If it Ignores the Techno-Nationalists." The heart of the critique is that anyone advocating a government role in promoting innovation is proposing bad policy and is a techno-nationalist. The Economist is looking at innovation policy from a European point of view, where there is a tendency for governments on the Continent to pick high tech corporate champions, with little success. Moreover, heavy government regulation and high taxes undermine entrepreneurship and start-ups.

I appreciate that point of view and agree with much of it, especially the failure to create a culture of risk on the Continent. But The Economist goes on to criticize my post suggestions as "a tax-payer to-do list" of big spending. The Economist thus puts the discussion of a National Innovation Policy within an old paradigm of

After all, the internet itself comes out of US military spending by ARPA on a secure system of communication with American universities. Public education (a key item on my list) is by nature tax-payer paid. Highways are paid for by the public, as are most utilities and my suggestion that the US needs a super-fast broad band network falls into a long tradition of government support for basic transportation (canals, ports) and utilities (electricity, dams).

At the same time, there are many things needed to promote innovation that do not require a big government role--or any participation at all. They include promoting research into service innovation, codifying design methodology and managment, creating better metrics for innovation and developing a discipline of innovation economics that values intangibles such as human capital, not just capital. They could use a bit of government help, especially in changing the way bureaucrats measure the economy. But not much.

The Economist is just beginning to discover innovation as a journalistic topic and it is unfortunate that it is analyzing it through the prism of an old, tired political paradigm. The readers of The Economist and Economist.com deserve better. I say this as an avid reader and fan, as well as competitor.