Archives: July 2009

Cash for Clunkers Out of Cash? Not Anymore!

Posted by: Damian Joseph on July 31

The Cash for Clunkers program, designed to get those old gas-guzzling, pollution spewing motor vehicles off the road almost ran out of cash ... But, the House stepped in and...

Can a Start-up Save Soldiers Scarred by War?

Posted by: Jessie Scanlon on July 31

A friend of my mine works for a VA hospital. His specialty is PTSD, or post traumatic stress disorder. He never talks to me about specific patients, but he has...

Has the Video Game Industry Run Out of Ideas?

Posted by: Michael Arndt on July 30

With unemployment rising and wages falling, people have cut way back on travel. They're getting cheap when it comes to their staycations, too. Nintendo reported on July 30 that sales...

Starbucks New Design

Posted by: Damian Joseph on July 29

Some images are coming out of Starbucks' new "Not-A-Starbucks" Seattle store. Dubbed 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea, the shop is an effort to blend with the local neighborhood. It...

Can a Computer Predict Innovation?

Posted by: Damian Joseph on July 29

Check this out... Experts at some big name universities just finished up a study on the U.S. patent system. The results: stifling....

Microsoft, Amazon, IBM: Do M & As affect innovation?

Posted by: Reena Jana on July 29

"What role do mergers and acquisitions play in your company's innovation strategy?" We asked this question in our annual Most Innovative Companies survey this year, conducted with Boston Consulting Group...

Apple, Record Labels Push Forward; Music Still Left Behind

Posted by: Damian Joseph on July 27

The Internet is all abuzz today about this Financial Times piece. In the article, it's put forth that Apple (AAPL) is talking to the four largest record labels -- EMI,...

Smart Talk at Smart Design

Posted by: Reena Jana on July 22

Smart Design is a consultancy that's helped design the OXO Good Grips line of kitchen tools, the popular Flip digital camcorder, and the Fusion dashboard for Ford. Last week, we...

Laptop Keyboard Mystery: The SysRq Key

Posted by: Reena Jana on July 21

Last week, I interviewed design experts at Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, IBM, and other companies and educational institutions about the most recent evolution of computer keys. This was for a short item...

Earnings, Culture and the Lesson of Caterpillar

Posted by: Jessie Scanlon on July 21

No one was expecting good news to come out of Caterpillar's earnings report today, but it was better than expected, as I wrote in this piece about the company's new...

The Biggest Challenges to Innovation

Posted by: Jessie Scanlon on July 20

How do you innovate? What's your process? What innovation methods work, and which are just hot air? What are the biggest hurdles? As many readers of our Innovation & Design...

"Live Music," The Crowdsourced Movie, Will Hit Theatres

Posted by: Damian Joseph on July 17

If you've been following our innovation and design stories, then you might remember my article Pushing the Limits of Crowdsourcing. I took a look at Live Music, an animated movie...

GE's Smart Home: A Tester's Review

Posted by: Michael Arndt on July 17

This is a guest blog by Venessa Wong, who joined BusinessWeek’s Innovation+Design team in June. General Electric hosted what it called a Smart Grid Symposium on July 14 to publicize...

What "One & Other" can teach companies about how to do business

Posted by: Helen Walters on July 17

"One & Other" is a fascinating public art event that's taking place in London right now. Every hour until October 14, a different person climbs up onto the "fourth plinth"...

Google graduates 'Tasks' from Gmail Labs, launches Calendar Labs, opens innovation pipeline

Posted by: Helen Walters on July 14

Google's way of doing business been under real scrutiny of late. The Journal recently ran a piece on the company's organizational revamp, intended to try to stop losing good people...

Disney: Adamant About Innovation

Posted by: Damian Joseph on July 13

I recently had a really fun conversation with Luis Fernandez, senior vice president, global creative, for Disney Consumer Products. We talked about how the company manages to keep creative, despite...

How to Find the Next Twitter

Posted by: Reena Jana on July 09

Investors are always searching for the next hot start-up, the next hot technology. Wouldn't it be great to have a tool that could help identify entire "micro-industries" built around new...

Jonathan Ive on The Key to Apple's Success

Posted by: Helen Walters on July 08

Jonathan Ive isn't prone to making wild proclamations about design, his boss, Steve Jobs, or Apple, the company at which he's led the design team since 1996. Indeed, he's not...

AT&T Solves Information Overload

Posted by: Damian Joseph on July 08

Information is the pollution of the digital age -- there's so much, we don't know what to do with it. Yet, we want more and more: the Internet exponentially grows...

Print Is Dead After All

Posted by: Michael Arndt on July 07

Joshua Karp's media startup seemed quixotic, well, from the start: the Printed Blog, a free weekly newspaper whose content was culled entirely from the blogosphere. The 21st Century DeWitt Wallace—profiled...

Scitable Mixes Science, Crowdsourcing, and Social Networking

Posted by: Damian Joseph on July 01

I spoke with Vikram Savkar, senior vp and publishing director of Nature Education. He's also the head of Scitable.com, a Web site that mixes elements of crowdsourcing, social media, and...