Data, packaged usefully and cleverly, can have enormous utility and appeal. Nate Silver proved this when his political Web site fivethirtyeight.com gained a following with its stats-based projections and analysis during the 2008 presidential election.

In the supply chain world, a geek-chic startup called Panjiva is crunching numbers for a business purpose—to evaluate suppliers worldwide. Sitting in an airy studio office in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, CEO Josh Green, 31, explains that supplier databases such as Alibaba.com already exist but none takes objective data to evaluate and rate companies exporting to the U.S. Scoring can add perspective to previously overlooked or underutilized information—and make it suddenly irresistible to consumers.

"Every data source was underused," he says. "U.S. Customs was a great data source but underused because it was so messy.”

Ballmer was in Chicago on June 18 for back-to-back speeches before two business groups. At the second event, before the Executives Club of Chicago, he talked about the recession and innovation. (More on that in a moment.) He gave a plug for Bing, Microsoft's new search engine, which my colleague, Peter Burrows, blogged about recently. And he took a few questions from the audience that numbered 1,500-plus. That's when he turned rueful.

Ballmer said he and his predecessor at Microsoft, Bill Gates, used to keep a list of 10 biggest mistakes they had made. They'd look at it and rib each other by asking: "Can you believe that we spent $2 million building blah-blah-blah?"

I met with the affable duo this week to talk about the book. It is both a self-help manual for people hoping to not only keep their jobs during the recession, but also possibly advance, as well as a taxonomy of office workers for managers, to help them make better staffing and team-building decisions. But it also is about innovation. Maybe not direct product innovation, but workplace and staffing innovation, as well as personal time-management innovation. Which of course can help lead people toward more inventive ideas.

And I couldn't resist meeting Littman and asking him about the relationship between The Ten Faces of Innovation, which spelled out the ten types of people you want to have on your team (Experimenters; Collaborators), and I Hate People, which lists the ten types you don't (Liar Liars; Stop Signs). I wanted to also sit down with Hershon, because who wouldn't want to see how the mind of someone who helped come up with the winning "BlackBerry" brand works?

A lack of capital to invest in new EMR systems is widely cited on physicians' blogs and online message boards as the main barrier for doctors’ and smaller hospitals’ adoption of digital records. While the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides for federal stimulus funds to help pay for EMR systems, this money won’t be available until 2011. GE’s Stimulus Simplicity offering is meant to bridge the gap. For those who qualify for the loans, which are being offered via GE Capital, no interest will be due until 2012.

“When speaking to our customers, we heard loud and clear from physicians’ practices and also hospitals directly that there is a crunch on capital,” says Vishal Wanchoo, president and CEO of GE Healthcare IT. “This was the fastest we’ve ever moved on this scale [to create a new offering]. It only took a couple of months to organize and launch. But we wanted to do what our customers wanted.”

In my opinion, Gibson, now CEO at Paradigm, put his finger firmly on the issue at hand. "I've fired nearly everyone, rehired and had exactly the same company," he said. In other words, fostering innovation is about the way you do business as much as who does your business for you. Recreate the same uncreative processes and you'll have the same uncreative business.

There were no "aha", breakthrough moments of clarity here. Instead, conference attendees came up with some perfectly reasonable suggestions of encouraging cross-department collaboration or creating internal networks for ideas. What came out loud and clear is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to this critical issue.

I caught up with Spradlin after the panel to discuss the topic further and talk about Spradlin's own pithy assessment, that "culture eats strategy for lunch." Listen to the podcast here (with apologies for the sound quality -- I thought sneaking outside of the UN to find a quiet spot was a brilliant idea... until the planes started whizzing overhead.)

Do privately held companies have an edge when it comes to long-term innovation? At least some of them seem to. Recently, Al Gore—former Vice-President and Senator and now Nobel Prize-winning environmental evangelist—declared S.C. Johnson & Son one of the most sustainable companies in the world.

I caught up with H. Fisk Johnson III, chairman and chief executive of the Racine (Wis.)-based company behind brands such as Ziplock, Pledge, Windex, and Glade, after Gore spoke at the Cornell Global Forum on Sustainable Enterprise in New York on June 3, to hear what makes his company such a standout. Full disclosure: The event was sponsored by the Johnson School of Management at Cornell University, which was named in 1984 after its Johnson family benefactors. Fisk Johnson is also an alum, with five degrees including a 1986 PhD in physics.

(To hear Johnson in his own words, click here.)

Regional Blue Cross Blue Shield companies in Hawaii and Minnesotta already offer their customers online care using American Well's technology, but the OptumHealth partnership marks the first nationwide online service.

A recent Gartner Predicts report estimated that "by 2013, 25 percent of patient encounters in North America, Western Europe, and Asia/Pacific that could be conducted virtually, will be." The response of OptumHealth's consumers to the online offering will be an interesting reality check to that prediciton.

Will patients feel comfortable meeting with their doctor via Web video? Are they happy to trade the intimacy of the exam room for the convenience of a virtual visit? And how will the technology-mediated interaction change the patient/doctor relationship? We'll soon find out.

Corbett previewed some research from the report. I asked him about success stories of government innovation and he mentioned Sweden, which shaved 11% of of its budgets after a major governmental budget crisis in the mid-90s. They did this by re-thinking "overall structuring and management," Corbett says. He also points to the U.K., which he says saved more than 26 billion British pounds annually after re-evaluating its operational costs in 2004. The Canadian goverment merged over 70 different services, from different agencies. "The streamlining of that flow saved 400 million Canadian dollars annually," Corbett says.

He says countries are using the concept of lean operations, borrowed from Toyota, and applying it to defense logistics, taxes, immigration, and security clearances. The use of a new process adapted from industry certainly is innovation.

But he cautions that it isn't easy to translate other nations' inventive processes to the U.S. or even across European or North American boundaries. Still, there could be some lessons learned.

For more, keep your eye out for McKinsey on Government.

As you can see from the picture, the chair probably doesn’t look a lot like many of the furnishings you might have in your workspace today. The back looks more like a plastic web or netting, reminiscent of the mesh found in hip sneakers than the rigid, screen-like back of the iconic Aeron chair (which I normally sit in). And the webby back conforms and moves with your body. Unlike many previous office chairs designed before the mid-2000s, which were made for one type of work only—sitting straight and forward, looking at a computer screen and typing or talking on the phone—this chair allows you to lean toward a collaborator to listen more easily to what she has to say, or to sit sideways to engage with, say, someone you’re mentoring.

Intuit's CEO and President Brad Smith will be visiting BusinessWeek's New York headquarters on June 3. What questions do you have for him? The company posted strong 3rd quarter results last week. Smith has been Intuit's leader since January of last year (he'd been at the company five years, and helmed each of Intuit's major businesses in that time). Since assuming the corporation's top spot, he has been focusing on small business products, worldwide growth, and tapping customers for inventive ideas. We're looking forward to your questions. UPDATE: Please post your questions for Brad Smith on our new Five Questions For blog.

This past academic year (2008-09), Cornell offered a class called Creative Design for Affordability, taught by Professor Alan McAdams and championed by both Gangemi and Lo. Professor McAdams kindly gave me a copy of the reading packet to peruse, which included case studies from companies such as Kodak and IDEO, on how to iterate low-cost products for the world's masses. Next year, the class will be offered in two forms: one a big-think course that tackles theories and ideas, and another that focuses on hands-on creation of products.

If this sounds like a B-school that's taking a cue from Stanford's D-school, well, you're right. The D-school's approach of bridging business and design curricula was definitely an inspiration. While two courses doesn't really signify a full-on D-school-like initiative, it does illustrate growing student and faculty interest in cross-disciplinary, design-thinking classes for tomorrow's managers. Cornell's focus on design for the world's poor might also give the budding program a way to distinguish itself among other B-schools also following Stanford's lead.