Design thinking helped to shape Buick’s 2010 LaCrosse, it seems.

Seung-il (Sean) Lo, lead designer at GM’s Global Brand Strategy Studio in Warren, Mich. says the idea was to make the brand relevant to American consumers again-especially to young drivers. Buick's prestige has gradually faded as other autos claimed greater market share. (In the first half of 2009, the top five best selling cars were: the Ford F-series, Toyota Camry, Chevrolet Silverado, Honda Accord, and Toyota Corolla.)

The rankings overlap a bit—Apple, LG, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are on both—but the order is quite different. At BusinessWeek, Apple is first, followed by Google, Toyota, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Strategos puts LG in the lead, trailed immediately by Nintendo and Microsoft. As for Apple, it ranks 10th.

One obvious reason for the different lineups: The Strategos list includes only consumer electronics companies, while ours encompasses companies across all industries.

Since I first posted this, I had a chance to talk with Strategos CEO Peter Skarzynski about Apple's relatively poor showing in the ranking, which is based on a consumer survey. Apple's chief shortcoming, he says, is "uniqueness." Its products are so common today that they seem commonplace. Even Microsoft, lifted by high scores for the Xbox and Zune, rates 15 points ahead of Apple on uniqueness.

LG also does well on uniqueness, as well as quality, usefulness, dependability, and, in some regions of the country, coolness.

Skarzynski says Apple's results floored everyone at Strategos. "We triple- and quadruple-checked the data," he says. They checked out.

Here's the entire Strategos Top 10:

1. LG
2. Nintendo
3. Microsoft
4. Sony
5. Hitachi
6. Canon
7. Sharp
8. NetApp
9. Audiovox
10. Apple

But a study by the Patent Board, an intellectual-property consultancy, shows there are other—and better—ways to quantify innovation. The company looked at all active U.S. patents in one field, automobile collision-avoidance technology. Ranked by sheer volume, Honda Motor is No. 1, with 54. That's almost twice second-place Panasonic, which has 28. (Only two U.S.-based companies make the Top 10: TRW Automotive, in fifth place with 22, and Delphi, which is tied for eighth with 17.)

Ranked by other metrics, though, Honda isn't a leader. In a scorecard in November's Intellectual Property Today, the Patent Board publishes five more ways to put a value on patent portfolios, including citations by other patent seekers, innovation cycle time, and age. Honda does no better than second and as poorly as sixth. Delphi leads, for instance, when it comes to having the newest patents, while Fuji Heavy Industries is fastest at turning ideas into patents.

Remember this when the list of 2009 patent winners is announced.

American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) is giving its shoppers 15 seconds of fame. A 15,000 square foot LED display atop the retailer's new store in Times Square, which opened on November 19, is adding more flash to New York’s busy hub. Anyone who makes a purchase can broadcast a photo and a 20 character-long message on the screen, which towers over the corner of 46th Street and Broadway. Already, one man popped the question on the big screen (she said yes).

I headed to the new store this afternoon and took a photo with my BusinessWeek colleague Anne Vandermey. One of the AE staffers operating the studio, which is in the lower level, said that in the last hour he had photographed more than 50 people (some in groups). They came from Ireland, the U.K., Germany, Australia and other countries.

So we tried an experiment. Two weeks ago, I won a Sony Reader Pocket Edition in a raffle. It’s a slim gadget with a 5-inch screen, the electronics giant’s answer to the Amazon Kindle. I futzed with it a bit since I got it, but really hadn’t put it through its paces.

Last night was my son’s turn. One of the neat features of the Sony Reader is that you can “borrow” electronic books from participating libraries, including ones in New York, Chicago and my public library in Seattle. So I went to digital media page on its Web site and searched for Eclipse. It turns out that six of the library’s eight copies of the book in Adobe’s eBook format, which works with Sony’s eBook devices, were available to borrow for 21 days. I typed in my library card number and PIN, clicked download, and a few seconds later, the book was on my PC. Then, I connected the Sony Reader via the USB port and the book zipped over to my device.

My Pocket Edition version is the least expensive of the Sony Readers, priced at $199. Sony has one other Reader on the market now, the $299 Touch Edition, a 6-inch touch-screen model. And on Dec. 18 it will launch the $399 Daily Edition, a 7-inch touch-screen version with 3G connectivity, so users can download books without having to plug the device into their PCs.

Project ChargeCar, led by the school’s Robotics Institute, is a holistic approach to automotive over-consumption. Here are the basics...

There's a gray lining in these numbers: One in every five companies is still cutting spending on the development of new products or services.

And there are other findings that suggest that companies really haven't kicked their recession habits. While new products or services have the biggest potential to generate sales and profit, 74% of the respondents told Accenture that their companies were pursuing incremental advances, like line extensions. (How many varieties of Coca-Cola will we really drink?) Along the same lines, 66% said their companies were more interested in short-term gains than long-term ones. (Same question.)

In the U.S., at least, companies may not be getting better at innovation, either. Accenture said 73% of American respondents said their employers didn't learn from mistakes. (In the U.K., only 30% were such slow learners.) Respondents blamed failed innovation mostly on inability to meet customer needs, being late to market, and incorrect pricing.

What's going on at your companies? Are you seeing any lift in innovation allocations?

In reponse to reader inquiries, I called RISD, which was not on our list, to see if any graduate-level programs were in the works. A spokesperson confirmed that while RISD offers its students opportunities to work on industry sponsored projects, at this point it does not have any formalized master's programs marrying design and business, or any partnerships with business schools. Still, the president, John Maeda, stresses the importance of intuition, design, emotion, and art in innovation. We'll watch for news.

Here is a rundown of the nine other programs.

I'm in Los Angeles, at the Opportunity Green conference, this weekend, and Leonard was a featured speaker this afternoon. Along with her co-presenter, Jonah Sachs of Free Range Studios, she was a real highlight. And what I loved most about her presentation was her matter-of-fact analysis of where she'd gone wrong in the past.

Having spent 20 years investigating environmental health and justice issues around the world, she said, she was super confident that she had figured out the issues and problems. Yet for some reason, others didn't seem to share her enthusiastic concern. After taking a program at the Rockwood Leadership Institute, she was confronted with the fact that not only was she 20 years ahead of everyone else, she was so charmed by the cogent argument of her own intellectual ideas she had forgotten to engage an audience that had no idea what she was on about.

"I had been standing there wondering why people were not excited about the idea of a paradigm shift in our relationship to materials," she described. "I was too much in my head. And I needed to move to my heart."

So that's what she did with The Story of Stuff, which tackles her topic (issues with materials) in a way that an audience of laypeople can understand. Importantly, it's not about dumbing down or over-simplifying, but of speaking in a language to which people can relate. "If you’re trying to connect with people, a super intellectual brain-dump is not what’s needed," she said. "A connection with people is what’s needed."

Two years after it was released, the film is still watched by some 10,000 people every day. And Leonard has become a folk hero of sustainability. Next year, a book version of the film will be published. "I don’t like to encourage people to buy things," Leonard concluded wryly. "But buy it, and then give it to your local library later."

A trial involving 10 patients begins today (Nov. 5). These patients will be monitored while in the clinic in Rochester, Minn., to test the equipment and to train hospital personnel. Mayo plans to move on to a trial with discharged patients in early 2010, says Dr. Virend Somers, a consulting cardiologist and professor of medicine.

Talking with me before the official announcement, Somers acknowledged that telemedicine at Mayo is hardly brand new; the hospital has been taking readings from heart patients through at-home devices for years. But he said the STMicroelectronics technology should be more adaptable. For instance, it might be programmed to send real-time data 24/7, or for patients in less critical condition, it could record data and upload it once a day or week.

"The question is how can we make a comprehensive, unobtrusive, user-friendly, and economic remote monitoring system all together," he said.

The device and monitoring system costs money, of course. The clinical trials are also aimed at finding out whether they're worth it. Somers says he's fairly certain it will lower both technology and personnel costs. Time will tell, as they say.

The financial info company tallied patents and patent applications in alternative energy, an area it considers to be a proxy for automotive innovation, from 2008 through 2009's first quarter. Ford finished 12th, with 137 patent grants and filings. No. 1 Toyota Motor had 2,899—or 21 times more than Ford. Even General Motors bested Ford, coming in fourth, with 451 patent documents. (GM also outsells Ford, as does Toyota.)

Thomson Reuters also examined patent data in two other areas on the forefront of innovation—vehicle security and navigation—in 2003 and again in 2008 and the first quarter of this year. Ford didn't make the top 20 in any of these rankings.

Not to dump too much on Ford, I should note that it is moving up in alt-energy patents. In 2003, the carmaker wasn't even in the top 20, with 43 grants and applications. In 2008, it was 13th, with 116. I have asked Ford for a response, but haven't heard back.

For the record, here's the top 12 list in alternative-powered vehicle patents in the most recent five-quarter period:

1. Toyota 2,899
2. Nissan 601
3. Hyundai 549
4. GM 451
5. Honda 449
6. Matsushita 383
7. Nippondenso 334
8. Sanyo 219
9. Sumitomo 198
10. Hitachi 196
11. Bosch 144
12. Ford 137

The study of 5,618 respondents finishing or holding business degrees from five Northeast US schools (unnamed because of confidentiality agreements) found that there is a correlation between taking classes on entrepreneurship and forming a company with original ideas, as defined by obtaining patents, copyrights, and creating new production techniques.

For instance, 39% of respondents who studied entrepreneurship founded a company, versus only 26% who didn’t formally study the topic. Eighty-six percent of those who said their firms offered new products studied entrepreneurship, but only 18% of those who launched inventive goods said they didn’t study the subject. Among patent or copyright holders, 75% studied entrepreneurship, but only 10% learned on the job. And 62% of those who said their firms use new production techniques said they took a course in entrepreneurship, versus 28% who didn’t.

In August, Better Place was awarded the prestigious, 100,000 Euro "INDEX" design award. Now, the company has decided to put its winnings toward a design competition of its own. And to do so, it turned to BusinessWeek's list of the World's Best Design Schools. The challenge? To ask students from those schools to design a prototype for a next-generation, hands-free electric-car charging infrastructure (left shows a picture of the distinctly wired recharging system that currently exists.)

Ten finalists will be given 3,000 Euros to develop their ideas beyond a paper proposal. One final winner will receive a further 35,000 Euros to build a working prototype.

So where does this leave Better Place's regular design collaborator, NewDealDesign, which won for its Better Place work only this year at the International Design Excellence Awards. "We definitely are still working with them," said Better Place spokesperson Julie Mullins in a phone conversation. "But this is much more about being able to give back and do a project that's fun and exciting for all of us. And it's a way to give people the means and actual funding so they can do a competition like this and challenge themselves."

And the idea that they're tapping young talent for cheap work? "It’s not about getting free work," said Mullins. "We have brilliant teams of engineers and design folks; it wasn’t about that at all. It was being able to use the 100,000 Euros we won from the Index Award and give back in a fun way that will advance our movement toward sustainable mobility."

And no, the material doesn't look or smell like cow poop. And no again, you can't buy it in stores—at least not yet.

The booth is a public showcase of a dairy industry initiative to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2020. For a new product, it came together fast. Erin Fitzgerald, Dairy Management's director of social & environmental innovation, tells me she decided to enlist Mau after hearing him speak about sustainable design in May, as she was prepping for the sustainable-themed trade show.

Contractor and client quickly agreed that the booth itself should carry the eco-message. But how? While researching dairy farming, Tom Keogh, Bruce Mau Design's project director, says the Toronto-based team came across experiments by a scientist in Madison, Wis. The scientist, John Hunt, a general engineer with the USDA's Forest Service, had been testing alternatives to wood pulp in making paper and particle board. Among them: fiber-rich cow manure.

"There's a moment during the creative process," adds Paddy Harrington, a Bruce Mau Design creative director, "when someone says, the whole thing could be made of cow manure." And so it would be.

Many people who commute to work by car or public transportation and eat lunch in the office may be in the same boat, and Philips believes there is an opportunity here. The company plans to market DirectLife in the B2B space and has tested it with 30 companies.