The DIY lifestyle movement continues to gain momentum. Neatorama profiles a new book from Tsia Carson called Craftivity: 40 Projects for the DIY Lifestyle. The book is basically a primer on how to turn everyday, household items into designer goods:

“Have a pile of extra buttons and don’t know what to do with them? Make a cool bracelet. Need some pillows for your new couch, and have a bunch of old wool sweaters? Turn those sweaters into felt and make pillows so beautiful you could sell them at any store. Knitting, felting, glass, and woodwork—it’s all here. Craftivity is filled with 40 amazing DIY projects that show you how to take everyday objects and turn them into functional, fabulous art.”

In Craftivity, you can learn how to make a unique coffee table out of a vintage suitcase, use a simple picture frame to construct a back-painted glass backgammon board, and transform plastic grocery bags into a durable tote. Oh, yeah, and if you want to learn how to transform a simple t-shirt into fashionable underwear, you can learn that too.

What is Google’s secret formula for innovation success? According to Amy Rowell of Innovate Forum, it is the company’s willingness to experiment with “wild, ambitious” ideas, while at the same time, understanding that failure can be a catalyst for innovation success. Also, it doesn’t hurt that the company has created “a sort of playground for adults” to get the innovation juices flowing:

“Google is one of those companies that just seems to keep getting it right. But as even its management team will tell you, that’s in large part because it’s not afraid to get it wrong – at least some of the time. In fact, Google’s innovation process leaves plenty of room for experimentation and failure, and does so by having a rather novel workplace environment.

By design, Google’s product development environment is a sort of playground for adults. In a campus setting, Google employees can, for example, reportedly enjoy the benefits of an outdoor wave pool, an indoor gym, free meals and the use of company-provided scooters to transport them between buildings.”

[image: Life in the Googleplex]

In a one-hour video presentation for MIT World, Novartis Chairman and CEO Daniel Vasella explains the innovation process behind one of his company’s flagship pharmaceuticals, Gleevec. The discovery, development and marketing of this drug, which fights the rare chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), highlights some of the things Novartis does right. For example, during an important period of coordinating clinical trials and winning FDA approval for the drug, employees at Novartis volunteered to work in 24-hour shifts, seven days a week. In summarizing the success of the innovation process at Novartis, Vasella cites “intrinsic motivation in each Novartis staff member, high standards, savvy risk-taking and persistence in both research and marketing, and a company culture that brings out the best in everyone.”

As always, MIT World provides excellent show notes for the one-hour presentation. There’s also a brief bio sketch for Vasella and a short history of how Gleevec started out as an untested idea and emerged as a multi-billion-dollar blockbuster drug.

[image: Daniel Vasella of Novartis]

According to a survey conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics in China, the most innovative city in China is Shanghai. Other cities cracking the Top 10 included Hangzhou, Qingdao, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Beijing, Changzhou, Yantai, Guangzhou and Shaoxing. For close followers of the Chinese innovation scene, these findings may not come as a shock, but I was personally a bit surprised to find Beijing at #6. Anyway, the survey also looked at the pace of R&D spending in China, the composition of this R&D spending, and the primary sources of funding for this R&D research:

“The survey found that that the majority of research and development funding is spent on improving existing products and technology; only one third is spent on developing new products and basic research programs. According to the survey, 33% of funds are used to improve efficiency and reduce the costs of production; 31% is spent perfecting current technology, and doing research to widen the uses of products; 24% is spent on the development of new products and technology; 9% is used in basic research; the remaining 3% is spent elsewhere. The survey also found that internal revenue-raising is the major source of funds for innovation. Over 75% of funds come from the enterprises themselves, 12% from loans, and less than 5% from the government, partners and capital market.”

[image: Shanghai skyline via TravelBlog]

That is, if you’re a tech-savvy C-level executive from a hugely successful U.S. corporation. In a free Wall Street Journal Online feature, Brian Steinberg describes a clever new advertising pitch from Unisys, in which the company is using the cover of FORTUNE magazine to sell its wares to some of the leading IT decision-makers in the country:

“Around 20 high-ranking executives at corporations such as Subaru of America, DHL, Citigroup and Northwest Airlines will get a surprise when FORTUNE magazine arrives on their desks this week. Each will find his or her own face gracing the cover. The covers are one-of-a-kind mock-ups wrapping the actual FORTUNE edition, part of an advertising ploy conducted by IT company Unisys that brings new meaning to the idea of niche marketing. Unisys is sending the magazines to get the attention of executives - mostly CIOs - responsible for making buying decisions about their companies’ technology products and services. In other words, the people Unisys most wants to influence.”

As Steinberg goes on to explain, the FORTUNE cover wraps are personalized to the needs of the particular corporate executive. Moreover, the company is placing outdoor signs and billboards in strategic locations that these executives might see, even going so far as to map out morning commutes in order to find the most advantageous locations.

In short, the new advertising initiative is based on influencing the influencers: “We’re not trying to have grandma at home understand who we are and what we do. We’re not even trying to have every business executive understand who we are and what we do. It’s a very narrow set of executives that we really want to reach.”

[image: Unisys trade show]

Responding to the proposed merger of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, James Grant (editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer) wrote a great op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal called, provocatively enough, Innovate or Die. Innovation, quite simply, is the key to future success within the financial services industry.

Mention the Chicago Merc today, and you probably think of sophisticated financial derivatives and financial innovation. Yet, the Chicago Merc actually started out life in 1898 as the much humbler Chicago Butter and Egg Board, trading contracts on commodities such as butter, eggs and onions, Suffice it to say, the Chicago Merc in those days was well on its way to becoming a “relic of the Old Economy.” By the 1950s, it was left with a single type of contract to trade - the egg contract - that was itself the subject of constant manipulation by traders. So what happened? The Chicago Merc decided to innovate its way to success:

“They picked innovation. The same government that had stamped out the butter and onion contracts proceeded to create new opportunities through inflation and monetary turmoil. The end of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates opened new vistas in currency trading. The Merc seized them as it more recently did the chance to develop markets in interest rates and equities…

The Merc didn’t burst when the Nasdaq bubble did. Today, it is generating over $1 billion in annual revenues, up from $210 million in 1999. Its stock market capitalization tops $17 billion, a nice, neat 17-fold appreciation in value for the seat holders in less than seven years… Properly, the CME Group is the envy of the New York Stock Exchange and of brokers and dealers worldwide…”

[image: President Bush at the Chicago Merc]

Every now and then, it’s interesting to check out how the rest of the world views the people we consider to be the most innovative thinkers in the USA. For example, do Russians living in Moscow really read the latest works from Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell and Jared Diamond? It turns out, yes, they do. Check out this recent issue of Afisha, a glossy biweekly magazine from Moscow, which has a cover story on 50 People Who Explained the World. (Don’t let the disturbing cover photo of Subcomandante Marcos put you off. Just like some American hipsters think it’s cool to wear a t-shirt with a photo of Che Guevera on it, the Moscow hipsters also dig the Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries.)

Anyway, I couldn’t find the full text to the Afisha cover story, so I scanned the page of the Afisha article featuring Chis Anderson and the Long Tail Theory (see top right corner of the scan for a picture of Chris and a Long Tail graphic). There’s a brief bio description for Chris, a quote from his groundbreaking 2004 article in Wired magazine, and a brief summary of the Long Tail theory. The other two Big Thinkers profiled on the page are David Icke (author of Children of the Matrix) and John Perry Barlow (former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a prominent thinker about the future of cyberspace).

UPDATE: Some people have asked: Who else made the list besides Anderson, Icke and Barlow? Well, how about Kurt Vonnegut, Malcolm Gladwell, Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Rem Koolhaas, Steven D. Levitt, Ted Turner, Camille Paglia, Alvin Toffler, James Watson, Thomas Friedman, Stephen Hawking and Umberto Eco?

On the C3 blog, Henry Jenkins of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program provides an update on an exciting new project that he is helping to launch that is intended to spur innovation, diversity, and creativity in games design. The Singapore-MIT International Game Lab is a “pioneering collaboration” that will advance digital game research on a global basis, help to develop world-class academic programs in game technology, and “establish Singapore as a vital node in the international game industry.”

According to Jenkins, the new Game Lab will have a powerful impact on innovation: “The Singapore-MIT International Game Lab collaboration will provide a strong catalyst for innovation by bringing together students, industry leaders and faculty from very different cultures and backgrounds to work together and to conduct research that could have a great impact on the international game industry.” In addition, the high-profile collaboration with MIT could help provide a boost to innovation initiatives throughout Singapore. Already, Singapore is projecting that as many as 300 of its best and brightest minds could be involved on this innovation project.

[image: Henry Jenkins of MIT]

The current issue of FORTUNE is chock full of a number of interesting articles based around the theme of What It Takes to Be Great. In addition to the Secrets of Greatness cover article by Geoffrey Colvin, there’s a profile of Boeing CEO James McNerney, a piece by Michael Lewis on why iconoclasts in business find new ways to succeed, and a fun piece on What makes 12 Peak Performers Tick.

Jia Lynn Yang and Jerry Useem also weigh in on why it’s so important to cross-train your brain. The basic idea is that outside interests and hobbies - no matter how unrelated to your job - can become a powerful stimulus to creativity. One example is Condoleeza Rice, who’s actually a concert-level pianist in addition to being one of the brightest foreign policy advisors around. Apparently, Ms. Rice performs Brahms sonatas with Yo-Yo Ma when she’s not busy with her “side gig at the State Department.” This is more than just anecdotal evidence - scientific researchers in fields like neuroscience are starting to generate some amazing conclusions on brain behavior. By training your brain in different ways, you are opening up new neural pathways and establishing connections with parts of the brain related to visualization and conceptualization.

Anyway, the Condoleeza Rice “Cross-Train Your Brain” article is not yet up on the FORTUNE site. In the meantime, could I possibly interest you in the new Secrets of Greatness book from FORTUNE, now available at the low, low price of $13.57 from Amazon.com?