As CNN points out, the latest product innovation appearing at the corner coffee shop just might be a super-caffeinated donut:

“A molecular scientist who moonlights as a café owner [has] developed a way to add caffeine to baked goods, one that eliminates the natural, bitter taste of caffeine… The amount of caffeine in his creations can vary, but Bohannon can easily put 100 milligrams of caffeine — the equivalent of a 5-ounce cup of drip-brewed coffee — into the treats he plans to market under the “Buzz Donuts” and “Buzzed Bagels” names.”

This is more than a half-baked idea (pun intended) — there are already plans afoot to sell these caffeinated creations to companies like Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks. Nutritionists, of course, are aghast at the idea of doing anything to encourage the development a “super caffeine generation” that consumes way too many calories and way too much caffeine.

[image: Buzz Donut via AP]

As Camille Ricketts of the Wall Street Journal points out, Silicon Valley is “establishing an outpost in London, bringing its laid-back office culture - including company gyms, relaxed dress and office kitchens full of snacks - with it.” (The eating habits are particularly difficult for the Brits to understand - they can’t seem to figure out why Americans are always stuffing their faces with snacks and soda in the office, yet don’t seem to have any special inclination to hang out at the local pub to have bangers and mash or a proper pint). Anyway, the flow of talent and know-how from Silicon Valley to London has been accelerating over the past 12 months:

“Just last year, about 30 California companies opened offices here, and nearly one of every three U.S. companies in London hails from California, including Apple, Google and MySpace. London also has become an attractive springboard for smaller tech companies from the state that are seeking a European toehold. In fact, if California were a country, it would rank second — after the rest of the U.S. and before Canada — as a place of origin for foreign companies setting up shop in London, according to Think London, a nonprofit consultancy that recruits foreign companies to the city.”

[image: Londonist]

According to a study of global innovation conducted by French business school INSEAD, the U.S. is the world’s most innovative nation by a large margin. Germany was a distant second, while the U.K., Japan and France rounded out the top five. The United Arab Emirates (#14) was the only country in the Top 15 that wasn’t European, Asian or North American.

The World Business/INSEAD Innovation Index 2007, researched by Professor Soumitra Dutta and sponsored by BT, ranks nations according to their innovation performance. The ranking takes into account several categories of evaluation: institutions and policies; infrastructure; human capacity; technological sophistication; and business markets and capital. The study also factors in knowledge, competitiveness and wealth. Data for comprising the ranking was based on information provided by, among others, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum.

[image: We’re #1!]

Clayton Christensen’s Innoblog points to an article in the New York Times (”Snowbound Neverland”) describing a disruptive new business model for the ski resort industry being developed by Echo Mountain Park in Colorado:

“Echo is a new resort built exclusively for freestyle snowboarders and skiers. It is much smaller than traditional resorts, covering just 50 acres with a vertical drop of 600 feet, miniscule for Colorado. There are no groomed runs, no gondolas, no moguls; Echo is 100% terrain park, all jumps, rails, and half pipe. It is relatively cheap and easy to operate since there is much less need for snow coverage and maintenance and it can handle considerably higher utilization than its competitors (many more freestylers fit on a slope at a time since they tend to congregate around jumps, watching their friends and taking turns). It is more skate park on snow than downhill resort.

This approach is much more economically viable than, say, building another Vail, and it is also perfectly targeted at the fastest growing segment of the winter sports industry – the youth market. Prices are low ($35 vs. $70-plus at competing resorts), the entire park is lighted so lifts run until 9pm daily, and the mountain is a quick 30 minute drive from Denver. The cafeteria sells microwavable burritos and Red Bull, and kids crowd around video game consoles while they eat. The resort operators field user requests and suggestions online, actively adding and subtracting features according to popularity. The décor, music, and atmosphere targets the young.

Jerry Pettit, Echo’s owner, sums it up: “It’s nothing against places like Aspen, but the young people we consulted early on told us they can’t afford to pay $75 for a lift ticket or $14 for a buffalo burger…What kept coming back to us was: ‘Keep it inexpensive. Make it for us.’”

Anyway, over at Flickr, there’s a cool collection of snowboarding pics by photographer Matthew Staver that were taken at the opening of the Echo Mountain snowboard park in March 2006.

[image: Snowboarding at Echo Mountain Park by Matthew Staver]

Apparently, the U.S. Defense Department is growing increasingly concerned about Canadian coins embedded with tiny RFID transmitter devices that could be used to conduct double top-secret espionage operations against the U.S. In fact, the government has even sent out warnings to its defense contractors about the sinister Canadian spy coins:

“The government said the mysterious coins were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada. Intelligence and technology experts said such transmitters, if they exist, could be used to surreptitiously track the movements of people carrying the spy coins. The U.S. report doesn’t suggest who might be tracking American defense contractors or why. It also doesn’t describe how the Pentagon discovered the ruse, how the transmitters might function or even which Canadian currency contained them. Further details were secret, according to the U.S. Defense Security Service, which issued the warning to the Pentagon’s classified contractors. The government insists the incidents happened, and the risk was genuine.”

Of course, the U.S. doesn’t actually believe that our respectable neighbors to the North have anything to do with these spy coins. Instead, all clues seem to point to China, Russia or France - experts claim that all of them “actively run espionage operations inside Canada with enough sophistication to produce such technology.” The idea of Canadians spying on Americans: “Unthinkable.” At least, that’s the official word from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

[image: The Spy Who Came In From the Canadian Cold]

Well, the latest issue of FORTUNE magazine finally hit newsstands yesterday, featuring Google as The Best Company in America to Work For. Maybe it’s my growing skepticism about GOOG at $500 a share and my unbridled jealousy about Google employees getting free meals, free spa treatments and free doctor visits on location at the Googleplex in Silicon Valley, but here’s a preposterously scary question to mull over during the weekend: Is Google the new Enron? Now, I’m not insinuating that there’s any kind of financial shenanigans going on at Google, only that the valuation numbers at Google just are not adding up the way they once did.

As much as I love Google and wish the company all the best as it attempts to march past $500 per share, does it strike anyone that Google bears a striking resemblance to Enron in several key areas: a stratospheric stock price that nobody really questions; constant adulation by the media, consulting firms and Wall Street analysts for “innovation”; and the all-important front cover of Fortune factor. (At one point, FORTUNE named Enron as the “most innovative company in America” for six straight years!)

Anyway, the cover of FORTUNE magazine features a group of thin, wealthy and casually-dressed Google employees whooping it up and having fun, together with the headline: Google is the New #1. Just like Enron, Google has been touted as America’s most innovative company year in and year out. Enron claimed to be an oil & gas company, but was really a big-time financial derivatives company. Google claims to be an Internet company, but is increasingly becoming a big-time advertising and media company.

OK, OK, maybe I’m overplaying this issue. (It’s tough to be a contrarian these days!) But, ask yourself, when was the last time you actually clicked on one of those annoying text ads or bought anything from Google?

Kevin Desouza, a faculty member at the University of Washington, recently visited HP Labs in Palo Alto, California in order to better understand the company’s innovation processes. As Desouza points out, “the single most important enabler of innovation at HP is their history and culture of innovation. From the days of Hewlett and Packard, HP is a company that recognized the value of innovation throughout the organization. HP focuses on all aspects of innovation: product and service innovation; innovation in business models; cultural and organizational innovation.”

In a wrap-up of his HP Labs tour on the Leveraging Ideas for Organizational Innovation blog, Desouza also provides an overview of the innovation portfolio approach, examines the role of collaboration within the innovation process, and explains the importance of having mature stage-gate processes to screen ideas and innovations.

[image: HP’s first product]

Let’s face it, Sony has really dropped the ball lately when it comes to innovation. Initial reports from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas have been promising, though, as Destructoid (live blogging the show) points out. Sony has been inundated with innovation awards for its consumer electronics gadgetry:

“Not only was the SIXAXIS awarded by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Sony itself received the “Technology and Engineering Emmy Award”… In addition to this, Sony has also picked up the “CES Best of Innovations Award” for 2007, a “Sound and Vision’s Editor’s Choice Award” and “Digital Innovation Award” from the Digital Entertainment Group and a “20 Most Innovative Products Award” from PC World.”

[image: Sir Howard Stringer delivering the keynote address at CES 2006]

At the FORTUNE Innovation Forum last year in New York, Geoffrey Colvin of FORTUNE magazine interviewed Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy, live on stage at the Time Warner Center. You can click on the links below to listen to the three parts of the interview:

Part 1 of Interview with Brad Anderson

Part 2 of Interview with Brad Anderson

Part 3 of Interview with Brad Anderson (including questions from audience)

If you’d like to follow along with a (partial) text transcript of the interview, please check out the following post on the Business Innovation Insider: Day 1, 4:45 pm: Bradbury Anderson of Best Buy.

One of my favorite year-end lists comes from The New York Times Magazine, which for six years has been putting together a list of the most important and influential ideas of the year every December. Even if you read an impressive number of blogs, subscribe to FORTUNE magazine and occasionally pick up the random issue of Scientific American or Popular Science, there’s a good chance that you would have missed about half of the 70-75 ideas the Times comes up with each year. Anyway, here’s the intro to the 6th annual Year in Ideas from New York Times Magazine:

“This month, as in the past five Decembers, the magazine looks back on the passing year from a distinctive vantage point: that of ideas. Our editors and writers have located the peaks and valleys of ingenuity - the human cognitive faculty deployed with intentions good and bad, purposes serious and silly, consequences momentous and morbid. The resulting intellectual mountain range extends across a wide territory. Now it’s yours for the traversing in a compendium of 74 ideas arranged from A to Z.”

Among the ideas worth checking out: empty-stomach intelligence, digital Maoism, psychological neoteny, the truth of workplace rumors, the LifeStraw, smart elevators, and my personal favorite: walk-in health care.