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.

Michael Arrington of the influential Tech Crunch site has put together a list of his favorite Web 2.0 companies and products of 2006. The list includes the fifteen products or services that he uses everyday and couldn’t do without:

* 800-Free-411
* Amie Street
* Ask City

* Blue Dot
* Digg
* Flickr
* Flock
* Gmail
* NetNewsWire
* NetVibes
* Pandora
* Skype

* TechMeme
* WordPress
* YouTube

[image: Web 2.0, courtesy of Markus Angermeier]

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently outlined a $95 million R&D initiative intended to keep California on the leading edge of innovation in areas such as nanotech, clean tech and biotech. The “Governor’s Research and Innovation Initiative” will help create jobs while also preserving the environment. In a statement, Schwarzenegger explained that, “as a leader in developing new technologies, California will reap tremendous rewards for our economy and environment from this investment in our innovation infrastructure.”

The governor’s R&D initiative focuses on four primary projects:

* The Helios Project at the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is developing new energy sources, improving energy conservation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions;

* The Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California, which plans to develop biofuels for use in transportation;

* The California Centers for Science and Innovation, which will work with private companies to conduct research in IT, biomedical and nano technology;

* The Petascale Supercomputer project, which is building the next-generation supercomputer.

[image: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the winner of the Arnold Classic]

In Bangalore, IT industry association Nasscom showcased the best in Indian innovation for 2006, with a focus on those companies that are driving business model and process innovation within the Indian IT industry. The ten companies nominated are eligible to win one of the Nasscom innovation awards that will be presented early next year in Mumbai:

“Ten homegrown companies including Elitecore Technologies, IttiamSystems, MIEL e-security, Monsoon Multimedia, Newgen Software, Pandora Networks, Strand Life sciences, Image analyzer, and MNCs HP Labs and Intel Technology, which are working on Indian market-specific products have been shortlisted for the awards. Around 160 companies took part in the innovation face-off this year of which ten have been chosen.”

More proof, perhaps, that India is turning into an innovation powerhouse that is creating and nurturing the types of companies that are capable of taking on the likes of Intel and Hewlett-Packard.

[image: Kiran Karnik, President of NASSCOM]

The International Herald Tribune has posted a wide-ranging review of the best in design for 2006. Among the highlights:

(1) The World Economic Forum in Davos made “design” part of its strategic agenda for the first time;

(2) Architects experimented with new types of emergency housing for the victims of Hurricane Katrina;

(3) The designers working on the $100-laptop project for the One Laptop per Child nonprofit foundation produced their first models of the X0-1;

(4) A group of Guatemalan politicians, academics and industrialists enlisted the help of Canadian graphic designer Bruce Mau in the ¡GuateAmala! campaign, to encourage their compatriots to be more optimistic about the future after decades of civil war and human rights abuse;

(5) Black finally replaced silver as the “default color” for digital and electronic products (e.g. Apple’s iPod Hi-Fi and the glossy black Apple MacBook);

(6) Rapid prototyping technologies, originally used in the automotive and aerospace industries, became part of the mainstream (e.g. the Sketch furniture made by Swedish design group Front);

There’s also a lot to look forward to in 2007:

“Take Apple’s long-rumored iPhone; and the Great Journeys series of Penguin paperbacks designed by David Pearson. Or Microsoft’s Multimouse, which will enable more children in poorly resourced schools to use the same computer, and Spore, the ambitious game devised by Will Wright as his follow-up to The Sims. And next summer the XO- 1 laptop will be shipped to schools throughout the developing world, albeit with a price tag closer to $150, than $100, for the first year or so.”

[image: Sketch Furniture by Front (Sweden)]