The Department of Energy just selected 20 Universities to compete in building a solar-powered house and Parsons School of Design made the cut for the 2011 competition. Parsons is teaming up with the Stevens Institute of Technology to provide solar-powered Habitat for Humanity housing for residents of the low-income Deanwood neighborhood of Ward 7 in...

When I began the Most Innovative Companies annual survey with BCG's James Andrew, nearly all the top 50 companies were American. This year, more than half of the most innovative companies in the world came from Asia and Europe. Despite all hoopla and blah-blah about innovation among CEOs in the US, the actual building of the rituals and processes that...

The deep meaning of the SEC's lawsuit against Goldman Sachs for fraud is that it marks the end of the "financialization" of the US economy and the return to the "socialization" of finance. This is a very good thing and educators at both business and design strategy schools need to note the huge change. For the past three decades, the Chicago school...

When Apple first announced the iPad, I asked students at Parsons what they thought of it and they immediately said it was for consumption, not creation of content. No camera, no USB, no flash--not much to remix and make. They weren't going to buy it. Maybe their parents would to watch TV and read newspapers. I just read Jeff Jarvis this morning on...

Mike Mandel is the best economist I know and he's predicting that the fastest growing job segment in the recovery that is starting will be in communications. Mike's Second Law of Booms and Busts says that jobs that tend to recover in the bust also tend to lead the boom. So, looking at the stats that are being published now on new job growth, what...

Apple's iPad has tremendous buzz and will hit the stores this weekend--with Boomer's loving it, techies hating it and mainstreaming media hoping it means salvation. But the iPad has been in development for 20 years, starting with Apple asking Smart Design in NYC to come up with concepts for what a tablet might look like. IDEO and other design consultancies...