Yes, this is the kind of thing I would read for leisure… don’t judge.

Next step: Planning a trip to visit China and India and learn about their innovation cultures first-hand.

Description of the report:

The return of the once-dormant economies of China and India to dynamism and growth is one of the most remarkable stories in recent history. The two countries are home to nearly 40 percent of the world's population, but until recently neither had played an influential role in the contemporary global economy.

In the past two decades, China and India have liberalized internal economic policy, treatment of foreign investment, and trade, and have experienced economic growth at sustained high rates. From the point of view of the United States, however, the most important development in the Chinese and Indian economies in the long term may be the strides they are making in developing their own domestic innovation capacities. After a long period of underinvestment, both countries have committed to growing their science and education systems to bolster research and further economic expansion.

Some observers of the recent growth have said that both countries are surging in their efforts to spur innovation; others have emphasized the potential of one country over the other; and still others have suggested that both China and India have a long way to go before achieving innovation-driven growth. With such a range of views, The National Academies set out to describe developments in both countries, in relation to each other and the rest of the world, by organizing a conference in Washington, D.C. The conference, summarized in this volume, discussed recent changes at both the macroeconomic level and also in selected industries, and explored the causes and implications of those changes.

via The Dragon and the Elephant: Understanding the Development of Innovation Capacity in China and India: Summary of a Conference.

Now a British architectural design firm is giving the more conventional combustion power plant a much-needed makeover. Of course, this plant doesn’t burn coal, but substitutes palm kernel shells instead.

Why not make these facilities good-looking and integrated into the environment? Sure, they lose their attraction as a movie setting for climactic clashes between humans and alien invaders, but they’re likely to endear much more good will with the surrounding community who views the plant out their kitchen windows.

Fancy-schmancy biomass plant

Excerpt:

Heatherwick Studio has just released its design for a biomass station on the banks of the River Tees in British town Stockton-on-Tees, for British company BEI.

The facility is expected to pump out 49 MWe–enough to power 50,000 homes. Those homes are expected to see their per capita carbon footprint cut by as much as 80%, since the electricity will be generated simply by biomass generators that will burn palm kernel shells, rather than coal.

Thomas Heatherwick, Heatherwick Studio’s founder, has a genius for offbeat architecture, made with experimental techniques–for example, he designed a colony of houses with tinfoil and a bridge that curls up like a snail.

This time, the building has been conceived as less of a power station, and more of a local attraction and amenity. The building’s skin will literally be green, made up of exterior panels planted with local grasses. Inside, in addition to offices and the biomass factory, there will be a visitor’s center.

via Heatherwick Turns Biomass Into a Thing of Beauty | Design & Innovation | Fast Company.

Take Christmas lights. As a teenager, I had no intrinsic motivation to hang the family Christmas lights. In my mind, hanging the lights had competition only with before-school snow-blowing as the most torturous task associated with miserable Midwest winters. Lights tangle. Ladders are a hassle and liability. And, inevitably, no amount of pre-hanging electrical testing will prevent one strand from inexplicably dying as soon as the decorating is complete.

But Ric Turner sees the winter differently. And he certainly has a better touch with electricity and lights. Take his recent project, turning his house and yard into an interactive Guitar Hero game sprinkled with over 21,000 lights.

Ric, you are engineering geek (guitar) hero of the week. I’m impressed by your imagineerativity. (Aren’t you impressed by my language innovation?)

By the way, I can safely compliment Ric only because I live too far from home to be conscripted into light-hanging service.

Read this explanation from Ric of how he created the lighting system.

And watch the video here:

Obama at Newton, Iowa factory

Obama used the town of Newton, Iowa and the Trinity Structural Towers factory there as an example of the potential for clean energy businesses to replace jobs lost in mature manufacturing industries. The Maytag appliance factory in Newton — now inhabited by Trinity with 90 employees — once employed 4,000 people before closing entirely as manufacturing shifted overseas.

This is only one example, but it does illustrate the gap between America’s past manufacturing heyday and the size of today’s clean energy industry, even considering the potential growth of the latter. We certainly need these new jobs in order to replace those recently lost, particularly in the auto industry. But how do we encourage the manufacturing of these new clean energy innovations to occur in the US rather than overseas? Will clean energy companies make their global operations decisions any differently than hundreds of other industries already have, shifting production to low-cost countries like China?

I hope so. This is not only an employment issue but a national security issue. We need control of local clean energy resources to replace our dependence on petroleum from the Middle East.

I am excited to hear that a cap-and-trade program might finally emerge in the US. As I’ve written before, until carbon emissions impose a cost on emitters commensurate with the impact of the emissions on the climate, none of our ambitious goals to cut energy consumption and increase renewable energy usage will be feasible.

Obama’s speech barely addressed the piece of the clean energy economy that will have the greatest impact on the state of Iowa — biofuels. Iowa already produces large amounts of corn-based ethanol, but most agree that ethanol derived from food crops is not a long-term solution. Moving forward, advanced liquid biofuels will be essential to reduce petroleum consumption, as many applications, particularly diesel engines, cannot typically not be replaced with batteries and electric motors. Future biofuels, such as cellulosic ethanol, will grow into a huge section of the agricultural economy, and agriculture is certainly Iowa’s backbone.

I look forward to watching these initiatives move forward. Let’s see what Congress does next.

In this scenario, the country’s investments in research (bioengineering bacteria to produce cellulosic biofuels, for example) pay off and we are able to increase our exports to the rest of the world.

The key factor, though, is that the product must be manufactured in the US if we want to reduce our trade deficits and subsequently our borrowing. Biofuel processing will probably always be somewhat localized, as the cost of transport is high, and we aren’t likely to have surplus fuel anytime soon as large as our oil appetite is today. However, we can produce the bacteria, fungus, or other microorganisms in the US and export them to plants around the world.

Here’s the BusinessWeek article and here is my original post.

Update: I just found another BusinessWeek article with four ways the country can use innovation to help the economy recover:

• Inject capital
• Think global
• Focus on public programs
• Support talent