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Google's look and feel on TV will be similar to its style online. Photograph: Alamy Google has launched a "smart TV" service, in conjunction with partners including Sony , that will allow viewers to search the web while watching programmes. The service, called Google TV, will theoretically work with any TV set. However, the first products to incorporate the search capability will be developed by Sony and arrive on the US market from the autumn. Google TV-enabled sets, which will feature an on-screen search box similar to the company's look and feel on the web, will allow people to search for web content and download applications as well as programming from across the internet.

Adoption - There is no doubt online communities are valuable and powerful, but there is no value if your community is an empty dance floor. Generic communities based on generic tools, often have no stated purpose and employees or customers don't know why they should go there. Idea Portals are a proven way to get very rapid uptake because there is something in it for the end user. Either participating in the product direction or cutting costs instead of headcount...there's an obvious 'What's in it for me?' and that drives rapid adoption out of the gate. ROI - In today's environment the bean counters are holding the purse strings pretty tightly. So a technology looking for a problem is dead on arrival. However with Innovation we are often talking to our customers about Millions, Hundreds of Millions and Billions of dollars. By connecting the benefits of social networking with the innovation process the ROI is obvious, immediate, quantifiable and large. Inno...

Industrial designers sometimes make the mistake of thinking that certain product elements are written in stone, or that they just aren’t worth thinking about. And sometimes it takes a set of fresh eyes to see an exceptionally simple yet innovative solution. That was the case when Royal College of Art student Min Kyu Choi re-imagined the bulky UK power plug.

Today's generation of college students is among the first to take technological innovations such as e-mail, text-messaging and wireless Internet capability for granted. Entering freshmen in 2007 anticipate that they'll be connected in the dorms, in the classroom and across campus. © Yellow Dog Productions/Photodisc/ Getty Images Tech-savvy students expect WiFi connections. As university administrators try to keep pace with the expectations of these students who've grown up using the Internet, they're transforming the college campus into a wireless environment that integrates the latest communication technologies into the classroom and into student life. Some of the changes simply enhance the student lifestyle; others strike at the very root of timeworn notions of how learning should take place in higher-education institutions. A 2007 University of Virginia survey found that 67 percent of incoming freshman owned an iPod. Among students who came to school with a co...