nnovate’s Editor-in-Chief, Al Kapoor, met with many health innovators in the past four months. He was able to dive deeper to explore why health is widely discussed and collect facts you should have on your fingertips for creative decision-making.

Let us roll the tape to the beginning of the last millennium. It was a different society – one of nobles and peasants. For many centuries, the peasants were made to believe that their life-long ambition was limited to be of personal service to the nobles and have no freedom. It wasn’t till the latefourteenth century when Wat Tyler marched down the streets of London, representing the peasants and proclaiming equality for all. He inspired the fight for freedom and equality.

What led to this revolution? The answer lies in a natural disaster. The plague in the early-fourteenth century had killed nobles and peasants alike. It was clear now to both peasants and nobles that death did not discriminate based on class – all had to be equal naturally. Moreover, the plague shifted the bargaining power between peasants and nobles. Peasant deaths led to shortage of labor. Peasants now could negotiate with the nobles. In some instances, if the noble of a land was dead, the peasant was able to replace the noble. It was becoming evident that class mobility was based on opportunism, not birth. Tyler’s revolt and the plea to the King for equality was an organized attack on unfair taxation and forced labor. Unfortunately, King Richard II had him killed. It would take another several hundred years for the idea of freedom and equality for all to take firm foothold. John Locke and Thomas Paine vigorously disseminated such ideas, utilizing the printing technology of the mid second-millennium.

In a situation where there is no righteous person, try to be a righteous person. Not all who increase their wealth are wise.

These two sentences spoken by the first-century Talmudic scholar Hillel have proved to be the guiding light for Aaron Feuerstein, Malden Mills Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer and founder. A New England producer of “climate control” fabrics, the Malden factory was ravaged by a fire a few years ago. Then over 70 years old, Feuerstein was faced with three choices: opt for $300 million in insurance money, resume overseas contracts or retire. He chose none of these. Instead, Feuerstein stunned the industry and the local Massachusetts populace by pledging to rebuild the factory. And he pulled off another stunner: he continued to keep all the workers on the payroll until the factory was built.

That done, work began at Malden Mills – until disaster struck yet again in the form of bankruptcy. In a rare instance, the employees kept the branch functioning through long hours of work and reduced pay. Fortunately, the company was in safe waters towards the close of 2003. Feuerstein and his employees turned a dire situation into a unique, victorious one by being fair to one another and fully involved in the team that they were a part of.

“When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.” So said Confucius. Continuing the geography-wide series on regions of innovative excellence across the world, we focus in this issue on Japan and China, countries that though grounded in Confucianism have deployed innovation with clinical efficiency.

Japan and China account today for nearly threequarters of Asia’s economic output. China continues to surge ahead with GDP growing in double digits and Japan’s post-World War II economic resurgence has been reignited in recent years.

The concept of both China and Japan enjoying economic prosperity at the same time is alien to the world. Historically, the economic prosperity of the two nations has never grown in tandem. Before the eighteenth century, China was the pre-eminent power in the region, the undisputed source of innovation that would create much of the modern world’s technology. Paper making, printing, gunpowder and the mariner’s compass were all Chinese innovations as were decimal mathematics, paper money, umbrellas, wheelbarrows, multi-stage rockets, brandy and chess. In fact, from 600 to 1500 AD, China was the world’s most technologically advanced society. Its scholars were at the forefront of innovation, discovering new scientific principles and influencing human civilization around the world. But since the decline of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), China has stagnated not only in relation to its Asian counterparts, especially Japan and South Korea, but to industrialized Western nations as well.

China has the world’s second largest Internetuser population after the United States. Baidu reigns supreme here with over 50 percent of China’s online search market share. With deep and wide knowledge of Chinese culture, law and mindset, Baidu has created a niche in a humungous nation where even Google and Yahoo have stumbled.

“…hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood.”

These words, from a 960 AD-1279 AD-dated Song dynasty poem, epitomize the world’s first Chinese-language online search engine, Baidu. One of China’s most contemporary and fabled corporate success stories, Baidu – which literally means hundreds of times – has earned the moniker ‘China’s Google’.

The company offers a slew of products, including popular MP3 downloads, Baidupedia, Baidu Knows and online marketing services. Imbued with an innate knowledge of Chinese culture, market forces and power structure – often inscrutable to foreigners – the Beijing-headquartered Baidu has deployed its skills to compete aggressively with Google and Yahoo. Baidu commands 58.1 percent of the Chinese online search market while Google and Yahoo have 22.8 percent and 11.6 percent respectively.

It has been called the curator of people’s lifestyles, a global cult brand, the quintessential niche retailer. What is it that makes Ikea the phenomenon it is today? And can it sustain its innovative business model in the face of increased competition?

1. At the stroke of midnight on February 10, 2005 a new Ikea store opened in Edmonton, North London. Forty minutes later it closed. Over 6,000 frenetic shoppers had caused a stampede which led to 20 of them being hospitalized.

2. In September 2004, three people were crushed to death and 16 injured in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, as shoppers attempted to pick up free discount vouchers offered by Ikea.

3. In April 2000, police in Emeryville, California were forced to manually direct vehicles to the new Ikea store in town. Traffic lights in the area were unable to handle the endless waves of vehicles heading towards the store. Things went back to normal only three months later.

Welcome to the world of Ikea. Its citizens are a global tribe who worship at the altar of good design and great value. Their religion is shopping – at Ikea’s global temples of style.

The world’s pioneer in database and information management, Oracle is the world’s second largest software firm after Microsoft. With a slew of M&As under its belt, Oracle is now reaping the rewards of its billionairefounder Larry Ellison’s inventive mind.

“There will be no new architecture for computing for the next 1,000 years. The computing industry is about to become boring.” Larry Ellison’s words at the 2001 Oracle AppsWorld conference may yet come to haunt him. The founder and Chief Executive Officer of one of the most innovative and pioneering global software enterprises went on to proclaim at the conference that if he had to embark on his corporate journey all over again, it would be in the field of genetic engineering instead.

Speculative asset bubbles are not accidents. They follow a pattern of development and decline that is not hard to either detect or predict. They require assistance from government, primarily through monetary and tax policy.The Internet and telecom stock bubbles were followed by the housing bubble, which will be followed by new bubbles, writes Eric Janszen.

There are Eight Laws of Asset Bubbles.

1. Law of Mean Reversion:

All asset bubbles are market anomalies that revert to the mean. No market that experiences bubble growth ever maintains the price levels reached at the peak of the bubble.

2. Law of Development:

Starting from mean growth rates, all asset bubbles follow four stages of development: pre-bubble (or bubble formation), bubble, collapse, and overshoot.

PRE-BUBBLE: The higher-than-mean pre-bubble growth phase typically lasts one to three years before the hyper-growth bubble phase develops – or fails to develop. A pre-bubble growth rate develops from normal growth when the market recognizes a legitimate new discovery with significant economic value within an industry, such as the Internet in 1994.

BUBBLE: The hyper-growth bubble phase begins when government legislation and monetary policy creates the pre-conditions of cheap financing and perceived overnment guarantees of taxation limits on gains – or, at minimum, government protection of early investors from losses. Then, once hyper-growth becomes established, it becomes self-reinforcing as a positive feedback loop of money creation develops.

It is the world’s most potent trademark, the symbol of Americana. But can the Coca-Cola Company reinvent itself to meet the growing needs of an increasingly health-conscious global consumer?

“… The most basic truth about the psychology that underlies the corporate culture of the Coca-Cola Company is that the men who run it perceive Coke’s reality as unchanging. Domination in the past. Leadership in the present. Supremacy forever.”

That’s how scathing Roger Enrico, former President and CEO of Pepsi-Cola, is about Coca-Cola in his book, The Other Guy Blinked – How Pepsi Won the Cola Wars. But then the company that owns the greatest trademark in America’s business history is well-known for its hubris.

Except for a few blips, the dominance of Coca-Cola has been unparalleled for over 120 years. The rubric of innovation in the company has centered, from its early days, as much around creating novel products as building new markets and reinventing business processes. The firm’s culture of innovation has focused on generating pioneering new ideas and taking them to market in record time.

“Some can sing opera, Luciano Pavarotti was an opera. No one could inhabit those acrobatic melodies and words like him.” So said U2’s Bono in a tribute to the world’s greatest tenor, who died in September 2007. Pavarotti will always be remembered for his vocal versatility and commitment to sharing the rarefied world of opera with mass audiences.

I am enthusiastic about the job I do and enthusiastic about life… The pleasure of the profession is the human warmth around me, the public out there,” Luciano Pavarotti once observed. It was a public that the primissimo tenor had created himself with his talent and charisma on and off stage. Pavarotti brought opera out of its gilded ivory tower and into the lives of millions of people worldwide, many of whom had never ever entered an opera house or heard an aria before. His presence made opera an increasingly popular art form, capturing the imagination of audiences of the latetwentieth century.

The solution to restoring human vision and treating diseases like macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetes-related blindness could be in your home, nestled between the ferns of your aquarium. A popular aquarium fish – the zebrafish – is being regarded as manna by all scientists researching human vision. This fish has a unique ability to restore its vision by regenerating its damaged retinas, giving scientists at the University College London’s Institute of Ophthalmology a clue to the human body.

Adult stem cells that develop neurons in the retina have now been grown by British researchers. The team studied Mueller glial cells in the eyes of people ranging from 18 months to 91 years. Astonishingly, all the cells were able to develop into the retina’s neurons. “Our findings have enormous potential,” says Astrid Limb, a leading scientist from the Institute of Ophthalmology. “It could help in all diseases where the neurons are damaged, which is basically nearly every disease of the eyes.”