Call us crazy, but it looks as if the people at Great Harvest have managed to pull off what the rest of us only fantasize about. They've built an organization that practically runs itself

Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas. Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather. Unlike birds, we can also alphabetize. And so we hereby present, from A to Z, the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world. To offer a nonalphabetical option for navigating the entries, this year we have attached tags to each item indicating subject matter. We hope you enjoy.

I recently attended an excellent Made by Many event hosted at BBH which featured a re-presentation by Manuel Lima of his 2009 TED talk on data visualisation. Manuel is the curator of visualcomplexity.com and is an eloquent, modest, charming pioneer in this fascinating field. As a novice myself, I could not help wondering why we are all so immediately and instinctively attracted to the best of data visualisation.To start with, I’m sure there is some fundamental truth that for most of us data become meaningful only when we can see scale, change, patterns and relationships. Seeing is understanding.

For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn’t rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner. How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition—including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead—evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence.

In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel. It’s not these facts, but the stories surrounding the facts that inspire me when I take a good, long stare at a suspension bridge. But first…

One of the paradoxes of early 20th Century management was the observation that companies are best run as dictatorships, while countries are best run as democracies. Why was this?

Seemingly, the culture of “open” has infused even the most conservative and blood-thirsty organizations with companies falling over each other to claim the mantle of being the most open of them all. So we won, right? I wouldn’t say that. In fact, I think it’s now when the hard work begins.

After a year of watching adults engage in devastating recklessness in the financial markets and depressing fecklessness in the global climate talks, it’s refreshing to know that the world keeps minting idealistic young people who are not waiting for governments to act, but are starting their own projects and driving innovation.

Zelf maken wordt een trend in 2009. Niet langer alleen films, kerstkaarten en allerlei teksten - juist het produceren van fysieke objecten - lampen, speelgoed, kleding en meubels - komt snel binnen ieders handbereik. Met nieuwe online diensten die dat tegen lage kosten mogelijk maken kan iedereen straks ontwerper, uitvinder, producent en marketeer worden van zijn eigen producten. Wat kan er nu al, en hoe zorgen we ervoor dat dit wat oplevert?

Better Place is working to build an electric car network, using technology available today. Our goals? Sustainable transportation,globa energy independence and freedom from oil.

Did Apple steal the idea from Kodak? Not at all. Was Apple aware of the Vanity Kodak, and the what and the how of Teague’s contribution? Without a doubt: Jonathan Ive is an outstanding designer, and the Vanity Kodak is one of the classic examples in the history of industrial design. What Apple did was learn from history, and adopt, adapt, and assimilate past success to current context. That is simply good, intelligent design in action. It is also a very good lesson: an obsession with the new and original, without a deep literacy and appreciation for the past, leads to a path of missed opportunities.

Here's the biggest problem: no one yet has any idea what a climate-neutral city would look like or how it would operate. We can't build what we can't imagine, so one of the first orders of business is vision: visions of various ways in which cities could slash their emissions while increasing their prosperity and quality of life.

Hilarious! - "The patented alarm clock that runs away and hides to get you out of bed. Clocky gives you one chance to get up. But if you snooze, Clocky will jump off your nightstand and wheel around your room looking for a place to hide, beeping all the while. You'll have to get out of bed to silence his alarm. Clocky is kind of like a misbehaving pet, only he will get up at the right time."

A list of 8 upcoming Nokia innovations. -- Some of these are already being tested in large public projects, it seems. Others aren't really that innovative, at first sight. Two or three are interesting.

Well, as people rely on email as a primary means of communication, and everyday users deal with a mounting level of new messages per day, even more advanced features can help all of us keep our inbox under control.

We all know déjà vu—looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling like you’ve been there before. But what’s valuable to innovation is vuja dé—looking at a familiar situation with fresh eyes, as if you’ve never seen it before, and with those

Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist exploring the impacts of new media on human interaction.

Breakthrough ideas are around the corner, says the Google co-founder. But most of us are failing to take a chance on them.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--ri

Here it is: I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.

Een vlieg in het email van een urinoir is ook innovatie. Maar niet voor het kabinet, dat zich blindstaart op onvolledige r&d-statistieken en dus vooral geld uittrekt voor stamcelonderzoek en nanotechnologie.

“The intended effects of new technology are nothing compared to the unintended effects… the Internet is an accident. When you put a US Defense Department think tank together with a bunch of acid heads in California, you get this big thing. Nobody plan

Until the development of water and wind power, humanity burned carbon-based fuels like wood and coal to power our civilization. These very same fuels are now polluting the air and water with heavy metals, ozone pollution, and acid rain.

Here, then, are some of the books that have tweaked our thinking in the last couple years (of course, we think highly of our own book as well)

A one day conference with a focus on the near future of the web and how new technology, business models, innovation and culture-changes affect the direction of the web and the way we do business. The Conference for web industry thought leaders, leading co

If John Doerr has his way, greentech will be Silicon Valley's new new thing—and taxpayers will foot the bill.

"In this off-the-cuff talk, Charles Leadbeater weaves a tight argument that innovation isn't just for professionals anymore. From open-source software to mountain biking to astronomy, passionate non-professionals are harnassing digital technologies to col