Congratulations to Fast Company’s 2012 “Innovation by Design” award winners announced earlier this week.

Eleven winners were chosen from among 56 finalists and 1,700 entrants in nine design categories: consumer products, industrial equipment, interactive, service, transportation, spaces, concepts, student, and 2-D.

The 2012 winners included: Nike, BioLite, Microsoft, Sheehan Partners, Continuum Innovation, Fisker, Softwalks, and Embrace Global.

According to Fast Company, this year’s awards celebration in New York, NY featured “the best and brightest in the industry, judged by the best and brightest in the industry,” and showcased “design innovations from bootstrapping student teams to mega corporations.”

I draw your attention to this month’s Fast Company magazine, which it refers to as its “Design Issue.” The entire issue focuses on the important role that design plays in business innovation as a positive disruptive force.

As the magazine points out, the marriage of design and innovation is not a new concept. For it was the legendary CEO of IBM, Thomas Watson, Jr., who noted almost 40 years ago that “good design is good business.” And scores of companies since then, including IBM, have ably demonstrated the truism of these words.

The magazine spotlights the latest social media darling, Pinterest, and its 30-year-old CEO, Ben Silbermann, as shown in the cover photo above. Silbermann has leveraged the power of the Internet to turn the age-old idea of the scrapbook into a must-go-to web destination. In the last year alone, the number of monthly unique visitors to Pinterest has soared from 600,000 to over 20 million.

Of course, 20 million users is a drop in the bucket compared to the social media behemoth, Facebook, which just past the 1 billion mark in users. Yet, Pinterest tops both Facebook and Twitter in its ability to translate visitors into product sales.

Fast Company also uses this month’s issue to highlight its “2012 Innovation By Design Award” nominees at 1,700 strong across nine categories. Nominees include companies and products such as Boeing’s fuel efficient 787, Nike’s lightweight Flyknit shoe, and Nest Labs’ slick and simple-to-use “smart” home thermostat. Winners will be announced on October 16 in New York City.

I urge you to spend more time in Q4 and in 2013 thinking about good design and how it can be good for your business. It might just be the best decision you make over the coming year — and could lead to your company’s nomination in a future Fast Company’s Design Issue.

The Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute (CRSI) announced its 2012 design award winners last week based on aesthetics, innovation, engineering achievement, functional excellence and economy of construction.

CRSI has been recognizing excellence in reinforced concrete structure design through its award program for almost 40 years. This year’s winners were chosen across three categories: multi-family residential, commercial, and education facility. Winners in each category, respectively, included Cary Kopczynski & Company of Bellevue, WA; DeSimone Consulting Engineers of New York, NY; and Atlantic Engineering Services of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.

Robert Risser, CEO and President of CRSI, noted that “the winning projects showcase the innovative design possibilities and qualities of using reinforced concrete and the exceptional collaborative management required during the construction of these outstanding structures.”

According to CRSI’s website, its Design Awards program is open to architects, engineers, contractors and fabricators. The entrants may be individuals or teams, and eligible structures must be located in the United States, Canada or Mexico.

The CRSI awards help reinforce the point that beauty is, in fact, more than skin deep. Many times, it’s what you don’t see that distinguishes an ordinary structure – or an ordinary company — from an extraordinary one.

It pays to take the time to regularly recognize and honor those responsible for extraordinary performance, no matter what the field and no matter how obvious or non-obvious their contributions.

One of the business innovation workshops I conducted in New York City featured cognitive scientist Donald Norman as a guest speaker. Norman is a leading expert in “user-centered design” and author of The Design of Everyday Things. The workshop was attended by 40 mid- and top-level managers from numerous divisions of a Fortune 200 company.

The goal of this off-site innovation meeting was to provoke some of the company’s most promising professionals to look at things a little differently – in fact, we wanted them to look at everything differently.

Every day of our lives, we are bombarded by tens of thousands of visual and operational stimuli. The door handle we use to open the closet, the street sign we see to make the correct turn, the faucet we use to turn on the water in the restroom, the ink pen we use to sign a letter — and on and on.

Given the sheer volume of this stimuli, it’s no wonder that we give little thought to 99% of what we see, touch, and feel every day. But maybe your brain is paying more attention than you think.

Whether on an individual stimulus basis or in a cumulative way, your brain responds more positively to objects that are pleasing to the eye – even everyday objects. Whether it’s a company logo, a product, an online service, or a routine internal process or form, a user’s reaction to all of these things is real, no matter how subtle.

Your product division may want a customer or potential customer to enjoy the use and visual attributes of a given product. Your sales department may want a customer to have a positive user experience with an online tool or service. And your human resource department may want employees to respond favorably to this year’s new health benefit based on smart and attractive design elements.

Innovation is not only reserved for the once-a-year or once-in-a-lifetime breakthroughs. Innovation can and should occur every day across every part of your company – from the most obvious anchor product of the company to the most subtle and routine business process.

It’s the cumulative effect of these innovations and the associated attention to detail and design that will separate good companies from the best companies.

Companies should make it a point to encourage employees to seek out every opportunity to improve a product, service, or process – and should seek to arm them with the tools, training and incentives to do so.

In the end, making everyday things and how they are designed and used a priority within your company may very well lead to extraordinary things.

I admit it. I have a foot fetish. It’s not exactly what you think. My love for feet is of the inanimate kind – stone feet sculptures, that is.

I just returned from my second trip to Rome this year. And based on my well-trained and traveled eye, I must say that Rome is probably the foot sculpture capital of the world. Everywhere I turned, there was another marble-carved foot. They were in museums, shops, piazzas, flea markets, and basilicas. Stoned feet in every direction.

The largest foot sculpture I’ve ever seen was in the courtyard of the famed Musei Capitolini, the oldest public museum on the planet which dates back to 1471. (This date is not a typo.) The really big and old foot is shown above. The courtyard also showcased a number of other large marble body parts, such as fingers, elbows, and heads.

The museum’s shop had a small marble replica of the big foot, which I wanted to buy, but my husband — as always – gave his standard complaint: “It’s too heavy to carry home.” Most of the time I ignore him, but given he ends up carrying the heaviest bags, I relented this time.

Of course, I regret not buying that foot. Its image is now plastered inside my head. I think I need therapy.

But great art, even in the sculpted foot variety, has a way of possessing the mind and soul.

And whether you call it a fetish or a passion, the positive effect of art and design can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary.

This effect just might help you ultimately lap the competition by a mile – give or take a foot.

It’s hard to add to what has already been said from so many corners of the globe about the enormous contributions of Steven Paul Jobs to the fields of technology, movies, music, telecommunications, and design itself. But I do feel compelled to say something about Mr. Jobs. We just lost our country’s Chief Innovator.

Steve Jobs was a once-in-a-generation visionary who demonstrated a unique blend of design, business, and marketing savvy. He took a quirky, irrelevant computer company named after a fruit, which he co-founded in the 1970s, and turned it into a global business powerhouse boasting the largest market cap of any other company on the planet  – equaled only by Exxon Mobil.

The last decade, in particular, has been truly impressive as Jobs led Apple as it redefined the music industry via the iPod, wireless communication via the iPhone, and more recently, the computer itself via the iPad.

Jobs didn’t always get it right. In 1985, after being fired by Apple, he started the NeXT computer company. NeXT folded in 1996 after shipping only 50,000 units, but its high performance personal computers impressed many, including Apple, which re-hired Jobs in 1997.

Most important, Jobs learned from his mistakes and he wasn’t afraid to make them. At every turn in his career, he ignored traditional business school dogma, and chose to take a different path – always guided by what he felt the consumer wanted.

Jobs concluded that consumers would be willing to pay more for a product if it was well-designed and simple to use.  He was right, and Apple and its shareholders have benefited handsomely.

Business schools will be studying the “Jobs Effect” and his hyper-successful business methods for years to come, and rightfully so.

At some point, there will be another Steve Jobs. He or she will also achieve success by eschewing the safe path. And most likely, he or she too will succeed as a result of a keen focus on innovation, smart design, and creative business approaches.