July 29th marks the start of the 8th season for Bravo’s Emmy-award winning television program “Project Runway.”

One of the designer contestants who will appear on the show this season will be April Johnston, a 2010 graduate of SCAD’s School of Fashion. At 21, Johnston will be the youngest of the 17 contestants.

SCAD is the Savannah College of Art and Design, which is headquartered in Savannah, Georgia, with campuses also in Atlanta, Hong Kong, and Lacoste, France.

I profiled SCAD in a blog posting in February 2009. As one of the top art and design schools on the globe, I am a big fan and supporter of SCAD’s.

If past “Project Runway” shows are any guide, April Johnston will undoubtedly face stiff competition, as well as stiff critiques from the show’s honcho and former super model, Heidi Klum. Fashion industry luminaries Tim Gunn, Michael Kors, and Nina Garcia round out the panel of judges.

What Johnston will have going for her is the world-class education and training she received at SCAD. That, along with some natural talent, will hopefully serve her well throughout the competition.

The Dean of Fashion at SCAD, Michael Fink, handicaps Johnston’s chances this way, “If her provocative and powerful senior collection is any indication, we’re confident she’ll create some exciting and intriguing clothes.”

We will soon see whether or not that’s the case.

Your employees hold the keys to your company’s success and how well you measure up to the competition. But you’ll need to create a corporate culture that will nurture employee talent, and stimulate creativity and innovation.

New Lantern has the type of “provocative and powerful” services that could tap into the scads of talent that already exists within your employees. This, in turn, could put you on the path to your own award-winning season.

I unfortunately had to spend most of the month in Washington, DC suffering through the hottest June on record. Washington has had 18 days over 90 degrees this month with lots of humidity to boot, resulting in heat indices well over 100 degrees. And the few days of the month I was in New York, it wasn’t much better.

While the global warming theory appears to have lost some of its steam of late, if June 2010 in DC is any indication, then the planet is in for a heap of trouble. Where’s Al Gore when you need him? (Answer: He’s preoccupied with his divorce and other tabloid rumors.)

Maybe there’s a silver lining with all this heat.

As long as it’s this hot, many of us will choose to stay indoors – in the cool of our office buildings — and not on the golf course, the tennis court, or at the baseball game. And as long as we’re in our offices, we might as well spend part of that time thinking about how our respective businesses can be more productive and innovative during the second half of the year.

So use this time wisely. Pull together your management team, challenge them to take a fresh look at the next six months, and come up with a game plan that could move the dial in each business and function across your organization.

Better yet, treat your team to an inspiring offsite meeting or innovation workshop, in a nice air-conditioned space, where thought-provoking speakers and thought-enhancing surroundings might spur more creative thinking.

That sounds like a pretty cool idea to me.

A small group of corporate heavy-hitters has come together to sound the alarm for increased spending and focus on energy research and innovation in the U.S. (New York Times, June 10, 2010).

Seven of the country’s most respected business leaders have formed the American Energy Innovation Council, including luminaries such as General Electric CEO, Jeff Immelt, and Microsoft Chairman, Bill Gates. Their message: the U.S. Government needs to “triple investments in clean-energy technologies to boost the nation’s economic competitiveness and protect the environment.”

We’ve heard similar calls for action on clean-energy investment in recent years from a variety of voices from business and academia. What makes last week’s announcement unique, however, is the coming together of major corporate leaders from disparate sectors around a common “business plan.” And the fact that it was announced against the backdrop of our nation’s worst oil spill in history adds further to the uniqueness of the moment.

The plan calls for a tripling in clean-tech funding in nuclear fission, solar, wind and fossil fuels. It also proposes the formation of an independent energy strategy board, which would develop an energy plan and oversee large-scale demonstration projects as part of the “New Energy Challenge Program.”

The Council recommends a $20 billion commitment over 10 years for the Challenge Program, which would “unleash significant private sector resources as projects are developed.” Additionally, it suggests that the Federal Government create Centers of Excellence to “foster multidisciplinary collaboration amongst scientists, universities, federal laboratories, and other public and private institutions.”

In addition to Immelt and Gates, the Council also includes: Chad Holliday, Chairman of Bank of America (and former CEO of DuPont); Ursula Burns, Chairman and CEO of Xerox; Norm Augustine, Chairman of Lockheed Martin; Tim Solso, Chairman and CEO of Cummins Inc.; and John Doerr, a leading energy venture capitalist and partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.

The group clearly faces some stout headwinds in making the case to Congress and the Obama Administration to spend more federal money on energy research at a time of unprecedented budget deficits. Yet, we know that the barking dog is usually the one who gets fed first. And when you have seven notable best-in-breed barkers, it’s hard not to at least give the group and their plan a serious look.

At a time when the public is less inclined to believe our corporate leaders, I am ready to take these leaders at their word. They know the path to energy security will be long, and as Jeff Immelt puts it, “the world is not going to wait for the United States to lead. This is about innovation; this is about competition; this is about energy security.”

I hope someone listens and heeds the call.

DuPont announced yesterday the winners of its 22nd DuPont Awards for Packaging and Innovation. Granted, the DuPont Awards do not yet have quite the cachet of the Academy Awards or the Pulitzer Prize, but they do represent the pinnacle of extraordinary achievement in “packaging materials, technology and service innovations.”

This year, Alcoa Inc. and Exal Corporation took home one of the top “Diamond Winner” awards for their new aluminum bottle, which offers a lighter, stronger, cheaper, 100 percent recyclable container, referred to as the “”Coil-to-Can” or “C2C” bottle. The new, high-tech bottle uses Alcoa’s bottlestock sheet and Exal’s C2C manufacturing technology.

Exal launched the C2C aluminum bottle in 2008, which is now used by companies like Coca-Cola, ESKA Still and Sparking Water of Canada, and Anheuser-Busch.

Ok, so what’s the big deal you might be asking? A lot in my book. The DuPont Awards illustrate a point that I have made on a number of occasions in earlier blogs on this website. Innovation is not only about the iPad, or the latest flat-screen technology, or a Mars rover. It’s potentially about everything your company is doing.

Innovation can and should occur across every nook and cranny of your business — from better and more advanced products, to enhancements in services for customers and clients, to improvements in internal processes, and to the very packages that contain your company’s products.

In short, if your company’s executives and managers are not actively pursuing innovations in all these areas – and strongly incenting your employees to do so – you may not only be missing out on possible revenue and market share, you may end up missing the boat altogether.

So this coming weekend, when you find yourself sipping your favorite beverage from one of those newfangled, super-cold aluminum cans, think about how your company can be more creative across the board.

I can assure you that a new can-do approach to innovation will put your company on a path to bringing home your own awards.

If you’re like me, once every few years you hear a song on the radio that makes you stop in your tracks and just listen. I recently had one of those moments.

A couple of weekends ago, my husband and I were out running errands when the “The House That Built Me” by Miranda Lambert came on the car radio. I must admit that I’m a relatively recent convert to country music. I don’t like all country music, but I do tend to like the newer country songs, and their sweet, melodic sounds and the real stories that they tell.

After the first few lines of the “The House,” we were pulled in. I turned up the radio and we just sat quietly in the car as it played. And then when it was over we searched several other country stations to see if we could hear it again.

It’s a simple song that tells a powerful story. The song is about a woman who is in search of herself. So she decides to go back to the house she grew up in and ask the current owners if she could just walk around the house and take it all in “one last time.” She goes on to say that she had hoped that her coming back “to touch this place” in some way would help heal some of the “brokenness” in her life.

She pleads with the owners, “If I could just come in, I swear I’ll leave. Won’t take nothing but a memory, from the house that built me.”

The lyrics took me back to my time as a kid and the house where I grew up. I could see my back yard, the trees I climbed, our kitchen, and my beautiful mom at 30 years old making lunch for my sister and me.

Born in Lindale, TX in 1983, Miranda Lambert is not yet 30 herself. “The House That Built Me” was released in March of this year on Lambert’s Revolution album, which won Best Album of the Year at last month’s Academy of Country Music Awards, where she also won Top Female Vocalist of the Year. “The House That Built Me” was co-written by Tom Douglas and Allen Shamblin.

The most successful artists and innovators listen more to their hearts than to their heads. The most successful companies and the executives who run them usually listen to both.

An employee who is motivated and passionate by what she does and the company she works for will always outperform an employee who is simply going through the motions.

Use your company to build something special and enduring, and you’ll in turn help build employees who will want to stay with your company — or at least want to return some day.

It’s not every day that a movie is made about a typeface. Well, technically it was a documentary by Gary Hustwit that debuted in 2007 at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. It later aired on PBS in January 2009 as part of the Emmy-award-winning Independent Lens series, which is the version I saw.

The film, Helvetica, subsequently toured film festivals, special events, and art house cinemas worldwide, playing in over 300 cities in 40 countries.

From April 2007 to March 2008, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City displayed an exhibit called “50 Years of Helvetica,” which celebrated the many uses of the font.

Why all the hoopla over a typeface? Well, in short, no other font can begin to approach Helvetica’s long-lived impact on the design, advertising, print and communication worlds. To this day, Helvetica continues to shine based on its simple, functional, contemporary, and timeless qualities.

Helvetica was developed by Max Miedinger with Edüard Hoffmann in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland. Miedinger, a former employee and freelance designer, was commissioned by Haas to draw an updated sans-serif typeface to add to the firm’s line. Miedinger’s new font was called Neue Haas Grotesk, but its name was later changed to Helvetica in 1960, which is derived from Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland.

Helvetica’s popularity was fed by its Swiss design roots and by advertising agencies selling this new design style to their clients. Almost overnight, Helvetica began to appear in corporate logos, signage for transportation systems, fine art prints, and a myriad of other uses worldwide. Five decades later, the use of the Helvetica typeface in our daily lives is as ubiquitous as the air that we breathe.

What does your company’s logo and typeface say about your organization? Are you giving enough attention to how your company approaches the design, look, and feel of your products and/or services?

The best product or service in the world is of no benefit if it is not seen as appealing to the customer.

Take a page from our omnipresent friend, Mr. Helvetica, and make sure you are doing everything you can to appeal to your customers. If so, your company too will find itself still looking good at the ripe old age of 53.