Innovation Playground: The Herman Miller story has graced these pages in previous posts, but its worth revisiting the company's on-going campaign to unseat all other office furniture makers with creativity, sharing and premium-priced chairs. Idris Mootee is a big fan "not only about their chairs but also their corporate culture and management capability" so he recently composed a piece featuring CEO Brian Walker's thoughts on what makes Herman Miller such a force to be reckoned with in the cube farm biz. "The central thing that we've learned is a willingness to follow and give ourselves over to these designers-not lose ourselves, but be open to following them to places that we may question in the beginning. We give our creative network an outline of a perceived problem and let them share their insights as to whether we're on the right path and then enable them to bring their own gifts to the search for a solution. We follow them in their journey without judging too quickly. One of the hardest things to do is not to judge too quickly, based on the first physical appearance of something. Instead, we try to understand the essence of what they're describing in physical form, written form or sketches." This "creative network" includes outside sources that increase HM's chances of striking the perfect balance of design, materials, and cost of production for its very popular line of ergonomic chairs. Read Herman Miller's Next Innovation Is In Clinics And Hospitals. How About The Aeron Wheelchair? for the rest of the story.

Vcorp Services: Global Entrepreneurship Week is coming soon and what are YOU going to do to celebrate? UnleashingIdeas.org is sponsoring the event, which takes place during the week or Nov. 17-23, with hopes of encouraging would-be business owners to attend any number of events as detailed in a timely post by the good people at Vcorp Sevices in 10 Cool Things to Do During Global Entrepreneurship Week. For starters, here's one that could be interesting: "By Kids for Kids (BKFK) is encouraging young innovators to clean out their lockers. BKFK inspires young entrepreneurs to create and share their ideas, and often transforms outstanding ideas into commercial products where the young people earn self-esteem, business experience and royalties. As part of the program, BKFK provides Idea Lockers, a private online space where teens can create, develop, store and share their ideas." What's bad about feeling good, earning money and learning about the world of business?

Knowledge At Wharton: With the Christmas shopping season just around the corner, there are justifiable concerns that consumers will not be spending with the credit cards like they have in years past, with even the steadiest of luxury goods purveyors wondering if the crunch will hit them this time around. From Pajamas and Popcorn: Retailers Face a Less-than-Festive Holiday Shopping Season: "[L]uxury retailers are no longer immune to the jitters that have plagued other retailers in past spending troughs. Carl Steidtmann, chief economist at Deloitte Research, says that in recent years, luxury retailers had been able to sustain strong growth by developing new entry-level brands and products to draw in "aspirational" shoppers with lower incomes than traditional customers. Now those aspirational spenders who helped support high-end retailers in recent years are more susceptible to the economic downdraft than long-time clientele. Luxury retailers are no longer "bulletproof," he says." Nieman Marcus' line of extravagant Christmas gifts now includes pajamas and popcorn, albeit at the 100 dollar price range, and is a sure sign that even those with a few million in the bank are feeling the pinch of the economic downturn.

VentureBeat - Mobile/Comm: Maybe what everyone needs is an inexpensive netbook to fulfill their holiday tech shopping needs? VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi features HP's entry in the crowded netbook market in his review of the HP MIni 1000family of computers. "The models are targeted at 'information snackers,' or people who want to get on the Internet, quickly and easily. They include mobile professionals, media enthusiasts, and 'fashion-forward women.' The 'ultra portable' computers are less than an inch thick and weigh 2.25 pounds. Yet the keyboards are almost full size, at 92 percent of the typical keyboard size." There is also a very sleek and beautiful Vivienne Tam version that looks like a clutch-style purse and has the Chinese symbol for "double happiness" on the keyboard. Price for this tiny, light and eye-catching netbook ranges from $379.99 for the Linux version to $699.99 for the Vivienne Tam model.

ArsTechnica.com: Ten years in, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), what does the world of piracy and DVD-ripping look like? John Timmer thinks that there are some positive, but mostly negative effects from the DMCA's loose definitions of infringement and its Draconion anti-circumvention provisions and he details those failings in A decade of the DMCA: keep the Safe Harbor, ditch the rest. Timmer writes, "...[T]he big loser here has been the public. As more devices gain the ability to handle music and video—I can think of five different device classes that handle one or the other lying around my (quite small) apartment right now—consumers have found the DMCA is a hurdle that keeps them from having the content they own available on the device of their choosing. Want to watch a DVD movie on an iPhone? Good luck; software that allows you to do so violates the DMCA. Sophisticated users know how to find the software that does what they want, but the average consumer is stuck with lots of formats and protection schemes, and no guarantee that they'll be able to get the content they own where they want it." One might conclude that the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA encourages piracy because people want to watch "their" copy of a movie or listen to a song when and where they please, and not have to purchase another copy to be able to use the file on a separate digital gadget.