Traveled 14,414 miles through 17 states and interviewed 500+ people at 100 companies  Phoenix and San Francisco, March 8, 2012 — Innovation: dead in America? Hardly. After six months of driving around the nation and interviewing more than 500 engineers, entrepreneurs, inventors, educators and students, our research shows quite the opposite — innovation is thriving in America. Avnet Express’ Drive

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa–By now, we're familiar with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The U.S. military has used them extensively in the Middle East to perform surveillance and to target suspected terrorists. More design resources The UAVs can be controlled from a room in Nevada or Florida or anywhere, far from the battle fields. The use of UAVs is somewhat controversial too, but

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa–Rockwell Collins’ presence here near the cornfields of Iowa is huge and counter-intuitive. You could imagine a big tractor factory, sure. But a high-tech innovation center working on virtual/augmented reality, communications systems for police cars and bleeding edge display systems? Well, it’s here, and it’s thriving. The company is deeply embedded (pardon the pun) in cockpits of both

Steve Jobs, who stepped down as Apple CEO amid a legendary career, is in many ways the paragon of innovation. But for what reasons? Some people cite his creativity, especially his famous Stanford speech in which he talked about learning calligraphy in college and how that influenced him to push for fonts on computers. More design resources Some people cite

LANSING, Mich.–Allan Dale traces his computing roots back past Burroughs, for whom he worked at one point. He's created and sold off technologies a few times over and could probably go flying off into the sunset (he's a pilot), but that's not nearly as fun as what he does. Today, he's the CEO of a company here, Lectronix, that's managed

In the the first major leg of the Drive for Innovation, we hit six states in five weeks and covered 3,800 miles in the Chevy Volt. Our goal is to root out great stories about innovators, innovations and innovative products. The stories we came across were phenomenal, but that’s just me. It can be hard to judge when your hands

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa–Engineers are drawn to electric cars for two main reasons: They’re fantastic design challenges and (two) they can go really fast. More than a decade ago, I rode around with EE Greg Hanssen down in Orange County, Calif., as he showed off his EV1. I was stunned at how fast it accelerated. Then, a few weeks back, I

(Odometer, 1,195 miles) CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa–We often think of defense contractors as enormous companies using very expensive equipment and software to churn out expensive products that taxpayers end up paying for. Maybe not so much these days. Rockwell Collins is taking the concept of prototyping and turning it on its head–and, perhaps most importantly slashing its cost as a key

Time was when a state-of-the-art police squad car had a radio and cherry on top. Today, it’s a whole different ball game. Most squad cars are their own rolling command centers and have to handle not only navigation and multiple radio frequences, but also lights, sirens, and data systems designed to give police the quickest, most insightful information they can have.