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If Thomas Edison were alive today, he'd feel right at home at Google. Take Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters, add some high-tech lab facilities, throw in a few manufacturing plants, and Edison would be set.

Why? It's not just because Google is one of the most innovative workplaces in the world - although that certainly helps. It's because Google's work culture is a stellar 21^st century example of one of Edison's most important innovation principles, taken from his Third Competency of Innovation: "Play" during work hours.

That's right. Edison loved "play" mode just as much as he loved "serious" mode. In his Third Competency - called Full-spectrum Engagement - we see Edison seamlessly navigating opposite states of behavior: working in solitude and working on a team; dealing with complexity as well as expressing ideas with simplicity; being serious and being playful. The dynamic tension created by these opposites provides an important canvas for the innovator.

For Edison, work wouldn't have been "work" without play. He regularly pulled practical jokes on his employees, like fashioning bogus cigars out of tobacco leaves filled with hair clippings. (Someone was breaking into his private stash of Havana's and he had to figure out who the culprit was...)

Penguin Group (USA) and Amazon.com today announced the second annual Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Competition, the international contest seeking the next popular novel, which will launch on February 2nd 2009.

During the tremendously successful inaugural competition, Bill Loehfelm emerged as the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Grand Prize Winner from a pool of 5,000 entrants. G. P. Putnam's Sons published his novel, Fresh Kills, in August 2008 to critical acclaim. The Associated Press hailed the novel as "the finest crime fiction debut since Dennis Lehane burst on the scene...not just a crime novel but a psychological novel of impressive subtlety and complexity." Mr. Loehfelm said, "The opportunity to enter this contest and share my manuscript with two publishing industry innovators like Penguin Group and Amazon was thrilling enough-but to go from longtime struggling writer to nationally published author in nine months is an aspiring writer's dream."