Edutopia, IDEO and the Riverdale Country School are offering “Design Thinking for Educators,” a five-week, free virtual course for K-12 teachers. The workshop starts on July 30. To sign up, visit Edutopia’s website. Read more about the course on Good magazine’s site and MarketWatch.

OpenIDEO co-founder Tom Hulme has been appointed to the Tech City Investment Organisation advisory board with the objective to provide “strategic direction” for the UK government’s efforts to support the startup community in East London. To read more, visit Wired.co.uk.

Faraday Bicycles, a business conceived at IDEO, debuts its first bike, the Porteur, on Kickstarter. Check out coverage of the launch on CNET, Engadget, and Core77.

In the 2012 Core77 Design Awards, electric propelled utility bike Faraday placed runner-up in the transportation category, while IDEO’s work on Future Visions of Synthetic Biology received professional notable in the speculative category.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services invited OpenIDEO’s Nathan Waterhouse to be an Innovation Technical Advisor for its Innovation Fellows program. He will work with the fellows to take on some of the Department’s toughest challenges by pushing fellowship projects forward and sparking innovation within HHS.

Tim Brown spoke as part of the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival. His talk, “From Newton to Design,” presented design as an evolutionary process. Watch a 2-minute clip on the Aspen Ideas website.

Iain Roberts explains what IDEO Chicago learned from our first Startup-in-Residence, Food Genius, and what we’re looking for in our next this Fall. Applications due July 15. Apply here.

Richard Kelly talks to China Daily, a prominent English language newspaper, about IDEO’s business, impact and future in China.

German magazine PAGE includes a brief interview with Leif Huff about what it takes to make real innovation happen, crowdsourcing and the impact of design (thinking) on businesses. A separate article in a different issue of the magazine highlights Designs On—.

“One thing I’ve noticed is that the people in organizations who are the most responsible for innovation are frequently working alone–and they’re lonely,” says Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab. This reason among many others is why MIT and IDEO have teamed up to form the Innovators Guild, a new concept for supporting and encouraging thought leaders, now and into the future.

Read more about the Innovators Guild on the MIT Media Lab blog, and on BostInno.

IDEO was awarded 13 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEAs) by the IDSA, with winning designs ranging from an open innovation platform to redesigning women's breast health journey.

Silver

• Elmo Calls App for Sesame Street (Web and App)
• Kiosk Consumer Experience Redesign for Redbox (User interface)
• Next Door for State Farm Insurance (Research)
• Next Door for State Farm Insurance (Service Design)
• OpenIDEO for IDEO (Design for the Majority)
• Radically Disruptive Empathy Lunch Workshop for IDEO (Design Research)
• Sacred Care for St. Joseph Health (Service Design)

Bronze

• Customer Care Strategy for Intuit Quickbooks (Design Strategy)
• Designs On— Packaging for IDEO (Packaging and Graphics)
• eReader Design Language for Kobo (Laptops and Notebooks)
• GE Mammography: Redesigning the Women's Breast Health Journey for GE and GE Healthcare (Design Research)
• Healthy Workplace for Kimberly Clark (Service Design)
• Room Wizard II for Steelcase (Office Equipment)

For more on the winners, read here.

Popular Science checks in with IDEO’s Christian Palino about the design of Enroll UX 2014, a consumer healthcare enrollment experience developed in collaboration with the California HealthCare Foundation and a coalition of national and state partners. Read more about the project here.

Nathan Waterhouse kicked off the latest OpenIDEO challenge at Rio+20, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. The challenge, which is focused on the problem of discarded electronics, is being done in partnership with leading Brazilian bank Itaú Unibanco, the US State Department and the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Paul Bennett, IDEO’s Chief Creative Officer, writes for the “From the Desk of” column for Singapore’s The Business Times, the country’s most influential business paper, about why Singapore is the perfect place to prototype ideas. Paul says that “trying is the new talking,” describing why Singapore lends itself to a learn-by-doing approach.

Download the PDF here.

How might businesses that found success in one area find new outlets for future growth? Colin believes that the start-ups of today and the skunkworks of the 1970s suggest ways larger organizations can pursue growth. Read the full article on HBR.com.