Temple University’s Fox School of Business is kicking off something of a coming out party this week for the Center for Design and Innovation, which debuted last fall. To do so, the center is hosting a Design Week challenge for its students and, on Friday, hosting a free, day-long conference around innovation, called incitexchange [RSVP here].

Led by eager Director Youngjin Yoo, the center is meant to offer students “cross-disciplinary, action-orientated education” programs and feature driven research meant to foster a better Philadelphia through design, management and technology.

“[The Center] attempts to bring design, technology and management together to re-think our management education and practice,” Yoo said. “In particular, we are very interested in leveraging design and innovation in order to transform our cities.”

Kicking off this afternoon as the first major CDI initiative, the Design Week North Broadband student challenge has nearly 100 students from six schools working in teams competing to create the most actionable, innovative solutions for job creation and infrastructure concerns along North Broad Street.

On Friday, the Design Week comes to a close with incitexchange, a day-long conference on design, innovation, management and technology by way of short, individual presentations, panels and collaborative acts. The conference is free, RSVP on Facebook. Speakers include Mayor Nutter, Electronic Ink CEO Harold Hambrose and former City of Philadelphia CTO Allan Frank, who is involved in the CDI planning.

“This is about sharing ideas and making real change,” Yoo said.

If the guy who said “what gets measured gets managed” stepped foot into Albert Einstein Medical Center he would have been a happy man.

The Logan-based hospital has been using a Real-Time Location System (RTLS) that monitors and measures the location of doctors, medical devices and patients since last September, according to RIFD Journal, but the North Broad Street fixture has just released their first round of related metrics.

What Twitter is to your friends’ eating habits, the RTLS is to medicine.

Each patient who comes through the hospital is given one of the 350 special ID cards that gets synced with the patient’s medical file. The devices act as a GPS of sorts, relaying the location of the wearer to receivers throughout the hospital which transmit the data over a local area network to a computer running special software. Hospital employees can pull up the building’s floor plan and see in real-time where patients and co-workers are and how long they have been there.

Doctors no longer have to go searching for equipment (and each other), while the time patients spend waiting around to be treated is being cut down.

The tracking system is more than just a damn-cool way to make the medical center run more smoothly, it also helps the bottom line.

Medical personnel can not only track the location of a patient, they can also track how long that person has been in their current location, allowing all kinds of metrics in efficiency to be taken and analyzed. In less than nine months, Albert Einstein has seen a 24 percent increase in patients in the emergency department and a $4.5 million increase in revenue. The figure of patients who leave the ER prematurely and end up coming back for more treatment is down from five percent to between one and two.

Doctors also receive monthly reports that evaluate their performance on statistics such as patients treated, how often each patient was visited and time spent with each patient.

Soon, the hospital hopes to combine the tracking system with electronic medical records to make all of the hospital’s data available from a single source. Once that projects is finished, the system will be able to combine location data points with statistics typically found in a patient’s chart.

If all of that data in one place makes you skeptical, you have good reason. Earlier this month, a hacker broke into a� similar database in a Virginia medical center and demanded $10 million in ransom.

YouthBuild Philadelphia Leads a green build at the National Mall in D.C. on March 17, 2009. YouthBuild also has technology courses.

She wasn’t going to pass.

Testing for an ICDL, a license noting she had mastered general computer functions, is the goal of the six-week technology class at the YouthBuild Philadelphia Charter School, but sometimes there are too many challenges for some students to get there.

This young woman tried, but it sure seemed like she’d be one of the students who miss the mark. Female high school dropouts aren’t often thought as players in technology fields.

But then, she passed. And now, one year later, she’s at the Community College of Philadelphia, reaching even further.

Stephanie Virgo, a YouthBuild technology instructor who had those concerns about that student she liked, now sees that triumph as something of a lesson on how technology can challenge and motivate.

“We have students who have never used a computer before,” Virgo says. “It can be very empowering and help them pursue that post-secondary education. If you’re given a paper to write, that can be hard. If you’re given that paper and you don’t know how to use a computer, it’s a whole ‘nother challenge.”

YouthBuild is a one-year, nonprofit program designed for high-school dropouts to offer job-training and based on a national model. The Philadelphia chapter, founded in 1992 and one of 226 chapters nationally, is on North Broad Street above Girard. Students get a high school diploma and real, applicable job skills.

The school, with 200 students yearly, offers a popular construction sequence, which gained a degree of notoriety for leading a sustainable home building project on the National Mall in D.C. in March, in addition to a nursing program and the technology coursework.

The six-week tech class features twelve students engrossed in computer maintenance and use for eight hours a day, led by Virgo, who is in her second and final year at YouthBuild as a AmeriCorps staffer, along with another instructor, Julia Hillengas.

As with the mission of YouthBuild, time is split between vocation and education and classes are small and targeted.

Often students will be taught to refurbish donated computers, cloning the software, clearing the harddrive and putting it all back together. This year, Virgo says the class has been devoted to restoring a computer lab to be used for future training and general Web surfing and computing. Other times students will learn basic programs like Microsoft Office.

“It about opening up to see what’s out there,” says Virgo, who has a programming background, went to school in Indiana and hopes to continue her work in adult education in Philadelphia. “So they can make real choices.”

YouthBuild does rely on donations. If you’d like to make a contribution use the Network for Good system — designating “Friends of YouthBuild Philadelphia” in your online donation form — or mail a check to Friends of YouthBuild Philadelphia, 1231 North Broad Street, 3rd Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19122.

Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly�s tech scene, but aren�t necessarily technology focused. See others here.

The Donegal Insurance Group, based in Marietta east of York, will begin offering policies May 1 that offer a five percent discount on insurance for homes that use solar energy or a geothermal heat pump.

It is part of a growing trend for green initiatives to actually expand, despite relatively low gas prices. The commodity’s price still dictates interest in products like hybrid cars for some, but as oil seems destined to only increase in expense, the movement maintains.

The rise and fall conversation and market for an electric car is again on the rebound. The now 12-year-old YouthBuild Philadelphia Charter School on North Broad Street, which focusing on sustainable construction, got a visit from Michelle Obama. Green businesses in our region won federal stimulus dollars.

Vice President Joe Biden was in University City last month to talk about our city’s role as a green tech jobs hub. Funding for the same green industries have come our way.

Valley Forge lawyer Audrey Zibelman co-founded Viridity Energy, which aims at profiting by selling unneeded energy to the power grid. The trick is using a mix of energy generation units like wind micro-turbines and solar cells to create a virtual power plant.

“It’s the Prius Effect. Prius cars tell you their level of efficiency, and drivers start looking at that efficiency level as much as they look at their miles per hour to determine how best to use their cars,”  Zibelman said. “Markets are like that. We all know that the more we know about pricing, the better we’re able to make decisions.”

High-cost energy scares have likely taught lessons of our future, making sustained efforts at increasing green attitudes a greater reality.