Business involves more than pursuing money.

Business is being creative, as when employees at MetaGeek in Boise brainstorm to meet a wireless professional worker’s data-visualization needs. It’s making things, as when workers at Johnson Thermal Systems in Caldwell manufacture industrial-refrigeration equipment. It’s building buildings, growing food. It’s selling, serving, supervising, teaching, playing.

The 17 pictures on the following pages reflect these activities and more. The images are some of our favorite Idaho business pictures of 2012. Fifteen were published in the magazine. One (Ronald McDonald) did not run with the article for which it was taken and is being published for the first time. One (the child studying Mandarin in a Meridian school) appeared in the Statesman, and one (Chris Butler’s portrait of Micron’s Steve Appleton) first ran in the Statesman in 1999 and was republished on BI’s cover after Appleton died in February. This collection is impressionistic, not comprehensive, but I think it conveys a sense of the pervasiveness of business-related activity in our lives.

The photos are the work of current Idaho Statesman photographers Joe Jaszewski, Darin Oswald, Katherine Jones and Butler, and former photographer Shawn Raecke. Statesman artist/designer Patrick Davis designed this edition’s cover and these pages.

This is our final edition of 2012. Look for BI again on Jan. 8 with our annual look at what business wants from the Legislature. Meanwhile, all of us at BI wish you a joyous holiday season.

dstaats@idahostatesman.com. Twitter: @IDS_DavidStaats