50 Most Innovative Companies
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
Where are Philips who are pioneering high efficiency LED lighting, or TomTom that gave us the first decent GPS for cars? or Ubuntu that gave the world its first decent free operating system? or eBay, still the leader in global re-cycling... and I'm sure there are loads of companies that make amazing scientific and medical innovations that I am unaware of.
lol what
or Toyota for making practical hybrid cars
PS: Although I enjoy Google products, they haven't 'invented' a single one. Search engines? Email? not exactly a Google innovation.
Philips I've already mentioned, but companies like Toshiba give us lots of innovation with things like disc drives (I cant remember Starbucks ever developing a new type of fast, energy efficient storage media, although that did give us the 'mocha-choca-frappa-latte')
Or is there something I don't know about HBO?
It's stupid, what it is. Because the stuff Microsoft Research is working on is crazy cool.
Xerox was inventive. Apple was innovative. There's a world of difference between the two.
As far as Microsoft goes -- several years ago, I heard an embittered ex-Microsoft researcher opine that the purpose of Microsoft Research was to buy up the best and brightest people in the world, and then lock them safely away in a box where they could never deploy anything that competed with Windows, Office, or other entrenched cash cows. Although I have tremendous respect for what Microsoft Research is working on, I think there was some truth to this sentiment.
When you look at what has come out of Microsoft Research in the past, you have things like C#, PixelSense, ClearType, and Photosynth to name a few. And that doesn't include other labs like Office Labs. If you ever get the chance to tour their lab space, it's crazy the sort of things they have prototypes for, as well as the things they're striving for with their productivity vision video.
Plus, remember that the definition of innovation is "A new method, idea, product, etc: 'technological innovations'." That's exactly what Microsoft Research does. Things like the real-time translation that came out recently, the projected gaming system, and of course the things they're doing with NUI and the Kinect and using them as input methods for computers. Just because they're not viable right now does not discount the fact that they are making things that are some day going to change the way we work, and play.
Edit: And I would definitely not consider Apple innovative, in any way. They make products for the masses, and, yes, they are awesome products, but they don't really innovate. I can consider the iPhone to be an innovative product since it changed the way we view smartphones. But after that, they've simply changed the previous year's version and bumped up the specs. Overall, that's what they do. They take a product they have, change it up a bit, and release it the next year. They're a great consumer company, don't get me wrong, but innovative? No.
How many companies in this list or non American and how many are Internet companies.
This is a brainstorming not a rating. And it has a aweful home bias.
Secondly - they are amazing contra-indicators - remember Enron and WorldCom were first on these lists. So go ahead and pick the first company for a good all short because you know that if the business community thinks it's good - it's probably bad.