The top 100 most innovative companies (BW)
BusinessWeek Online has just posted their top 100 list.
The rankings were determined by votes from 1000 executives from large corporations: probably not the the best folks to make rankings like this, but it is the audience of the magazine, so there you go.
The top 5 are:
- Apple
- 3M
- Toyota
- Microsoft
More curious is their abuse of the word innovation:
Today, innovation is about much more than new products. It is about reinventing business processes and building entirely new markets that meet untapped customer needs. Most important, as the Internet and globalization widen the pool of new ideas, it’s about selecting and executing the right ideas and bringing them to market in record time.
Since when does selecting ideas and bringing them to market on time have anything to do with innovation? Don’t these things apply to running any kind of bussiness at any time?
Specific to their list, Google is in the search engine and advertising business (at least that’s their largest current revenue) – which are entirely old markets: at least a decade old. Apple’s ipod was not even close to being the first digital music player – and the market, personal music players, is also years old. Shouldn’t the first search engine and the first digital music player get the lions share of innovation credit?
Or perhaps a better question: is there a way to seperate out innovation, which should be hinged on development of new ideas, from execution, which is delivering a good, timely product to market? Lists like this one entirely confuse the difference between these two concepts.