The World's Most Innovative Companies
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Mark Marich
Fast Company has released its list of The World's Most Innovative Companies 2010, featuring stories of extraordinary innovative efforts under way in businesses across the globe and across sectors, from technology to politics.
For example, three-year-old Politico, ranked #49, is “doing the unthinkable: making money by printing a newspaper.” “While the paper's circulation is just 33,000, those copies go to a golden distribution list that includes the White House, every key Capitol Hill office, and prominent D.C. businesses. That's an appealing audience for issue-advocacy advertisers, which helped Politico turn a profit in the first year of the Obama administration. And proving that it's not afraid of a challenge, Politico's creators are developing a site to compete in local news.”
The top ten companies are the following:
1. Facebook
2. Amazon
3. Apple
4. Google
5. Huawei
6. First Solar
7. PG&E
8. Novartis
9. Walmart
10. HP
At the top of the list is Facebook. After six years since its launch, Facebook has become the social media platform of choice for 400 million users in every country on earth. The company more than doubled its user base last year. It currently employs 1,200 people. How did it confront the economic crisis? Fast Company interviewed Zuckerberg:
The young CEO did what every great Valley CEO has done in down years: sink money and time into continually perfecting "the product." Zuckerberg grew Facebook's engineering ranks by 50%, and those teams, though increasingly staffed by greenhorns, unveiled features and products at a record pace -- from the very practical (tripling site speed) to the profound (the launch of peace.facebook.com). …. And although the company achieved cash-flow positive status for the first time last year, that wasn't the primary goal. "What 2009 was about for us was making the site better and growing users," says Zuckerberg.
Many other companies seem to have confronted the crisis with relentless innovation and creative thinking, judging by the fact that most of the top 50 companies (33 out of 17) are new to the list. Some of these companies are long-standing businesses such as PG&E (#7), Novartis (#8), Frito-Lay (#28) and Samsung (#36), but most of them are recent challenger start-ups, such as Patients Like Me (#23), Filife (#27), Politico (#49) and Twitter (#50).
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