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The World’s Most Innovative Companies

Businessweek publishes an annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies as ranked by a poll of its readers. The 2006 list is here:

http://www.businessweek.com/pdfs/2006/0617_top25.pdf

The top names are:

1. Apple
2. Google
3. 3M
4. Toyota
5. Microsoft
6. G.E.

The leading European companies are Nokia (8), Virgin (11) and BMW (16). What do you think of this list? Do you agree with the rankings? Who do you think should be on there?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “The World’s Most Innovative Companies”

  1. Terry Pilcher, BCS Management Services Says:
    October 25th, 2006 at 3:27 pm

    No SMEs on the list? Maybe further down? In my experience it is the smaller companies that have shown greatest innovation. Virgin, Google etc. in the early years. I feel that there could be a great deal that large companies could learn from SMEs. After all most large companies are broken down into cost centres, which are often the same size as an SME (up to 250 people).

  2. Paul Sloane Says:
    October 25th, 2006 at 3:28 pm

    The poll is based on a survey of managers and directors so SMEs would probably not have the name recognition to get into the list. It is in many ways easier for SMEs to be innovative. It is a big challenge for large organisations - and I agree they could learn from smaller companies.