This year marks the 10th edition of the Fast Company World’s Most Innovative Companies ranking.
Fast Company‘s reporting team sifts through thousands of enterprises each year, searching for those that “tap both heartstrings and purse strings and use the engine of commerce to make a difference in the world.” Impact is among Fast Company‘s key criteria.
Fast Company‘s Top 5 Most Innovative Companies in the World:
1. Amazon: For offering even more, even faster and smarter
2. Google: For developing a photographic memory
3. Uber: For accelerating autonomous driving
4. Apple: For baking in its advantages. Creativity is more than skin deep — and Apple’s approach to the hardware and software engineering that creates its experiences has never been more ambitious. Other makers of phones and tablets buy the same off-the-shelf chips as their competitors. Apple, by contrast, designs its own chips—so an iPhone packs a processor designed specifically optimized for Apple’s operating system, apps, display, camera, and touch sensor. The company has gotten so good at chip design that the A10 Fusion inside the iPhone 7 trounces rival processors in independent speed benchmarks.
Apple has also made major inroads in artificial intelligence, an area where the competition from companies such as Google couldn’t be any more daunting. For instance, it uses AI techniques to wring as much life as possible out of the iPhone’s battery. Because of Apple’s privacy-driven decision to limit the amount of information it aggregates and analyzes in the cloud, it also does much of its AI right on the devices rather than using massive server farms. When it calls machines such as the iPad Pro “supercomputers,” it isn’t exaggerating.
5. Snap: For bringing crackle and pop to a new way of seeing the world
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Placing Apple under Amazon and Google is laughable, but putting them below Uber is inexplicable.
Oh the fan boys will crap ipods over this one!
This list is upside down.
If not, this is again, a paid advertising to show Apple is not in the game…
Guess what? The giant will rise this year. Buckle up!
But the survey was for last year. We got a Touchbar on a MacBook Pro and GPS in the watch – both minor in my opinion – with good advances in the iPhone 7. Portrait mode is stunning. I agree Apple should be ahead of Google and Uber in the list but Amazon has really put on the Ritz as evidenced by the popularity of Alexa. I do believe Apple has been laying the groundwork for a stellar 2017 – tvOS is matured now and they’ve brought in new and organized existing leadership; rumors of the next iPhone are shaping up nicely; hopefully the forgotten MacPro will be remembered and there will be more substantial improvements to the MacBook; and I’m interested to see if this year brings more capabilities to the watch to rationalize upgrading from the Series 1. The best true innovation from Apple in 2016 – again just my opinion – is the AirPods. If the watch accounts for the visual interface, these little babies truly do account for the audio interface. If they could get Siri working offline and make it so I can launch apps using Siri when the phone is locked, the phone really would be relegated to my pocket 90% of the time. Siri has to be updated though. 50% of my commands result in web searches that require me to look at the phone. I speak and annunciate well and it just doesn’t get it. I have to phrase the command a certain way without a guidebook. Where Alexa looks and acts like a proficient secretary, Siri is like a hard-nosed, bitchy sounding librarian – no offense to librarians. This could shape up to be a great year for Apple but I’ll wait to see their strategy before judging.
There is NO WAY Apple deserves to even be in the top 10!
I would have put KODAK, POLAROID, YAHOO, BLACKBERRY, YIK YAK, THERANOS, RADIOSHACK and XEROX well ahead of APPLE!
When are these guys going to wake up, smell the coffee and realize where technology is going! GEEZ!
Wow, poor JWW,
My guest is you don’t own a single recent Apple products.
Your comment, like all the other trolls, is incomplete : Perhaps you could tell us which company is way ahead of Apple in terms of technologies and which products is ahead of the curve now.
Mmm, that is what I thought, nothing but flappering… Keep on trolling man maybe you should hang over at Samsungdailynews.com… Ho, mm, sorry their website exploded lately…
I see I’m going to have to add [SARCASM] to the end of such posts to help some people get the joke.
KODAK, POLAROID…?
That is in fact a must!
You are great at trolling or pseudo trolling or hiding behind a troll to express your frustration. Any ways, you got me…
Maybe if you had put Smith-Corona, U.S. Steel, EXXON-Mobile, or Western Union then he might have gotten the sarcasm.
You forgot Enron.
Just use the traditional “/s” at the end of your posts. It will save a lot of misunderstandings.
And apparently Fast Company ranks dead last !
Exactly what innovation has Apple brought forth in the Pipeline Tim era?
What Apple looks like is a company that follows others.
Maybe you should read the reasons described in the list. They may have ranked Apple 4 the but Fast company at least have the courtesy to acknowledge and list their innovations truthfully; at least what ever is in their knowledge.
I do not generally care about ranked lists – they are typically meaningless. But I will give Fast Company credit for their rationale regarding Apple. The A-series SoC is one of Apple’s primary strengths, and I believe that it will soon move beyond iOS devices to the Mac.
Sorry but but their own admission Apple has much more innovation going on and also pulled much more money and heartstrings which is their main criteria. Putting Apple at no. 4 seems like an idea to get more furious clicks from us fanboys.
@DavGreg Apple Pay in the Cook era.