“Which leading-edge corporations are most likely to succeed now and in the future? That’s the subject of an eight-year study by Harvard Business School Professor and master of disruptive innovation Clayton M. Christensen, along with colleagues Jeff Dyer, a professor at Brigham Young University, and Hal B Gregersen, a professor of leadership at INSEAD,” Tom Post reports for Forbes.
“Their insights can be found in their newly released book, The Innovator’s DNA (Harvard Business School Press) — and are the subject of our Aug. 8 cover package on the world’s most innovative companies and leaders,” Post reports. “Check out the ranking of the world’s 100 most innovative companies, produced with Michael McConnell, a senior advisor at HOLT, a division of Credit Suisse.”
Forbes’ World’s Most Innovative Companies:
1. Salesforce.com
2. Amazon.com
3. Intuitive Surgical
4. Tencent Holdings
5. Apple
6. Hindustan Unilever
7. Google
8. Natura Cosméticos
9. Bharat Heavy Electricals
10. Monsanto
…
20. Nintendo
…
54. Adobe Systems
…
56. HTC Corp
…
77. Oracle
…
84. Intuit
…
86. Microsoft
Full list here.
Methodology here.
MacDailyNews Take: Any methodology that places Amazon three spots ahead of Apple on an “innovation” list is FUBAR.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
Explain how Amazon is ahead of Apple?
My thoughts exactly
Mine too
Or that Microsloth is even in this list. For what – innovations in copying?
That’s why Google is number 7! It’s hard to copy and evade lawsuits
Well, at least Microsoft’s R&D team comes up with some fun things from time to time… Useless, but still more “innovative” than whatever Amazon has ever done.
Well, Amazon did single-handedly jump-start the multi-gazillion-dollar internet shopping industry. But I don’t disagree with your perspective.
There is that. 😉 Something about customer focus might also have something to do with it, since so many (cough*adbe*cough*msft*cough) have lost it.
Kudos to Apple *AND* Amazon. 😉
And Apple popularized the Personal Computer, the GUI, the mouse, the MP3 player, online song shopping, reshaped smartphones and released a successful tablet after 10 years of companies failing in that market.
Apple should be 10 positions in front of them, at the very least
It’s goddamn rigged is why. Tell me one thing that Amazon has innovated in the last century. Bet Forbes is as stumped as I am.
And what the hell’s up with Tencent Holdings? Is that like Fifty Cent’s brah?
Bogus fake placings. Take a dump, Forbes.
I’m not sure if the Kindle is innovative, but I’d credit it for jumpstarting the tablet/eReader industry. I certainly buy almost everything from Amazon online so I wouldn’t call it a one-trick pony. Netflix, yes. Amazon, no.
As far as being rated ahead of Apple in innovation, I wouldn’t think so, but then again Amazon is valued higher than Apple on Wall Street but I think it’s rigged to be that way.
I can see why Intuitive Surgical is ranked higher than Apple since the DaVinci surgical robot is in a class by itself and has no competition. I hear it’s quite a lifesaver for certain types of surgical procedures. I’ll have to check out Salesforce since I don’t even know what the hell that company does.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), in the cloud, available at the press of a button. If you know any traveling salesperson, ask him or her, it’s almost guaranteed that Salesforce will be in use.
The eReader industry predated the Kindle by over a decade. Sony was selling them quite successfully… amazon managed to convince a lot of gullible people to buy kindles, though.
I disagree with that. Amazon was innovative with Kindle in the same way iTunes was with music. Not the first, but the biggest and the best.
That is SOOOOO wrong!
Amazon is a one-trick pony. How is that innovative?
Don’t you mean “one click” pony? They did “innovate” a mouse click as a patent…
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click)
Amazon convinced its investors that not making money is a good thing. that’s innovative!
You obviously are NOT an investor in AMZN. Only an idiot would make such a stupid comment. Geez you should be embarrassed. Only a fanboy would make such a truly moronic remark. Damn!
Today, of course, Amzaon is capturing market share from many other retail sectors and its success is assured.
But efforts by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos a decade ago to attract investors despite having no profits made all of that possible. Without selling that message — No profits? No problem! — Amazon likely wouldn’t have survived when the internet bubble burst in 2000-03.
Amazon is a terrible company. They are idea-of-the-month types. Every month it s a new thing. “I know, movie listings! People can go to amazon.com to find out what time a movie is playing!” then next month “I know we’ll scan mail order catalogs and put them online for people to brows the pages.” then the next month “I know we’ll scan restaurant menus so that you can find out if that local restaurant is serving the dish you like!”
Seriously, all three of those are “projects” amazon did, spent a bunch of time on, then left to abandon and rot away… when I last looked the mail order catalogs were over 5 years old!
They’re also dishonest. They made AWS, which is, by the way, a really crappy, crappy service. They claimed that Amazon.com was running on AWS services to imply it was reliable. The press, of course, bought this and reported it as fact. It was a total lie. Not only is amazon.com actually pretty unreliable– it goes down for some part of the world or some major section of the site several times a day– but nothing on Amazon.com was hosted on AWS except for the AWS static “buy AWS services” website. IT was a total lie.
And don’t get me started on how they treat employees…. it is totally political, and skill or performance are far below ass sucking in terms of skills needed for advancement. They have people who are barely computer literate managing programmers… but of course you don’t need to be computer literate to be a manipulative and dishonest person.
This goes all the way to the top. Bezos is a total bozo, and he surrounded himself with D quality people with type A personalities and thinks he’s got an “A team”.
It is an embarrassment to Forbes to have Amazon in the top ten.
“And don’t get me started on how they treat employees…. it is totally political, and skill or performance are far below ass sucking in terms of skills needed for advancement.”
^ The most clueless thing I’ve read today. Maybe even this year. But what do I know, I’m just one of those ass suckers.
I find it difficult that it was potentially the most clueless thing anyone has read this year.
If you have missed it, I’d refer you to the public statements and interviews by the RIM CEOs (either will do), Acer CEO’s recent claims, Google’s legal head honcho’s recent blog post/tirade/whine, or most Fandroidnista comments on CNet; oh the list is already getting exhaustive.
I stand corrected! (I’ve been out of the loop for a while!)
Your MIA state was noted: loved your quip, “tonight we dine in hell,” upon AAPL hitting the $300 closing mark the first time. Something on par clever was missing when AAPL hit the 400 mark; no one had stepped up to the plate in your absence.
I thought what Engineer said made a lot of sense. To me, Amazon has no taste, their website layout abuses my eyes. It’s a jumbled mishmash of 1,001 products. The only good thing about it is the user review system but that’s written by Amazon’s customers, not Amazon. The Kindle compared to iBooks is like a kiddie stick drawing.
Last but not least does Jeff Bezos not have two brain cells not to call its App Store the Amazon App store. Talk about vacuous plagiarizing.
Reading skills are top notch today, BLN! Wanna try again?
Amazon #2! you got to be joking!!! If it weren’t for Apples innovations, none of these companies would exist.
What A croc’!
Huh? I don’t recall apple inventing any of the core technologies amazon is built on.
Large distributed sever clusters. Nope
The internet/WWW nope
Massive databases nope
A packaging and shipping facility nope
With that being said I have.no idea how amazon is higher on list.
Amazon, through acquisitions, has become the only company that can truly challenge Apple for integrated products/software/services. Once the Kindle tablet comes out, it will all make sense.
Their methodology is flawed. This happens a lot with business academics. They computed value of the Company based on cash flows, then deduct that from the Market Capitalization (gross value of all shares) to determine the premium value placed on the Company by investors.
The disconnect between Amazon’s growth rate, gross margin, percent net income, earnings per share, cash flows, and that of Apple, has been a bone of contention with AAPL investors for a very long time.
Amazon isn’t growing as fast, does not generate as much cash flow per share, doesn’t earn the gross margins or percent net income as Apple. Yet, the market values AMZN with a much higher Price to Earnings ratio (93.73:1) than AAPL (15.54:1), which is how they got the higher ranking.
Ditto that here.
Explain why any company is ahead of Apple
Their natural feeling at Forbes was likely Apple #1, but that’s too easy. Some surprising choices make it look like the studied this. Besides, there’s the fear of being labeled “fanboy” by the both professional and amateur Apple haters.
Monsanto?! Innovative?! Pesticides that poison our food are “innovative”?! Genetically-modified crops and bovine growth hormone are “innovative?! HAH! Monsanto’s shareholders might think so…
In an overpopulated world, where 1/3 of mankind is starving or malnourished and we lose at least 20% of our crop yield on an annual basis, yeah, Monsanto is pretty damn innovative.
Locking farmers into buying seed every year because your seed is genetically modified to be infertile is only innovative in the field of pathological greed.
Hmm, I always looked at that as a safeguard, and one I will always want. Though I trust GM food, and no study has ever shown it to be harmful, I still don’t want GM food breeding with natural, organic food. It’s a safeguard in case something does turn out to be wrong with GM food, and it preserves biodiversity.
It’s true that it has economic benefits for Monsanto, but farmers also know coming in that their crop is infertile. They don’t have to buy that seed.
yeah…. So if it’s sterilizing the bovine…. What’s it doing you humans…
Except that this alleged safeguard doesn’t actually work, and Monsanto’s GM crops can and do spread themselves to adjacent farms. Monsanto then comes down like a ton of bricks on these farm owners who are “stealing” their GM plants.
Their goal is hardly to help anyone. It’s to hold food crops hostage and exact perpetual fees for the privilege of growing them.
Hunger isn’t caused by lack of food being grown but by lack of funds or access to the food market. So creating a food supply where seeds can’t be produced from crops but have to be purchased from Monsanto every year isn’t innovative, it’s predatory…
Absolutely right. And hunger has nothing to do with a lack of food or a lack of money. It’s the heart-breaking result of living in a world where the rich and powerful grab as much as they possibly can and leave the rest of the world to starve.
In the ‘Methodology’ link there’s a lot of talk about innovation. Apple is an obvious choice. But how is it that Adobe and Microsoft made this list?
Advances in volume copying techniques.
Probably in line of business and process integration.
For as big and slow as MS is no one has been able to touch the office suite or match its capabilities in the business world.
Its like a business process lego set.
So, looking at their ranking, they seem sorted by what they call an Innovation Premium, described as:
The Innovation Premium is a measure of how much investors have bid up the stock price of a company above the value of its existing business based on expectations of future innovative results (new products, services and markets) .
So, it’s the difference between Market Cap and EV, Enterprise Value. Usually, you can just back out cash to get a company’s EV.
So, for Apple, they have Apple’s EV at $303B, and its market cap is about $350B, so its IP, Innovation Premium is around $48B.
For Google, they have an EV of $138B, a market cap of about $185B, and an IP of around $45B.
So far, so good.
The problem is when you get to Amazon. They have a EV of $93B, a market cap of about the same $93B, which means they should have an IP of ZERO!!! How they came up with an IP of $59B is nuts?!? Did they make a mistake?
All present OS are like Apple’s Mac OS
All Present phones are lie Apple’s iPhone
All present iPods are like Apple’s iPods
All present App stores are like Apple’s APP STORE
All present computers are like Apple’s computers…
So please tell me again, how came apple is # 5 or amazon, the one tick pony is above apple?
“All present App stores are like Apple’s APP STORE”
You might want to rephrase that; otherwise, stated like that if it convinces a judge, Apple will lose its legal footing that ‘App Store’ is not too generic.
Amazon was the first major public cloud that was successful. To switch from selling books and online goods to having many of the worlds companies running applications in the cloud on one of their many data centers is extremely impressive. I’m not an Amazon fan beyond the random purchase but they have innovated like crazy and do deserve to be high on the list. Definitely not above Apple, nobody should be above Apple but they do deserve top 20 credit.
Hey, where the hell is Samsung?. Top 5 at least!.
Truely distrubing to consider that there are this many idiotic people working at Forbes to come up with such a list that can only be as an ASSWIPE.
It’s like one of those Top All Time Musical Acts/Groups list that wants to be different and puts The Beatles somewhere other than No. 1.
Ding ding ding…
I think you just nailed the bottom line on the matter.
Except that the Beatles are incredibly overrated and should have never gotten that position more than once?
Well, Babe Ruth wasn’t an unanimous selection for the HOF, proving stupidity is timeless.
What are you talking about Jax44! If you think Snickers isn’t worthy of a vote you’re just not thinking clearly! 😉
They do manage to magically get some of my Amazon Prime 2-day shipping items there the very next day and …
Wel… that’s all I got.
M-O-N-S-A-N-T-O…????????!!!!!!
Monsanto is a MAFIA, an american cartel of criminals, who use threats, scare tactics, and bribes, to force farmers in US and around the world to grow GMO==genetically modified crops.
These include almost all CORN in US, almost all SOY in US, canola, alfalfa and few other grains.
These GMO grains cause all kind of deseases incl. cancer, alter DNA of the body…plus more and more and more.
Googling GMO and/or monsanto will show thousands of results, and 100% of them describe Monsanto as A Crime Cartel.
GMO food is A POISON.
MONSANTO bribes not only farmers, but governments of various countries. Monsanto also threaten the governments.
Just recently farmers of Haiti kicked all Monsanto gangsters out of their country.
Many countries in Europe are doing the same.
This list is very strange and stinks.
I smell the monsanto stink here, and few other shady mafias.
Bill Gates is the biggest contributor to MONSANTO. I’m sure he is probably on the board of directors. MONEY is the language there. GMO===MONEY.
So, Gates pushed Monsanto to the top 10, agreeing to drop mikROZoft to the bottom.
Very dirty “list”.
I don’t know WTH is this rage about Monsanto, but claiming that genetically modified food is a poison is idiotic to say the very least..
Yeah… How about educating yourself?
Here, try reading about the Pusztai affair for starters. Then go run a search for Monsanto like snappir suggested.
Well i personally don’t make much of the list because is useless – But i asked 12 kids age 8 to 12 (family and friends)
the same question and guess what? 12 vote for apple
now maybe who made that list must be 3-5 years of age.
That would very much explain the list…