Most Innovative Companies Lists - Don’t We Love These?
I subscribe to several magazines which put out lists of most innovative companies. They tend to generally have lots of overlap in terms of the companies they profile and generally lack much in the way of creativity and surprises. Basically, Google Apple, Toyota, etc tend to be towards the top of all the lists and are then followed by the same anecdotes about continuous improvement (Toyota), the cafeterias (Google) and Steve Jobs’ awesome creativity (Apple). Facebook gets on some of the lists because of their current media darling status.
They tend to describe innovation as the lifeblood of organizations and other overused terms. They often profile some up & coming head of R&D at one of the profiled companies and talk about how he or she is shaking up how innovation is done at XYZ company. In essence, it’s the same article basically reformulated year after year.
But, amidst all this unoriginality, some points, no matter how often they’re restated, are made which are worthy of repetition. The best point as articulated by BusinessWeek in their latest list is that “As the recession shifts suddenly from ‘what if’ to ‘how long’, slashing research & development budgets just got a lot more tempting. That high-risk product in your pipeline? It’s about to get much more scrutiny…two camps emerge. ‘One is saying times are tough, so it’s the most important time for us to innovate. The other is saying ‘we simply don’t have the ability to think about innovation right now’. There’s a real separation between the innovation haves and have-nots.”
As I’ve stated many times before, innovation is not something you should do when times are good. It needs to be part of the organization at all times especially during downturns when a solid innovation effort can provide new growth avenues for when times get better. From a contrarian stock market perspective, why not invest in innovation now? The Street already has low expectations so why not just go for the gold? Companies continue to write off billions of dollars and their stock prices go up because people feel the worst is over. Low expectations are a wonderful thing.
I’d also posit that such times lead to a great deal of innovation from entrepreneurs and startups. As people get laid off, many who have tucked away some money may look at the time as an opportunity to launch that venture they’d been thinking of. And in some instances, these upstarts will become threats to big companies in the future. So for the large, well-capitalized, market-share owning organizations, this is a great time to innovate. Don’t cut back - invest more.
Tags: apple, BusinessWeek, facebook, google, Innovation, toyota
