Speculate to accumulate
Repeat winner Apple heads BusinessWeek’s list of 50 most innovative companies as rated by 2,950 senior execs in the 2008 BusinessWeek/Boston Consulting Group survey.
It is followed by Google, Toyota, General Electric, Microsoft, new entrant Tata Group, Nintendo, Proctor & Gamble, Sony and Nokia, meaning that six of the top ten are tech companies.
The common denominator is a corporate culture that values creative people in good times and bad. Two approaches are illustrated by Google (2), which has increased R&D investment by 72 percent, while Hewlett-Packard (15) has squeezed greater productivity out of its existing team.
Stock markets are nervous of heavy bets on new products during a business downturn, yet companies that do so are the best positioned to prosper when the cycle turns up again. ‘Strong companies understand this and during a recession they invest – and they get pummelled for it,’ commented Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon (11), believes that bad times are a spur to explore new products and ways of doing business. ‘Constraints drive innovation,’ he said.
Apple’s iPhone, Toyota’s hybrid, Tata’s nano car, Nintendo’s Wii, and MS’s surface are all doing well despite the downturn, while GE, P&G and Nokia have led the way in new forms of marketing. Many companies are committing strongly to collaborative projects in emerging markets, where cheaper labour and pockets of growth make it easier than ever to create new products.
Intel only just made it in at number 48 and is the only semiconductor company on the list. There were a total of 21 tech and telco companies in the top 50.
