In April at IBM’s innovation-themed leadership forum, held in Rome Italy, guests were treated to small group tours of the Vatican Museum, including Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. They sipped cocktails on a patio in the back of St. Peter’s, the vast dome of the basilica outlined by the light of the moon and then they dined in a marble-statue-filled hall inside the Vatican. What better place than Italy to hold a global confab on innovation, the topic di giorno among corporate leaders? It was, after all, the birthplace of the Renaissance, another period of great innovation and change.
The next day, at the Auditorium Parco della Musica, 500-odd corporate executives, government leaders, and academics listened as a diverse group of innovative leaders took the stage. Sunil B. Mittal, chief executive officer of Indian telecom company Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd., described his radical business model, which outsources everything but marketing and customer management, charges 2 cents a minute for calls, and is adding a million customers a month. Yang Mingsheng, CEO of Agricultural Bank of China, the country’s second-biggest commercial bank, spoke of building a banking powerhouse from a modest business making micro loans to peasant farmers.
Their stories echoed a comment IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano had made the day before: “The way you will thrive in this environment is by innovating — innovating in technologies, innovating in strategies, innovating in business models.” Today, innovation is about much more than new products. It is about reinventing business processes and building entirely new markets that meet untapped customer needs. Most important, as the Internet and globalization widen the pool of new ideas, it’s about selecting and executing the right ideas and bringing them to market in record time.
BusinessWeek joined with The Boston Consulting Group to produce our second annual listing of the most innovative companies. Since they didn’t do an easy to reference list, we have created one below and here’s link in case you want to read the rest of the original article. Slide show here.
- Apple
- General Electric
- Toyota Motor Corp. (moved up in rank this year by 10 spots)
- Microsoft
- General Electric
- Proctor & Gamble
- Nokia
- Starbucks
- IBM
- Virgin Group
- Samsung
- Sony
- Dell
- Ideo
- BMW Group
- Intel
- eBay
- Ikea
- Walmart
- Target
- Honda
- Amazon
- Research in Motion (RIMM)
- Southwest Airlines
Renee Blodgett is the founder of We Blog the World. The site combines the magic of an online culture and travel magazine with a global blog network and has contributors from every continent in the world. Having lived in 10 countries and explored nearly 80, she is an avid traveler, and a lover, observer and participant in cultural diversity.
She is also the CEO and founder of Magic Sauce Media, a new media services consultancy focused on viral marketing, social media, branding, events and PR. For over 20 years, she has helped companies from 12 countries get traction in the market. Known for her global and organic approach to product and corporate launches, Renee practices what she pitches and as an active user of social media, she helps clients navigate digital waters from around the world. Renee has been blogging for over 16 years and regularly writes on her personal blog Down the Avenue, Huffington Post, BlogHer, We Blog the World and other sites. She was ranked #12 Social Media Influencer by Forbes Magazine and is listed as a new media influencer and game changer on various sites and books on the new media revolution. In 2013, she was listed as the 6th most influential woman in social media by Forbes Magazine on a Top 20 List.
Her passion for art, storytelling and photography led to the launch of Magic Sauce Photography, which is a visual extension of her writing, the result of which has led to producing six photo books: Galapagos Islands, London, South Africa, Rome, Urbanization and Ecuador.
Renee is also the co-founder of Traveling Geeks, an initiative that brings entrepreneurs, thought leaders, bloggers, creators, curators and influencers to other countries to share and learn from peers, governments, corporations, and the general public in order to educate, share, evaluate, and promote innovative technologies.
