

50 Most Innovative Companies - acremades
http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2012/full-list

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tcarnell
Another subjective list and a another misunderstanding of the word
'innovation'.

Where are Philips who are pioneering high efficiency LED lighting, or TomTom
that gave us the first decent GPS for cars? or Ubuntu that gave the world its
first decent free operating system? or eBay, still the leader in global re-
cycling... and I'm sure there are loads of companies that make amazing
scientific and medical innovations that I am unaware of.

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tcarnell
or Intel (whose modern power saving CPU's are probably inside almost everyone
laptops?

or Toyota for making practical hybrid cars

PS: Although I enjoy Google products, they haven't 'invented' a single one.
Search engines? Email? not exactly a Google innovation.

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ekianjo
or ARM for making the best processors to go into mobile devices with low
energy consumption?

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azov
HBO more innovative then Tesla? Starbucks & NFL more innovative then
YCombinator? This deserves the title of the most innovative rating :)

Or is there something I don't know about HBO?

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chewxy
Microsoft no where to be found? The list is suspect.

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mynameisvlad
I feel like people don't realize how innovative Microsoft is. Or choose to
ignore whatever they hear.

It's stupid, what it is. Because the stuff Microsoft Research is working on is
crazy cool.

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nkoren
I think you might be mistaking innovation for invention. The stuff Microsoft
Research is working on is indeed crazy cool. The stuff that Microsoft is
commercialising, generally rather less so. Innovation, in the business world,
doesn't just mean thinking up a bunch of nifty stuff: it means successfully
bringing it to market.

Xerox was inventive. Apple was innovative. There's a world of difference
between the two.

As far as Microsoft goes -- several years ago, I heard an embittered ex-
Microsoft researcher opine that the purpose of Microsoft Research was to buy
up the best and brightest people in the world, and then lock them safely away
in a box where they could never deploy anything that competed with Windows,
Office, or other entrenched cash cows. Although I have tremendous respect for
what Microsoft Research is working on, I think there was some truth to this
sentiment.

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mynameisvlad
Sure, the stuff that they're commercializing is not as cool, but the stuff
that is being worked on at Microsoft Research should definitely not be
discounted because of this, nor should the company as a whole be not called
innovative. They spend 3x more in R&D than Apple does, and it shows.

When you look at what has come out of Microsoft Research in the past, you have
things like C#, PixelSense, ClearType, and Photosynth to name a few. And that
doesn't include other labs like Office Labs. If you ever get the chance to
tour their lab space, it's crazy the sort of things they have prototypes for,
as well as the things they're striving for with their productivity vision
video.

Plus, remember that the definition of innovation is "A new method, idea,
product, etc: 'technological innovations'." That's exactly what Microsoft
Research does. Things like the real-time translation that came out recently,
the projected gaming system, and of course the things they're doing with NUI
and the Kinect and using them as input methods for computers. Just because
they're not viable right now does not discount the fact that they are making
things that are some day going to change the way we work, and play.

Edit: And I would definitely not consider Apple innovative, in any way. They
make products for the masses, and, yes, they are awesome products, but they
don't really innovate. I can consider the iPhone to be an innovative product
since it changed the way we view smartphones. But after that, they've simply
changed the previous year's version and bumped up the specs. Overall, that's
what they do. They take a product they have, change it up a bit, and release
it the next year. They're a great consumer company, don't get me wrong, but
innovative? No.

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nextparadigms
Facebook 2nd? Seriously? I can't think of anything innovative Facebook has
done in _years_. The last one I could think of is the "Like" button, and
probably even that is pushing it.

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macco
As every year, this list is just senseless.

How many companies in this list or non American and how many are Internet
companies.

This is a brainstorming not a rating. And it has a aweful home bias.

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ekianjo
This list is a joke, with way too much choices going for web companies. As if
web companies were the core of innovation... Most of these companies have done
NOTHING new for several years.

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rbn
HBO 11th and SpaceX not even on the list...

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confluence
Fellow HNers - all business news lists are bullshit.

Secondly - they are amazing contra-indicators - remember Enron and WorldCom
were first on these lists. So go ahead and pick the first company for a good
all short because you know that if the business community thinks it's good -
it's probably bad.

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el_cuadrado
HBO is 11th on the list. Sounds legit.

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hello_newman
Great list.

