This WSJ article http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2010/11/22/whos-really-innovative/ looks at two lists of the world’s most innovative companies – one by Fast Company and the other by BusinessWeek – and attempts to define what it means to be innovative. I found the author’s taxonomy for distinguishing innovative companies to be very interesting. He writes about five distinct kinds of innovators. First, the tyros. These are young companies built on wacky business models that haven’t been challenged to reinvent yet. Hulu and spotify fall in this category. Next are the Nobel laureates. These are technology companies like Intel, Samsung, Novartis and Cisco that spend billions on R&D each year and hire the smartest engineers and scientists. The third and a much smaller category of innovation heroes are the Artistes. These firms are in the creativity business and their main product is innovation. IDEO and BMW DesignWorks fit this category. Next are the Cyborgs, companies like Google, Apple and Amazon that consistently achieve super human feats of innovation. The fifth kind are the Born again innovators which the author considers the most notable. These are companies like P&G, IBM and Ford which after years of top-down, hierarchical and orthodox practices have reassessed and reinvented their behavior. IBM’s EBO process is one notable example.
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