aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Business Week’s Most Innovative Companies

The top five stay the same from last year—Apple, Google, Toyota, GE, & Microsoft—the bigger news is in the losers: 3m went from 7 to 22, Wal-Mart from 11 to 23, Target from 15 to 24. Starbucks and Dell dropped from the list.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is their cover star:

Q: Few CEOs have taken as much flak as you have for spending on innovation, in both good times and bad. What’s your philosophy?
A: My view is there’s no bad time to innovate. You should be doing it when times are good and when times are tough-and you want to be doing it around things that your customers care about. For us, it’s such a deep-seated belief, I’m not sure we have a choice.

Q: The company has a reputation for frugality. Does that apply to the way you innovate?
A: I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out. When we were [first] trying to acquire customers, we didn’t have money to spend on ad budgets. So we created the associates program, [which lets] any Web site link to us, and we give them a revenue share. We invented one-click shopping so we could make check-out faster. Those things didn’t require big budgets. They required thoughtfulness and focus on the customer.