The World’s Most Innovative Companies [the broken link was removed] :
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.
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Consumers increasingly are doing the innovation themselves. Consider Google Inc. (GOOG), our No. 2 innovator, and its mapping technology, which it opened to the public. This produced a myriad of “mash-ups” in which programmers combine Google’s maps with anything from real estate listings to local poker game sites.Google’s mash-ups are just one example of the escalating phenomenon of open innovation. These days the world is your R&D lab. Customers are co-opting technology and morphing products into their own inventions.
