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THE 50 MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES April 15, 2010, 5:00PM EST The 50 Most Innovative Companies For the first time since Bloomberg BusinessWeek began its annual Most Innovative Companies ranking in 2005, the majority of corporations in the Top 25 are based outside the U.S. The reason: the new global leaders coming out of Asia By Michael Arndt and Bruce Einhorn In the past decade, as the U.S. was losing an estimated 2.4 million factory jobs to China, the Economic Policy Institute and other research organizations identified an alarming trend—alarming to Westerners, at least. The factories of South Korea, Taiwan, and China were making their way up the global value chain, from the sneakers, toys, and T-shirts they had produced in earlier years to personal computers, consumer electronics gear, household appliances, and even cars. For the West, the silver lining was this: Asia's high-tech products were still generally regarded as inferior knockoffs of items designed in the U.S. and other so-called knowledge economies. China may have been the biggest worry, but as author Ted C. Fishman argued in his 2005 book, China Inc., it possessed a factory culture—it could imitate but not innovate. If Asia ever did figure out how to design cutting-edge products comparable to those dreamed up in the West, however, the one-two punch of high-value research and development and low-cost manufacturing would make it almost unbeatable in the battle for global economic supremacy. The battle is on. In the 2010 Bloomberg BusinessWeek annual rankings of Most Innovative Companies, 15 of the Top 50 are Asian—up from just five in 2006. In fact, for the first time since the rankings began in 2005, the majority of corporations in the Top 25 are based outside the U.S. Asia's newfound confidence is turning up everywhere you look, from wind turbines to high-speed bullet trains, just two of the technologies China is trying to export to the U.S. "We are the most advanced in many
THE 50 MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES April 15, 2010, 5:00PM EST The 50 Most Innovative Companies For the first time since Bloomberg BusinessWeek began its annual Most Innovative Companies ranking in 2005, the majority of corporations in the Top 25 are based outside the U.S. The reason: the new global leaders coming out of Asia By Michael Arndt and Bruce Einhorn In the past decade, as the U.S. was losing an estimated 2.4 million factory jobs to China, the Economic Policy Institute and other research organizations identified an alarming trend—alarming to Westerners, at least. The factories of South Korea, Taiwan, and China were making their way up the global value chain, from the sneakers, toys, and T-shirts they had produced in earlier years to personal computers, consumer electronics gear, household appliances, and even cars. For the West, the silver lining was this: Asia's high-tech products were still generally regarded as inferior knockoffs of items designed in the U.S. and other so-called knowledge economies. China may have been the biggest worry, but as author Ted C. Fishman argued in his 2005 book, China Inc., it possessed a factory culture—it could imitate but not innovate. If Asia ever did figure out how to design cutting-edge products comparable to those dreamed up in the West, however, the one-two punch of high-value research and development and low-cost manufacturing would make it almost unbeatable in the battle for global economic supremacy. The battle is on. In the 2010 Bloomberg BusinessWeek annual rankings of Most Innovative Companies, 15 of the Top 50 are Asian—up from just five in 2006. In fact, for the first time since the rankings began in 2005, the majority of corporations in the Top 25 are based outside the U.S. Asia's newfound confidence is turning up everywhere you look, from wind turbines to high-speed bullet trains, just two of the technologies China is trying to export to the U.S. "We are the most advanced in many