Fast Company has published a list of the 50 best innovative companies for the beginning of 2021. Whether Apple or “UI / UX genius” aka Facebook may be offended or not, the picture looks like this.
In the original list, you can expand each of the items, and read the details of achievements for each of the companies.
In order to not turn the text into a long roll of all 50 companies, we will mention just a few more interesting companies, which made it to the top thanks to their interesting business models. There was a demand for them in society and market niches, so they took their chances. So, Peloton and Zwift actively took up a healthy lifestyle. Both companies focus on exercise bikes and customer engagement in home workouts and competitions.
Other companies have turned towards local tourism and nature outings under lockdown conditions. For example, the American service for booking camping Hipcamp. Or the Getaway company, which offers to relax in ultra-modern single cabins in the forest (no matter how scary it sounds for horror movies fans). At the time of this writing, the company has 12 locations in the US.
Snap Inc, the creator of the Snapchat messenger, made it to the top with the introduction of mini-apps. These are third-party applications that run inside the messenger and combine socialization and remote interaction with commercial services and solutions. Businesses have a financial gain, while users benefit from a combination of usefulness and entertainment. For example, virtual fitting rooms (AR) or applications for joint discussion of which movie to watch with the ability to immediately buy tickets. Or a mini-app that uses Computer Vision to recognize and identify objects in the real world directly from Snapchat.
Developers of the popular service for PM Asana ranked 15th. In this case, there is nothing to comment on: the service is well-known, they have 89 thousand companies and 3.5 million users.
Another biotech company that develops COVID-19 tests, Seegene, is in 20th place (55 million test systems sent to 67 countries).
You may have heard about Corning (# 22 on the list) for a long time when the high-tech news talked about their impact-resistant Gorilla Glass. Why, then, is the company on the list for 2020-2021 again? Last year, the company began to pay much more attention not so much to protecting devices from falls but to protect surfaces from scratches. Corning made good progress in this direction, for which they hit the top.
There is another space-related company on the list, besides the brainchild of Elon Musk. These are LeoLabs - the developers of radars for tracking objects in low Earth orbit. Considering that in the next few years the number of satellites in orbit promises to exceed 50 thousand, the company introduced a subscription for customers - satellite owners. This service allows them to track whether their satellite has decided to collapse into the Earth's atmosphere. And in general, these solutions can be helpful to solve the problem of space junk.
There are several companies on the list that are solving food problems. They tend to efficiently cultivate herbal substitutes for dairy and meat products (Puris and NotCo).
Ranked 43rd is cloud data giant Snowflake, whose tools help store, analyze, and extract value from massive amounts of data.
On the 45th place - the personal Make it in Ukraine's favorite - mailing and blogging service with monetization option - Substack. Someday we will write a case study about how we switched to Substack and how much we managed to save by eliminating unnecessary expensive options. More often, people write the other way around: what did they exchange Substack for and why. Yes, it lacks some customization and a number of useful features. But with the tasks that we have set for this platform, it is doing well so far. So we are very happy to have Substack on the list.
At 49, we find the well-known video platform for distance learning, Skillshare. This learning format became extremely popular last year (and you know why). The company currently has 12 million students. Only in 2020 they attracted 3 million users. This is not surprising to us, considering how many courses we got for ourselves since spring 2020.
The FAANG giants (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google) mentioned in the first paragraph are not only absent from the top 10. They did not make the list at all. A real signal and a reason to think for their management - are they not walking along a familiar track and is it time to come up with a new useful initiative?
Which company do you consider the best innovator? Contact us, leave comments on our LinkedIn posts. We are happy to know your opinion.
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