3. Amazon.com, US
12-month sales growth: 34.9%
Innovation premium: 58.3%
As one of the few garage tech start-ups to survive the dot com crash, some would expect Amazon to cling onto the business model that saw it through the boom and bust years.
And yet the online retailer has undergone constant periods of reinvention and renewal in order to keep itself ahead of the game.
Firs it offered a commission-based brokerage service to buyers and sellers of used books. Then it opened itself up to third-party sellers, to aggregate them under its burgeoning brand.
Then it did something that would potentially wreck the industry that served it – it launched the Kindle in 2007 in order to tap into the nascent ebook market.
In just a few short years, Amazon had gone from online seller to aggregator to technology manufacturer of a new product. And yet the sales keep racking up.
“If you want to continuously revitalise the service that you offer to your customers, you cannot stop at what you are good at,” CEO Jeff Bezos told Bloomberg.
“You have to ask what your customers need and want, and then, no matter how hard it is, you better get good at those things.”
4. Red Hat, US
12-month sales growth: 22.6%
Innovation premium: 58.1%
Red Hat is a US open sourced software company that defines itself thus: “Red Hat is more than a software company. We’re the bridge between the communities that create open source software and the enterprise customers who use it.”
This collaborative ethos is demonstrated by its sponsorship of the Fedora Project, an open-source project which promotes the development by open source software, and its annual innovation awards, which it doles out to those in the open source community.
As the company states on its site: “In the early days of open source software, few imagined that Red Hat would one day shake the industry giants. But we did.”
“With a vision to expand open source software development, Red Hat sought to ‘partner with the world’ to create low-cost, high-value enterprise-class solutions.”
5. Baidu, China
12-month sales growth: 73.9
Innovation premium: 57.8%
China is seen as the next big frontier for the likes of Facebook and Google, but local player Baidu is showing that it isn’t standing still in the quest to be the first port of call for the country’s growing online population.
The search engine and portal network recently said it will spend $1.6 billion on a cloud computing centre, after unveiling its WangPan – or “web disk” – that gives users 15GB free space, far more than DropBox’s 2GB.
The firm has also beefed up its range of apps and offers a rendered, 3D mapping service that looks more like Sim City than any sort of Google Maps rip-off.
This article was first published on LeadingCompany’s sister site, StartupSmart.
