The Fast Company magazine has published the list of the world’s 50 most innovative companies for 2011. Innovation is critical to the success of most businesses especially in this fast-changing highly competitive environment. The magazine mentioned the following with the introduction of the list:

An artificial heart and its lightweight power drive. A better airline for Brazil. Chocolate from Madagascar and a soccer shirt made of plastic water bottles. A fashion leader escaping its pattern, a smelter, and that little coupon startup in Chicago that’s suddenly worth billions. All this from one simple word: innovation.

The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies for 2011 are:

[TABLE=881]

Source: Fast Company

It is not surprising to see Apple (AAPL) take the top rank in this list. Apple’s market cap of $324.0 billion is higher than that of General Electric’s (GE) which is ranked at number 45. Other notable publicly-traded tech companies include Google (GOOG), Intel (CSCO), IBM (IBM), Cisco (CSCO), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN) and Netflix (NFLX). While these tech giants are highly innovative, from an investment standpoint not all of them have been best informers. In fact, stocks like Cisco and Microsoft have been dead money since the dot-com implosion.

Disclosure: No Positions