We are living in the age of science, the machine, and mass production. Like all the ages which have gone before, it is not without its contemporary critics. They would have us believe that … the worker has become the slave of the machine, and that mass production has engulfed us in materialism, converted the craftsman into the tightener of the bolt, and robbed the world of beauty … All this, if true, would be, indeed, a sorry outcome of the long series of intellectual triumphs which, during the last one hundred and fifty years, have given man so large a measure of mastery over his environment …Oh wait, that was Art Little in the December 1929 issue of The Technology Review.
Here's 2013:
Introduction
It might be easier to explain the 50 Disruptive Companies project by starting with what it is not.Here's the whole bunch, fully 24% are grouped under Energy & Materials.
It is not a quantitative assessment; we don’t think R&D spending or numbers of patents and new products necessarily reveal what’s most meaningful about a company’s innovative power. It also is not a ranking. We don’t mean to suggest that any of these 50 companies is more important or better than the others.
Instead, this package is meant to capture the rich variety of ways that innovations get commercialized. Each company on this list has done something over the past year that will strengthen its hold on a market, challenge the leaders of a market, or create a new market. As we detail in four feature stories and three CEO Q&As in this package, some of these companies, like the thermostat maker Nest, have burst forth with a breakthrough product, and the question now is what the next one will be. Others, like the battery startup Ambri...MORE
And it's about time ABB was named.
If I was forced to pick one company as a 25-year hold, a company that would still be in the pack called "the cutting edge" a quarter century from now, this is probably it.
