The Fabric of Creativity

When Fast Company set out to find the most innovative company in America, we wanted to rely on objective measurements, but that proved daunting. How can you quantify something as intangible as innovation? You can count up patents and discover that IBM is the leader, with a record 3,415 awarded in 2003. But patents have come to mean a lot less than they used to. The most creative companies of the Internet era -- Amazon, Google, Yahoo, eBay -- have only a few patents apiece. You can look at who spends the most on R&D, but a torrent of cash hardly guarantees breakthrough innovation. Over the past decade, Microsoft has poured $5 billion or more a year into research, but its vast expenditures still haven't yielded the next big thing (see page 68).

So we gave up on crunching numbers and focused on other criteria. For starters, we looked for a company with a long history of innovation. We needed proof of sustained inventiveness through multiple waves of technological and economic change. That knocked out Amazon, Google, and the other Silicon Valley startups. We also wanted a company that is as adept at product innovation as it is at process innovation. That eliminated Dell, which is highly innovative at making its operations incredibly efficient -- but not at bringing original and inspiring offerings to consumers. Apple, on the other hand, keeps coming out with dazzling new technologies, but count it out for process: The company relies too much on the inscrutable instincts of one man. What if Steve Jobs wasn't there anymore? It's a possibility that investors contemplated recently when Jobs underwent emergency surgery for pancreatic cancer. We wanted a company where innovation is resilient and doesn't depend on the ingenuity of a single individual or even a small cadre of geniuses. That led us to a few big operations that have hatched countless new products over the decades -- justly famous names such as 3M and General Electric.

But then we found an outfit that does it all, without the overwhelming size and awesome resources of a GE. In other words, a company that proves that brains beat brawn. Pound for pound, the most innovative company in America is W.L. Gore & Associates.

You've no doubt heard of its most famous product: Gore-Tex fabrics, which have a transparent plastic coating that makes them waterproof and windproof but keeps them breathable. Gore is big -- with $1.58 billion in annual revenues and 6,300 employees -- but not gargantuan like 3M or IBM. Still, Gore makes so many products that the total is hard to pin down -- with all the variations, the count rises above 1,000. Gore's medical products, such as heart patches and synthetic blood vessels, have been implanted in more than 7.5 million patients. Its cutting-edge fabrics are worn by astronauts and soldiers, as well as trekkers at the North and South Poles and on the world's highest mountains. It makes the number-one products in industrial and electronics niches ranging from filters for reducing air pollution at large factories to the assemblies for fuel cells that convert hydrogen to electricity. Gore, a privately owned company, doesn't release its annual financial data, but a spokesperson says that the company has had "double digit" revenue growth for the past couple of years. In many businesses, Gore has come out of nowhere and seized the market lead, as it did with its smooth Glide dental floss, the first floss that resisted shredding, and its Elixir guitar strings, which last three to five times longer than normal strings. When Gore's people think they can create a much better product, they're fearless about attacking new markets.

Gore is a strikingly contradictory company: a place where nerds can be mavericks; a place that's impatient with the standard way of working, but more than patient with nurturing ideas and giving them time to flourish; a place that's humble in its origins, yet ravenous for breakthrough ideas and, ultimately, growth. Gore's uniqueness comes from being as innovative in its operating principles as it is in its diverse product lines. This is a company that has kicked over the rules that most other organizations live by. It is tucked away in the mid-Atlantic countryside, 3,000 miles from Silicon Valley and even further (in its mind-set) from Wall Street. And in its quietly revolutionary way, it is doing something almost magical: fostering ongoing, consistent, breakthrough creativity.