Amazon Earns Top Rank: Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos Appears On Cover

NEW YORK, Feb. 13, 2017 — (PRNewswire) — Fast Company today announced its annual ranking of the world's 50 Most Innovative Companies for 2017, honoring leading enterprises and rising newcomers that exemplify the best in nimble business and impactful innovation. Earning the No. 1 spot on the list this year is Amazon "for offering even more, even faster and smarter." The company's founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is the subject of the cover story, which delves into Bezos's strategy for meshing size and agility through several key driving factors: Amazon Prime, the company's rapidly growing membership program; the launch of brick and mortar stores; and a factory of the future that features high-tech robots working alongside human workers.  

Most Innovative Companies is one of Fast Company's most significant and highly anticipated editorial efforts of the year. To produce the 2017 list, Fast Company reporters surveyed thousands of enterprises across the globe to identify the most notable innovations of the year and trace the impact of those initiatives on business, industry, and the larger culture.

The coverage also highlights Top 10 lists in 36 sectors and geographies, from artificial intelligence to health to travel.

Among the first-time honorees on this year's list: Headspace, Open Whisper Systems, GoFundMe, Vivint Smart Home, Glossier, Clique Media Group, RewardStyle, Hypebeast, Related Companies, Nvidia, Home Depot, Pledge 1%, TaskRabbit, Medtronic, Thinx, MailChimp, BeyondMeat, Orbital Insight, Resy, Celmatix, Drone Racing League, One Medical, Farmers Business Network, and Simplify.

The Top 50 list features only 12 companies that made the 2016 list—Amazon, Airbnb, Apple, BuzzFeed, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Netflix, Snap (Snapchat), Slack, Spotify, and Uber. "These enterprises continue to set the pace for their industries, showing agility and aggressiveness that makes them undeniable," says Fast Company editor and managing director Robert Safian. Additionally, six of the companies making the list are Chinese—Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, BBK Electronics, Huawei, and Dalian Wanda—more than ever before. "This was not a strategic objective of ours, but a natural result of our bottom-up reporting. The days of dismissing Chinese businesses as mere copycats are long gone," continued Safian.

Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies issue (March 2017) is now available online at www.fastcompany.com/MIC as well as in app form via iTunes, and on newsstands beginning February 21.  

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Fast Company is the world's leading progressive business media brand, with a unique editorial focus on innovation in technology, ethical economics, leadership, and design. Headquartered in New York City, Fast Company is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, one of the U.S.'s leading media companies.

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