Apple On Red Herring List of Top 50 Innovative Public Companies

W hen Steve Jobs sits back in his easy chair at the end of the day he has got to be smiling. Apple, once deemed dead as a doorknob a few years ago is now the talk of the town, and Apple products continue to get recognized for style, innovations, and usefulness. Mr. Jobsi smile must be doubly wide now that the 6th annual Red Herring list of top 100 innovative companies has been released. The Red Herring List is divided into 50 public and 50 privately held companies. This year, Apple earned a spot on the public list. This from Red Herring:

The Red Herring 100 issue is our annual survey of everything that is great about technology, innovation, and entrepreneurial capitalism. More than ever, producing it means seeking those companies that are bent on overcoming theoretical scientific limits and are capable of building sound business models from their developments.

We peered into corporate research and development labs and the cubicles of scrappy startups. At IBM and Matrix Semiconductor, we found chip engineers obsessed with extending Mooreis law forever. "This is why I go to work every day," says Bill Gallagher, manager of magnetoelectronics at IBMis T.J. Watson Research Center.

We then subjected each candidate to the assessment criteria favored by VCs and investment banks: the firmis potential to disrupt an existing market or to create a new one altogether, its execution of strategy, and the quality of its management. Of course, we also weighed financial performance. (Other business magazines depend solely on metrics--Fortune lists Enron as a top company for 2002--but we make a virtue of our subjective criteria.)

Check out the rest of the story and the list at Red Herring.com. The magazine will be publishing profiles of each of the 100 companies, including Apple, during the next few weeks. We will be bringing word of Appleis profile when it is published.