Insights

We scoured the 2026 winners lists of the top awards for the most innovative companies in the world... and put together this list of the companies that show up on three or more of them.

InnoLead’s Impact conference brought together three leaders who build new businesses inside large companies. They shared advice about how they identify new opportunities, how they move quickly, and how they keep leadership support over the long timeframe it can take for new ventures to generate return-on-investment. 

“In most companies, financial metrics are the default language for decision-making on core business innovation projects,” writes Noel Sobelman in the new book Innovation Portfolio Management. Unfortunately, “projecting ROI when entering brand-new territory with no history to draw on is, at best, guesswork,” he says. Here’s his advice.

InnoLead interviews Sun Life exec Laura Money about how she prioritizes AI projects; some of the concrete outcomes they’re seeing so far; and why Sun Life has joined other Canadian companies to form the AI Consortium.

Speakers at our recent Impact conference share advice on getting new tech across the gap from demo to deployment.

How can AI be useful in business-to-business innovation? By identifying the right problems to solve, write Ranjan Dash and Suresh Chandran.

Remember the emergence of e-commerce in the 1990s? Keep an eye on the horizon for agentic commerce, says Carol Juel, executive vice president and CEO of Synchrony Financial’s Digital Platform.

In a session at the most recent Impact conference last month, we looked at some of the reasons why it might make sense to partner with a startup rather doing everything in-house — and a few metrics and indicators that can let you know whether or not your approach is working.

If AI software is going to take over a bevy of repetitive tasks and processes, then what should organizations be doing with the time that frees up? We talk with business school prof David Schonthal.

We talk with Perdue Farms CIO Mark Booth about the company’s AI journey, including what future concerns are keeping him up at night.