It is encouraging on the one hand that innovation is a topic of such great interest that business publications produce lists of rankings. It is encouraging too to see that the executive teams of most organizations have a chief innovation officer (CIO), and a department of people with "innovation" as part of their title and job description.
The unintended consequence of this "functionalizing" of innovation is that it sends an implicit communication to "the rest of us" that innovation requires a specialist expertize. If you don't belong to the "innovation dept" then innovation is not your concern. In the same way that if you don't belong to the finance department accounting is not your concern.
Yet the truth is everyone can innovate. Everyone can see new ways to do things, ways to improve existing products or processes. For example, how many times did we all struggle trying to get the backing paper off self-adhesive labels till someone though of putting cut marks on the backing paper?
How many times do you hear people say, "why don't they...?", "Somebody ought to...?" It's a constant running commentary in most organizations. It's the sound of thwarted innovation, or innovative people speaking with no clear pathway to express or implement their ideas.
Maybe one of the cultural characteristics of the 50 most innovative is that they encourage everyone to innovate.
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