Autodesk has been recently featured in Fast Company‘s ranking of the world’s most innovative companies. From visionary upstarts to storied stalwarts, the list highlights companies that dazzle with new ideas — and prove beyond a doubt how business is a force for change:
Since 1982, designers, engineers, and architects have made Autodesk‘s 2-D AutoCAD drafting programs the default choice for creating anything from buildings to sailboards. Last year, sales grew by more than 20%, and revenue reached $1.84 billion. Now Autodesk is targeting the latest growth area in product design: 3-D virtual prototyping that eliminates the need for building physical models. With the company’s Inventor software, designers can not only create a rendering that shows how a product will look, as with the Wuhan Blue Sky Chinese apartment, but they can subject it to tests that show how different elements will respond to gravity or torque.
What’s more, whereas competitors’ forays into 3-D prototyping were prohibitively expensive and hard to use, Inventor costs $5,300 and uses click-and-drag functionality that allows objects to be changed, redrawn, and saved as easily as in a Word document. As Buzz Kross, a VP at Autodesk, brags: “We’ve delivered this tool into the hands of designers. It has become one everybody can use.”
