SME Times News Bureau | 27 Jan, 2012
Participants at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos Wednesday urged the companies to focus on innovation to remain in business.

Companies failing to adapt themselves to new business environment will soon fall behind and even go out of business, they said.

Cisco chairman and chief executive officer John T. Chambers said: "We had about 100 great competitors in the 1990s, all but two are largely gone".

If a company continues to do what it has always been doing, it is going to be left behind, Xinhua quoted him as saying.

Panelists at a special session estimated the life span of companies that are unable to change is around 15 years. The latest example is Kodak, which recently declared bankruptcy, they said.

Kodak, registered in 1888 in New York by inventor George Eastman, has been a household name for generations as it made photography accessible for the mass with the invention of handheld cameras.

But the company was on a losing streak since the late 1990s when fast-growing digital camera manufacturers started to grab the larger share of the market.

Some 2,600 decision-makers from about 100 countries and hundreds of companies are participating in the five-day event.

The theme this year is: The great transformation: Shaping new models.