Huawei replaced Cisco as the world's 5th most innovative company

"Shenzhen-based Huawei Technologies shot past Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens in 2009 to become the world's No. 2 telecom-equipment provider, powered by quality and product upgrades on top of its long-standing low prices. In the past year, it has won a slew of lucrative, prestigious contracts -- Huawei recently beat out rivals Ericsson and Nokia Siemens for a deal to build Norway's pioneering 4G cell-phone network, one of the world's first -- and showed continued strength in the burgeoning Indian and Chinese markets. The sum of these deals was good enough to double Huawei's global market share to 20% and boost 2009 sales 17.5% to $21.5 billion."

Interestingly, Cisco's 2010 ranking fell by 12, as its now only the world's 17th most innovative company.

Nevertheless, Fast Company didn't forget to gush about Cisco too:

"On November 9 of last year, Cisco Systems introduced an unheard-of 61 new technologies, all focused on collaboration. Tony Bates, the SVP behind them, says collaboration is a $34 billion market, and "by far the most exciting thing we're working on. The world is bigger than an office and a bunch of cubes." Among the new offerings: a social video system called Cisco Show and Share (YouTube for your office); Collaboration in Motion (WebEx for your iPhone); and, coming next year, the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform (Facebook/Twitter meets WebEx for your business), which will help far-flung employees share a chat window, videos, wikis, docs, even a company-wide news feed. No longer content to be a plumber, Cisco is focusing on the network as the basis for innovation, which is bringing the company into closer competition with the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Tune in next year to see how that's going."

With Cisco's "unheard-of 61 new technologies", why is it now considered behind Huawei in innovation?