Forbes has brought out a list of World’s Most Innovative Companies, ranking them by a matric called Innovation Premium:
.
.
Salesforce.com is ranked as world’s most innovative company. Amazon.com is at #2, confirming that technology companies will remain in the most innovative lot as a practice. Some favorites appear like this: #5 Apple, #7 Google. We have good representation from the ERP players also: SAP is at #63, Oracle at #77, Microsoft at #86, (Well, Salesforce is at #1, as I started with).
.
We have Intuitive Surgical as world’s #3. #24 is P&G, #31 General Mills, and #50: Pepsico. Syngenta is at #79.
..
Some rankings would of surprise to many and a matter of pride for others. E.g., some Indian companies appear as top notch:
.
Hindustan Unilever (Indian arm of Unilever) is world’s 6th most innovative, Bharat Heavy Electricals (BHEL, from India) appears at #9, and the #15th place is occupied with pride by Infosys (Indian IT major).
.
We could still guess it for HUL or Infy, but is it really that BHEL is world’s 9th most innovative company? A lot of people won’t easily believe that the PSU would hold that position. Here, the key is to understand how Forbes estimated the positions. The bottom text says,
.
The Innovation Premium is a measure of how much investors have bid up the stock price of a company above the value of its existing business based on expectations of future innovative results (new products, services and markets). Members of the list must have $10 billion in market capitalization, spend at least 1% of their asset base on R&D and have seven years of public data.
.
This explains many of the inclusions and exclusions. Anyways, I found the list predicable, surprising, and interesting, at places.
.
- Rahul
