Highlights
- Apple ranks #1 followed by Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft
- Top 10 companies list includes: 6 American, 2 Chinese, 1 Japanese and 1 South Korean
- Sony ranks higher than Facebook
- Only 8 companies have made the list every year: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Samsung, and Toyota
- Surveys over 2,500 global executives on innovation trends
Boston Consulting Group’s latest report recognises Apple as the most innovative company of 2020. The BCG research highlights the advantages of scale and the imperative for serial innovation. The research conducted before COVID wreaked havoc reveals the leading firms’ qualities delivering successes amid the pandemic.
The consulting firm’s latest report —The Most Innovative Companies 2020: The Serial Innovation Imperative—concentrates on what it takes to outperform over the long term.
For global businesses, a focus on innovation drives outperformance, and serial innovation success drives outperformance over time.
Committed innovators are winning | One-Quarter of Companies not walking the talk on innovation
The survey of over 2,500 global executives reveals “Innovation as a top 3 management priority for 66% of all innovation executives”.
Yet only 45% are “committed innovators”—that is, they see innovation as a top priority and back up that commitment with significant investment.
“Skeptical innovators” (30% of the total) see innovation as neither a strategic priority nor a significant target of funding.
And “confused innovators” (25% of the total) report a mismatch between the stated strategic importance of innovation and their level of funding for it.
Committed innovators are winning
The highest proportion of committed innovators are in the financial and pharmaceutical sectors (both 56%)—and the lowest in industrial goods (37%) and wholesale and retail (32%).
New Surprising Pattern
This year’s report reveals a new and surprising pattern: companies traditionally associated with a different industry as a leading innovator in their own industry, such as Amazon in health care or Alibaba in financial services.
However, automakers, chemical companies, retailers, and industrial manufacturers are also playing more often in other companies’ sandboxes as they see opportunities for new technology-enabled business models and revenue streams outside their own core businesses.
About 60% of software and services companies are innovating in other sectors
The report reveals “Large companies are increasingly using size to flex their innovation muscles and maybe even more advantaged now than. In Innovation, Big Is Back”.
