The most innovative companies
Management consultants from the Boston Consulting Group have identified the world's ten most innovative companies.
Asked about their ability to innovate, 1,500 executives from different countries and industries named innovative companies, from which the Boston Consulting Group drew up a list of the world's 50 leading corporations (in its PDF report: "The Most Innovative Companies 2014: Breaking Through Is Hard to Do").
The focus was primarily on those companies that not only continuously develop their product lines, but also revolutionize the market with "innovations of disruptive power" (Carsten Kratz, head of BCG for Germany and Austria).
Derived from "to disrupt," this refers to the introduction of entirely new business models and processes. Outstanding companies are characterized by the fact that they are more broadly positioned in terms of idea generation, make more intensive use of business model innovations, and are more strongly oriented toward breakthrough success.
However, the survey revealed that innovations seem to be of a rather random nature: Only 13 percent of companies actively strive for disruptive innovations, and according to the study, only 7.6 percent of companies can be named as companies with outstanding innovative strength.
And companies continue to oversleep the current trend in after you got how to trade stock and assume that digital technologies will not have a significant innovation impact in the next three to five years. Accordingly, less than one-third of companies plan to take digitization into account when developing innovative products or strategies.
Internet industry dominates the top 10
The bulk of the companies in the top 50 come from the information and communications technology sector. Apple is in first place - unchallenged for ten years now - followed by the Internet and electronics companies Google, Samsung, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon.
Tesla Motors and Toyota are two other car manufacturers in 7th and 8th place, followed by Facebook and Sony. Intel (13th), Cisco Systems (14th), LG Electronics (17th), Dell (20th) and Lenovo (23rd) are also in the top 50.
The technology sector continues to be on the rise, with six of the new entrants - Xiaomi (35th), Yahoo (36th), Hitachi (37th), Oracle (39th), Salesforce.com (40th) and Huawei (50th).
On the other hand, automotive manufacturers lost out overall, with only four of them ranked in the top 20 (nine in the entire list). Only Tesla Motors was able to make a big leap into the top 10, rising from 41st place in 2013 to 7th. With Coca Cola (16th), McDonalds (38th), Nike (24th), Walmart (42nd), Nestlé (44th), Starbucks (46th), Unilever (49th) and Procter & Gamble (31st), eight groups from the consumer goods sector are also represented.
Conclusion
The study highlights the increasing importance of the consumer goods industry, communication technologies and the need to take digitalization into account. However, companies have so far not implemented this sufficiently in their research and development departments. This is particularly clear in the automotive industry, which has lost places almost without exception, although automated driving, the further development of electric cars and the networking of cars with the Internet actually offer great potential.