The World’s Most Innovative Companies 2010
“The World’s Most Innovative Companies 2010” report was recently published by Fast Company. It reports analyzes over 250 companies, including more than 75 non-U.S. businesses, and emphasizes the Top 50 Most Innovative Companies. In addition to the Top 50, Fast Company cited 59 Innovation All-stars, culled from past Top 50 honorees, plus ranked the Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in 24 categories, including advertising and marketing, biotechnology, film and TV, media, music, and sports.
What lacks in this report is the means by which the selection and ranking was generated. There are no indicators or criteria of company’s selection, making the validity of the rankings questionable. However, this raises several important questions:
- On what bases should a company be considered more innovative than another?
- How important is the difference between the customer perception of a company as being innovative relative to the actual innovation that took place?
- Should innovation be measured by volume or quality of innovation?
At organizational level, measuring performance in innovation is commonly done through a variety of metrics, many of them listed in the library of KPI examples available on www.smartKPIs.com:
- # Hours spent developing innovations
- % Innovations that significantly advance existing business
- % Idea conversion rate
- % Expenditure saved by introducing innovations
- % Employees involved in the innovation process
Another example of report regarding innovation performance, this time at national level, is “The Innovation Capacity Index”, presented in a previous blog post. The report contains the 2009-2010 Innovation Capacity Index rankings of 131 countries, and the factors that were taken into consideration while creating the ranking.
References:
- smartKPIs.com (2010), “KPI examples for Knowledge and Innovation Functional Area, Innovation subcategory”
- smartKPIs.com (2010), “The Innovation Capacity Index” blog post
- FastCompany.com (2010), “The World’s Most Innovative Companies 2010”
- Fast Company (2010)
Tags: Innovation, Marketing performance, Performance Measurement
