Performance Management Blog

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.

Below is a snapshot of the top presented by Fast Company.

Source: Fast Company (2010)

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:

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”, available at http://www.smartkpis.com/kpi/functional-areas/knowledge-and-innovation/innovation/ (accessed 21 March 2010).

smartKPIs.com (2010), “The Innovation Capacity Index” blog post, available at http://www.smartkpis.com/blog/2010/01/17/the-innovation-capacity-index/ (accessed 21 March 2010)

FastCompany.com (2010), “The World’s Most Innovative Companies 2010”, available at http://www.fastcompany.com/mic/2010 (accessed 21 March 2010)

Tags: Brand, Database of KPIs, Innovation, Key Performance Indicators, Library of KPIs, Marketing, Metrics, Performance Measures

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 8:10 pm and is filed under Index, KPI, Library of KPI examples, Performance Measurement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.