Economy

Apple, Google, Tesla Are World's Most Innovative Companies

Paul Ausick

Published: December 10, 2015 1:10 pm

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 4:13 pm

Over the past 10 years the single, most innovative company in the world has been Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL). The Cupertino firm has gotten the nod as the top innovator every year. The second-most innovative goes to Google and Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL), which has ranked number two in nine of the 10 previous years.

The list of innovative companies has been compiled over the past decade by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which surveys 1,500 senior executives representing a wide variety of industries, and the methodology of the study has been revised over the years. For 2008, in addition to asking respondents to pick a list, BCG added objective measures of total shareholder return, revenue and margin growth. For the 2015 list, respondents were asked to rank innovative firms in their own industry, and BCG increased the weighting of its five-year total return metric from 30% to 40%.

Rising to third place in the ranking this year was Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA), leaping ahead of Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), which has ranked fourth in each of the past three years. Samsung Electronics, which ranked second in 2013 and third in 2014, dropped to fifth in 2015, behind Microsoft.

Rounding out the top 10 are number six Toyota Motor Corp. (NYSE: TM), number seven BMW, number eight Gilead Sciences Inc. (NASDAQ: GILD), number nine Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and number 10 Daimler.

Among the biggest movers up the ranking list are BMW, Daimler, pharmaceutical giant Bayer, China’s internet firm Tencent and Japan’s SoftBank. Tencent rose from 47th to 12th year over year, and Bayer moved from 45th to 11th.

First-timers on the list include Gilead, Biogen Inc. (NASDAQ: BIIB) at number 17, Marriott International Inc. (NASDAQ: MAR) at number 19, Netflix Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) at number 21 and French insurance giant AXA at number 22.

See the full BCG report.