The Boston Consulting Group recently published The Most Innovative Companies 2020. There are a few rankings of innovative companies, but this ranking is the 14th report and one of the oldest rankings I know. While the ranking itself is interesting, their analysis gives us some insights in innovation. For instance, the subtitle of the report is “The Serial Innovation Imperative”, which obviously indicates that innovation is no longer something we need to do just one time but we need to be capable of making them multiple times. To achieve this, making an innovative product or service is not enough. We have to develop the system of facilitating innovations. The next few posts will review the report.
Cross-border innovations
The survey method is to ask executives about top innovators in any industries, but recently they started to ask them about innovators in their own industry and found an interesting trend. The executives more frequently mention innovators from outside of the industry than before. This point might be mentioned quite often, but this research also underpins the findings. The industry study is probably still useful, but entry barriers in a traditional sense seem to get lower.
Sony was out of the ranking since 2014, but they returned and ranked at No.9. There should be several reasons, but one of them would be their new bold challenges such as making an electronic car. This is a good example of crossing industries. Sony has been already successful in multiple industries, but even they need to push their boundaries further.
Behind this trend are many new technologies emerging. However, just acquiring new technologies probably does not necessarily foster innovations. Rather, how we can enable such technologies with a holistic perspective of business will be an important factor to innovate and also protect your business from external threads. Eventually, you will need to find out business models for those new technologies.