Who is leading the innovation race?
The Global Top 100 Innovators
The innovation landscape is constantly evolving—something that is evident in Innovation Momentum 2023: The Global Top 100. For example, this year’s Top 100 list includes 27 new companies. The basis for the list also highlights the vast number of inventions being developed today: About 11 million active patent families were taken into account to determine the Top 100 companies. To qualify for consideration, each of these had to have a portfolio of at least 10 active patent families.
Now in its second edition, the 2023 report represents the world’s leading patent owners with the highest innovation momentum, based on the Patent Asset Index—the scientifically developed objective measure to evaluate innovative strength. The report explores the most forward-looking technological and scientific developments and innovative industries, the regions in which innovators are concentrated, and the companies and academic institutes that meet the criteria of outstanding Innovation Momentum.
The report is supported by data analysis from industry-leading patent analytics solution LexisNexis® PatentSight®, seeking to bring clarity to the complexities of intellectual property.
“With disruption everywhere, the spirit of innovation is critical if we are to turn lemons into lemonade.”
Key Findings
The Innovation Momentum methodology is unique in that it recognizes patent owners with small but high-quality portfolios, as well as those with well-maintained portfolios.
Five industries—Pharmaceuticals, Information Technologies, Chemicals and Materials, Electronics, and Semiconductors—dominate the Top 100.
An aging global population and the long tail of the COVID-19 pandemic are creating demand for new pharmaceutical therapies and products.
Most patent owners in the Top 100 are headquartered in the U.S., which is also home to almost half of the owners in the Information Technologies industry.
In Asia, China, Japan, and Korea continue to demonstrate their traditional strength in Electronics, as well as in the Chemicals and Materials industry.
As more consumers give up smoking and governments work toward limiting tobacco use, cigarette companies know they must innovate to survive.
As people live longer, medical technology companies such as Medtronic, Masimo Corporation, and ResMed are innovating to ensure people’s lives remain comfortable and healthy
Academia remains a rich source of innovation, with leading universities and institutions found in countries across the globe, from the U.S. to China, France, Germany, and Korea.
How to Measure Innovation Momentum
As its name suggests, the Innovation Momentum report sheds light on the dynamics of today’s technology development. The methodology is unique in that it recognizes patent owners with relatively small, high-quality portfolios as well as patent owners with well-maintained large portfolios, takes into account the differences between developments in all technology fields, and considers the innovators’ target markets.
The methodology builds on the Patent Asset Index—an industry-trusted indicator based on a scientifically rigorous method of assessing patent strength—and provides an unbiased way of identifying innovators that have outperformed their peers in the previous two years.
This means demonstrating that a patent portfolio’s average Technology Relevance—its potential to lead to further inventions—has significantly increased in the case of small portfolios or has been maintained or even increased in the case of large portfolios. The methodology also takes into consideration the average Market Coverage—the size of the global market a patent family protects— of the patent portfolios. Combining these two indicators results in the average Competitive Impact—or average quality—of an entire patent portfolio.
To be included in the Top 100, an owner’s patent portfolio must have been well-maintained or must have increased their Technology Relevance over a two-year period. This is easier to achieve for companies with small portfolios. Therefore, for owners of small portfolios, the increase must be significantly higher than that for holders of large portfolios. Owners of large portfolios must either increase their portfolio in size and maintain or increase their average patent quality, or they must increase their average patent quality while reducing their portfolio size.
Industry Sector Distribution
The Innovation Momentum methodology delivers unique insights into global innovation developments across industries and geographies. Using the methodology, we have created a list of the Top 100 innovators across the world showing how global developments continue to shape innovation.
As we reach the second year of the global pandemic, pharmaceuticals are at the top of the most innovative industries list, with continued vaccine development from companies like Johnson & Johnson, Moderna Therapeutics, and others. There are also various smaller players innovating in this space, with gene editing based on clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats-associated protein 9 (CRISPR/Cas9) opening venues for the development of new therapeutics and 10x Genomics, Arvinas and Incyte making great strides in the field of onco-immunology.
Information technologies are another well-represented industry, highlighting the continued digital transformation of nearly every aspect of daily life. This includes financial services companies like Ant Group and WeBank, as well as internet giants like Alphabet, Amazon, and Tencent.
Many of the categories included highlight the technology and materials that are necessary to provision the most influential industries.
For example, hardware from semiconductor manufacturers like TSMC and electronics companies like Goodix are vital to supporting the world’s continued digital transformation. The demand for rechargeable batteries for items such as mobile devices and electric vehicles gives context to the chemical and materials category with innovators like Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), LG Chem, and Samsung SDI on the list.
REGIONAL DISTRIBUTION
The Americas, namely the US, contributes almost half of the Top 100 companies. These are concentrated in the pharmaceuticals, medical technologies, and information technologies industry sectors. The Americas have the most diverse set of industry sectors, as opposed to Asia and Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa (CEMEA) which have noticeable gaps. About a third of the Top 100 innovators are located in the Asian region, which focuses on the industry sectors of electronics, chemicals and materials, and information technologies.
The remaining fifth comes from the CEMEA region with all but one innovator being located in Central Europe. Regarding the European patent owners on the list, it appears that they cannot claim a dominant share in any specific industry sector.
Uneven distribution across the globe also applies to industry sectors. Top contenders in the pharmaceuticals industry, for example are concentrated in the US, while the innovators in the electronics industry are mostly located in the Asian region. In Europe, the most populated sectors are the chemicals and materials industry along with engineering.
TOP INNOVATORS IN ELECTRONICS
The report provides a peer group deep dive into three selected industries: pharmaceuticals, electronics, and semiconductors. We highlight here our analyzes for the electronics sector. The top innovators in electronics emphasize the influence of human interfaces and the continued evolution of human interaction with digital devices, from sight to sound to touch.
Display technology is prominent among the top electronics innovators, with Samsung, BOE, and CPT Technology being major display manufacturers along with AU Optronics supplying technology for touch screens. This should not be a surprise because displays are the preferred machine/user interface for any electronic or communication device in an ever more digitized world.
For most of the time, innovation in display technology was centered around good old cathode ray tube (CRT) technology, which celebrates its 125th anniversary this year. Even though liquid crystals were discovered prior to the invention of the CRT, MOSFET thin-film transistors were required to build liquid crystal displays (LCDs), which became popular in the late 1980s. At the same time, the success story of OLEDs started enabling colorful, high-contrast displays. And today, displays in which the display pixels consist of individual light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are available.
But there are alternative ways to interact with electronic devices using senses other than sight. As the computational power of virtual assistant systems increases, speech and hearing are being used for human/machine interaction.
This is similar to interaction with a display using a handsfree way of interacting with devices. However, it is an alternative interaction for situations when the device is out of sight or when sight is needed to focus on other tasks without distraction—for example, when driving a car. AAC Technologies, Goertek, and Goodix are among the electronics innovators offering technologies in this area. Complementing sight and hearing, the touch sensor is used for haptic interaction. Here, the same innovators again represent a different way to interact with electronic devices, such as providing a feedback signal when real and virtual buttons are pressed.
Beyond specific device interaction, virtual and augmented reality have become mainstream. To provide a truly seamless experience, computing performance, high quality, and refreshed displays, along with sensors and user inputs need to be expertly combined. These experiences quickly become strange or even physically uncomfortable when all these aspects do not function correctly. Magic Leap has and continues to make considerable strides in this area, which is a testament to the company itself and the broader technology base.
Another interesting area of innovation has emerged with the manufacturing of unmanned aerial vehicles by DJI Innovations, often in combination with photographic devices. Progress of this technology can be seen in the production of television shows and movies that capture agile aerial footage in narrow spaces that were not accessible via helicopters in the past.
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