World's Most Innovative Companies - Apple Tops For The 3rd Year in a row

Image courtesy of Mashable

Apple has become the most innovative company in the world for the 3rd time in a row in spite of spending notably less on Research and Development than most of its competitors. To rank the most innovative companies in different industries, Booz & Co. surveyed almost 700 executives worldwide. (Source: Report)

The last time when the survey was conducted, Apple has gone through some big changes. Most importantly, it lost co-founder and visionary former CEO Steve Jobs. It has also grown to become the most valuable company in the world. But these factors couldn't change its approach to R&D spending and its perception as innovator.

Apple spent $2.4 billion on research and development in 2011, or 2.2% of its total sales revenue. The company recently revealed that it spent $3.4 billion on R&D in 2012, which still works out to be the same 2.2% of sales given Apple’s growth. By comparison, Google spent $2.2 billion on R&D in 2011, or 13.6% of its sales and Microsoft spent $9 billion on R&D in 2011, or about 13% of sales. (Source: Mashable)

Tech companies including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung. Amazon etc. have dominated the Top 10 positions but Facebook has lost its position which was on the Top Ten List last year.

“The 10 most innovative companies handily outperformed the top 10 spenders on R&D on several financial metrics — market cap growth, revenue growth, and earnings as a percentage of revenues (after normalizing for industry variations).” Booz points out in the report

Here is the list of Top most innovative companies with amount of spending in R&D areas:

Image courtesy of Flickr, Dennis Goedegebuure