Top innovators to watch revealed in new global study
Report heralds major new methodology | Findings include continued ‘influx’ of automotives | Distinct lack of representation from mainland China.
Potential rising stars in global innovation have been unveiled in a new report from IP services firm Clarivate.
The Innovators to Watch 2022 report, released this week, July 28, introduces a major new evaluation method.
Data is now calculated by first comparing each invention individually, and only then compares performance. This marks a switch from the previous method, which used a top-down scoring of organisations’ patented innovations compared with other organisations that met the qualification criteria.
Innovators to Watch are companies and institutions with high potential for future recognition as Top 100 Global Innovators, a study conducted by the firm each year.
For 2022, the number of potential candidates regarded as Innovators to Watch increased from 28 to 37.
Trends
Emerging themes in this year’s Innovators to Watch list include a continued influx from automotive companies. Car manufacturers such as BMW, Mazda (an Innovator to Watch from 2021) and Subaru feature in the list, as do German component suppliers Knorr-Bremse and Eberspächer.
Taiwan electronics and semiconductor firms are well represented, with Winbond, VIA Technologies, UMC, SiliconMotion and Primax Electronics featuring as potential future Top 100 candidates.
There is also potential new country representation, with Ansaldo Energia from Italy and Danfoss from Denmark—both of which would be first time entrants for those economies.
New research organisations enter the Innovators to Watch list for the first time, namely Inserm from France and IMEC from Belgium.
The country with the biggest representation in the Innovators to Watch list is Japan, with diverse representation across industrial, automotive, consumer goods, semiconductor and chemical markets.
Ed White, chief analyst and vice president, IP and Innovation Research at Clarivate, wrote in a blog introducing the report: “These trends reflect wider growth shifts in the global innovation ecosystem, including expanded focus on mobility and sustainability, an increasing diversity of represented economies and the ever-growing importance of processors and computing power in the modern economy.”
Only two companies identified as Innovators to Watch in 2021 made it to this year’s Innovators to Watch list: software company Accenture in Ireland, and Mazda in Japan.
Out of the 28 companies identified as ‘Innovators to Watch’ in 2021, six were promoted to the 2022 Top Global Innovators list announced in February 2022.
Those six firms were: AUO, Alibaba, GM, Hyundai Motor Company, PMI and TCL Technology.
China gap
White said that one question arising from this year's Innovators to Watch list is the lack of representation from mainland China.
“There are currently five companies in the Top 100 Global Innovators 2022 list from the region, up from zero when we began the programme 11 years ago, and with the first entrant of a Chinese entity (Huawei) occurring in 2015,” he said.
“When we examine the wider ‘Global Innovators’ data set upon which the Top 100 list is based, mainland China’s performance continues to improve every year.
“However, in the 2022 rankings, there is a gap in its representation between the 100th and 250th space, the threshold upon which Innovators to Watch focuses. This means that no organisation in mainland China met the criteria for our forecast this year, although there are several which are fast improving their performance below position 250.”
Methodology
This year’s Innovators to Watch study used a twin-track approach to evaluation, said the report authors. Track one assessed volume of inventive activity, coupled with a comparison of innovators based on the proportion and level of international inventions (ideas patented in more than one country or region). Out of this, an international innovator weighting factor was created.
The other track evaluated all inventions using the Derwent World Patents Index, and scored them on four factors: influence, success, globalisation and technical distinctiveness.
The findings from these two ‘tracks’ were then used to create a Global Innovator Score.
To identify potential future entrants to the Top 100 list, Clarivate created threshold tests to filter each entity assessed in the Top 100 Global Innovators 2022 process.
Those thresholds for candidate organisations were: they must rank inside the Top 250 in 2022; their rise in ranking since 2017 must be greater than its current gap to position 100; and the organisation must not previously have been included in the Top 100 Global Innovators list.
Potential future recipients were identified using an overlay analysis focused on the fastest risers.
White explained that the new calculation model can be used for historical comparison of data.
“One of the benefits of the new Top 100 methodology is that it can be stepped in time, back to previous years, for the tens of millions of inventions globally then and now—and we can use that innovation model to measure the historical performance of an organisation under the new 2022 methodology.”
Asian companies dominated the 2022 Top Global Innovators list, with the US falling short of their lead in 2021.
Last year, in the 2021 Top Global Innovators report, chip maker Arm was the first UK-based firm to make the list.
