The Drucker Institute, named after legendary management scholar Peter Drucker, has released its 2021 rankings for The Best-Managed Companies of 2021, published in today’s Wall Street Journal. Take a look at the Innovation Top Ten:
- Amazon
- Microsoft
- IBM
- Apple
- Equinix
- Capital One
- Johnson & Johnson
- Walmart
- Uber
- Intel
How did they calculate a single number for “innovation”? They used four criteria and, honestly, only the fourth one sounds like creativity to me:
- They create systems for continuous improvement
- They exploit their successes
- They stop doing things that no longer provide value
- They create a “different tomorrow” that makes today’s products obsolete.
To measure these four criteria, The Drucker Institute used 11 indicators, including these:
- Number of patent and trademark applications
- How the stock market reacted to approved patent applications (in other words, did it create value for the company, as perceived by investors?)
- Patent abandonment–does a company stop working on a patent once they realize it doesn’t create value for them?
- How well a company “manages innovation across its supply chain” (I’d like to see the details for how they calculate this one)
- R&D spending and hiring, specifically in cutting-edge fields like robotics and AI
- Sales or releases of patents
- Market’s valuation of the company’s patents
- How many business magazines rate the company as “innovative”
- How consumers rate a company’s innovation
It’s interesting to see that the most innovative company–Amazon–scored almost twice as high as the tenth, Intel. That puts Amazon way up the stratosphere! (Microsoft was a close second.)
Creativity researchers have known for a long time how hard it is to measure creativity. There’s no readily accepted measure and almost any number you come up with, someone can think of a problem with it. I’ve often been critical of using patents, for example, as a measure of organizational innovation. But whether or not this measure is actually about “creativity” or simply about “good business practices,” it’s fascinating list of the things successful companies do.
The Creativity Guru 