Report: U.S. firms lead Top 100 innovators list

A look at influential patents finds U.S. firms leading among "Top 100 Global Innovators".

"Innovation is the cornerstone of economic growth and success, for both the companies that innovate and the countries that embrace them," begins the Thomson Reuters report. Looking at patent grants, worldwide approvals and citations, the report lists 100 multinational firms as leaders in innovation.

Particularly in semiconductors and related industries, U.S. firms lead with 40% of the innovative firms, such as Intel and Qualcomm. Japan comes next with 27% of them (where all of Asia only accounts for 31%). The report suggests these firms are ones likely to see financial success, backed by their capacity for innovation.

"The surprise is that China and India don't rank very high," says analyst Bob Stembridge of Thomson Reuters IP Solutions, even though China has seen explosive growth in patenting and is poised to file the most patents worldwide in coming years. Most of those patents are only being filed in China, Stembridge says, and it may be too early for their effects to be seen in the report's measures of innovative success. "I suspect China will come along," he says.

Some researchers, such as Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma authors Joseph Tainter and Tadeusz Patzek, have suggested that innovation productivity as reflected in patents has declined in the last decade. President Obama signed a U.S. Patent Reform bill into law earlier this year, touted by some as an improvement, but criticized by others.

Stembridge agrees that patents have more authors now than in past decades, reducing individual inventor productivity, but says, "instead, I think the nature of innovation is changing." Innovations rely on more interdisciplinary research than previously, he suggests. "We still see a lot of innovation."

The report team plans to update its findings in coming years.