The world's top 50 most innovative companies in 2021: Apple first, Huawei eighth

Recently, the world-renowned consulting firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG) released a report nominating the world's 50 most innovative companies. A total of five Chinese companies were selected for this report, namely Huawei, Alibaba, Lenovo, Tencent and Xiaomi. According to the report, Apple ranked first, Google ranked second, Amazon ranked third, Microsoft and Tesla ranked fourth and fifth respectively.

It is worth noting that Huawei, a Chinese company, ranked eighth in this report, the only Chinese company in the top ten and the company with the highest innovation ranking among Chinese companies. Alibaba ranked 14th, Lenovo ranked 25th, Tencent ranked 26th, and Xiaomi ranked 31st.

Regarding Xiaomi's selection as one of the top 50 most innovative companies in the world in 2021 selected by BCG, Xiaomi officially stated, "Not only Xiaomi, but also Chinese companies such as Huawei, Tencent, and Alibaba have entered the list. We have shown the world China's innovative power. In the future, Xiaomi will continue to be technology-based and forge ahead on the road of technological innovation."

It is reported that this report by Boston Consulting Group is based on an evaluation model called i2i, which divides a company's innovation capabilities into two major categories: "practice" and "platform", which are further divided into 10 sub-items such as innovation projects, investment portfolios, vision, target areas, organizational structure, talent culture, and implementation capabilities.

Earlier, Huawei released its 2020 annual report, which showed that Huawei's R&D investment in 2020 reached 141.9 billion yuan, accounting for 15.9% of its annual revenue. So far, the cumulative R&D investment in the past decade has exceeded 720 billion yuan. In addition, Huawei's R&D personnel also reached a new high, with about 105,000 people, accounting for 53.4% ​​of the company's total number of employees.

In 2017, Jack Ma and Alibaba jointly established the DAMO Academy, a research center dedicated to exploring the science and technology field. Jack Ma said that 100 billion yuan would be invested in three years. In April last year, Alibaba announced again that it would continue to invest 200 billion yuan in the next three years to develop new technologies and new infrastructure.

The 2020 Chinese Internet Companies' R&D Investment Ranking Report shows that Alibaba's technology R&D investment has continued to increase, exceeding 30 billion, and is nearly 20 billion away from second-place Tencent. The gap between Baidu, JD.com and Meituan is not large, all maintaining at the 10 billion level.