Methodology for America’s Most Innovative Companies (2024)

Structure: Description of dimensions

The ranking of America’s Most Innovative Companies is built on three pillars: product innovation, process innovation, and innovation culture.

Product innovation entails the evaluation of a company’s products and services, covering aspects such as attractiveness and design to usability and uniqueness. The total score that could be achieved in this dimension was derived from an analysis of a company’s IP portfolio and the opinion of experts and (potential) customers.

Process innovation consists of an analysis of all processes of a company, from sourcing and production to marketing, sales, and support. Given that there is an internal and external view on this dimension, the opinion of employees, experts, and (potential) customers were factored in.

Innovation culture measures to what extent a company fosters the spirit of entrepreneurship and creativity internally and allows implementation of ideas. In line with this, the opinion of employees was at the center, but external experts were also included, such as recruiters and HR experts.

Companies would receive a score in each of these dimensions, with each dimension accounting for a third of the total score.

Steps: Elements of the research

Eligible companies

In principle, every company headquartered in the United States was eligible to enter the ranking. Statista compiled a list of more than 25,000 companies in the selection of this list. The focus was on companies which employ at least 500 people in the US, but several hundred smaller companies which appeared to be vibrant and innovative were also included. In addition to this, a call for entry was published on Fortune.com, and any eligible company was allowed to register to participate in the ranking. A special focus on sectors or industries was intentionally not made. The list was fed into a survey platform and allowed survey participants to quickly choose the ones they wanted to evaluate, through an autofill system. To remain inclusive, each survey participant could add a company they wanted to nominate, allowing Statista to also feed it into the system.

Scope, scale, and time of surveys

For the evaluation of the innovation culture and the internal view of process innovation, Statista deployed online survey panels where employees could score their own company on a scale system. In total, over 35,000 people participated.

For the evaluation of the external view of process innovation as well as product innovation, a smaller panel of 2,500 experts was deployed. On top of that, experts in various fields—from recruiters to management consultants and patent attorneys—were invited to provide their opinion, both via newsletters from Fortune and mailings from Statista. In total, over 8,000 opinions were collected through these channels. The surveys were conducted between Sept. 14 and Nov. 23, 2023.

Last year’s survey results were also taken into consideration with a lower weighting.

Data analysis and scoring model

For product innovation, 50% of the points were allocated through the patent score, which is derived from evaluation of a company’s patent portfolio of products and/or services. The other 50% came from opinions of experts and (potential) customers. For the evaluation of the IP portfolio, Statista cooperated with LexisNexis PatentSight and used this platform to analyze the quantity and value of a company’s patents.

For the process innovation dimension, as well as culture innovation dimension, the survey evaluations for each company were calculated into a score.

Each dimension accounted for one-third of the overall score. The 200 companies with the best overall score were awarded as America’s Most Innovative Companies.