Europe's Most Innovative Companies

europe's most innovative companies

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For the first time, Fortune analyzed the top companies across the continent in partnership with Statista to find the standouts that are driving progress with success. Led by L'Oréal, Unilever, and Rolls-Royce, the 300 companies on our inaugural list hail from all parts of the continent and many different sectors. They reveal a nimbleness and appetite for change among younger businesses just as much as in traditional corners of the economy. Together, the companies on the list employ around 17 million people and brought in just under $8 trillion in revenue for the latest 12 months, with a median revenue figure of $14 billion.

L'Oréal

Unilever

Rolls-Royce

Philips

Sanofi

Novo Nordisk

Ericsson

Medtronic

The Top 10

What companies are leading in innovation in Europe in 2025?

Europe's Most Innovative Companies 2025

The ranking of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://fortune.com/ranking/europes-most-innovative-companies/2025">Europe's Most Innovative Companies</a> 2025 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 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 a company’s processes, from sourcing and production to marketing, sales, and support. Opinions of employees, experts, and (potential) customers were factored in.- Innovation culture measures to what extent a company fosters a spirit of entrepreneurship and creativity internally and allows implementation of ideas. Employee opinions were core to this but external experts' views were also considered, including recruiters and HR experts. Companies receive a score in each of these dimensions, with each dimension accounting for a third of the total score. A more detailed methodology can be found <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cdn.statcdn.com/rankings/Europe%27s+Most+Innovative+Companies+2025+-+Methodology.pdf">here.</a>

Structure: Description of Dimensions

Companies headquartered in Europe with at least 250 employees were eligible to enter the ranking. Statista compiled a list of more than 18,000 such companies and an additional call for entry was published on Fortune.com, allowing eligible companies to register for consideration. There was no particular focus on any sector or industry. This list was fed into a survey platform, allowing survey participants to select companies they wished to evaluate through an autofill system. Survey participants could also add companies they wished to nominate, allowing Statista to feed these into the system directly.Companies are listed under their top-level owning and consolidating entity, as based on regulatory filing documents, and consistent with all Fortune 500 lists. Companies' ownership structures are assessed continuously to ensure we deliver on this consistently, listing revenue and other financial metrics for companies only under their consolidating entity. For large conglomerates, innovation may have been driven by particular businesses within the group but such subsidiaries or holdings are not named individually. For further information on this, please contact <a href="mailto:grethe.schepers@fortune.com">Grethe Schepers, Lists Director Europe.</a>

Eligible Companies

To assess internal views on companies’ three dimensions of innovation, Statista deployed online survey panels with employees scoring their own company on a scale system. These surveys were representative of more than 90,000 employees and conducted between the start of December 2024 and the start of March 2025. External views on the three dimensions of innovation were obtained through a panel of 17,000 experts in various fields, including recruiters, business analysts, management consultant, patent attorneys, and people working in R&D or business development.

Scope, Scale, and Time of Surveys

Scores from each of the innovation dimensions were weighted equally, each dimension accounting for a third. The 300 companies with the highest combined scores were ranked as <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://fortune.com/ranking/europes-most-innovative-companies/2025">Europe’s Most Innovative Companies.</a>- Patent scores contributed 50% of the overall product innovation score, with opinions of experts and (potential) customers providing the remaining 50%. For the evaluation of companies’ IP portfolios, Statista cooperated with LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions, whose LexisNexis PatentSight The LexisNexis® PatentSight+ platform has patent data from over 120 million patent documents. This allowed for an evaluation of the quantity and quality of companies’ patents.- For process and culture innovation, scores were calculated on the basis of survey evaluations for each company.

Europe's Most Innovative Companies

Europe's Most Innovative Companies Ranking (2025)