The Future 120

The Fortune Future 120 recognizes companies from around the world that are best positioned to drive sustained, long-term growth. Since 2017, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Fortune have teamed up to identify companies across the globe with an innate fitness to grow from within—a measurable, manageable trait we call “corporate vitality.” 

To identify these companies, we evaluate companies across 15 forward-looking factors associated with long-term revenue growth, together covering three strategic dimensions: Growth Ambition, Talent Density, and Growth Culture. Together, these factors make up BCG’s proprietary vitality score, which provides our basis for the Fortune Future 120 ranking. 

To be eligible for consideration, publicly traded companies must have a market capitalization of at least $5 billion, and privately-owned firms must have received at least $1 billion in funding since inception or employ more than 20,000 employees. This year, we examined more than 3,500 companies meeting these criteria. 

Growth Ambition measures the degree to which leadership sets a bold growth target and backs it with the capital allocation and incentives necessary to turn it into sustained growth. In this dimension, we use an algorithm to evaluate the clarity of a company’s growth strategy from earnings calls. We also measure the share of active patents granted in the last five years, the share of revenue spent on capital expenditures, and the link between long-term incentives and growth. Finally, we assess each public company’s ability to access capital markets and create shareholder value.

Talent Density measures whether growth teams have the requisite skills, mobility, and experience to repeatedly transform innovation into scalable businesses. In this dimension, we look at the share of full-time employees holding product- and innovation-related roles. We also measure the average tenure of innovators, the mobility of current employees within the organization, and a firm's ability to attract talent from other high-growth firms. Finally, we assess the digital and AI skills of engineers.

Growth Culture measures whether a company minimizes organizational friction and embraces lean operating practices and technological advances, such as AI, to continuously reinvent the core. In this dimension, we evaluate employee job reviews for markers of bureaucracy, assess how heavy the management layers are compared to the rest of the organization, and measure whether attrition is at a healthy level. We add to these organizational metrics a weighted vendor quality score on a company’s tech stack and the share of employees across the organization with AI skills.