Huawei in top 10 for BCG's 50 most innovative companies in 2020

Source: BCG via Huawei. The top 50 most innovative companies of 2020, according to BCG.

Huawei has been ranked No. 6 in BCG’s list of the 50 Most Innovative Companies in 2020, a jump of 42 places. This is the highest ranking for the company since it first made the list in 2012.

According to the report by Boston Consulting Group, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Huawei are the top six in the new ranking, followed by Alibaba, IBM, Sony and Facebook. The ranking is based on a survey of 2,500 global innovation executives and assesses companies’ performance on four dimensions of Global Mindshare, Industry Disruption, Industry Peer View and Value Creation. 

This year, BCG also added a new scoring dimension that captures each company’s variety and intensity of boundary breaking, by assessing its ability to breach established industry entry barriers and play in an array of markets outside its own.

As the world’s largest supplier of telecommunications equipment, Huawei has continuously invested over 10% of its annual revenue back into research and development (R&D). In 2019, the company’s R&D expenditure totaled RMB131,659 million, accounting for 15.3% of its total revenue.

Huawei invested US$4 billion in 5G over the past decade. To further commercial adoption and promote new innovation in 5G applications, the company has established 5G joint innovation centers together with carriers worldwide. According to its annual report, the tech giant is shifting itself from an innovation 1.0 model to Innovation 2.0, which means breakthroughs in basic theory and developing new basic technologies, driven by shared vision for the future.

In the global fight against COVID-19, Huawei doubled down its innovation efforts and launched the Anti-COVID-19 Partner Program that focuses on artificial intelligence (AI), remote office, smart healthcare and online education, to support the fight against the pandemic. Its AI-assisted diagnosis, for example, can output computer tomography (CT) quantification results in seconds, helping frontline medical staff detect COVID-19 cases quickly.

“When we began the research for this 14th edition of BCG’s Most Innovative Companies report, COVID-19 had not yet emerged. As we explored the data and interacted with clients, however, it became clear that this year’s core findings—about the advantages of scale and the imperative for serial innovation—may be even more relevant today as innovation leaders need to adapt to rapidly shifting patterns of supply, demand, consumer behaviour, and ways of doing business,” BCG stated in the report.