Josh Bourne ⬥ October 8
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) released the results of this year’s Most Innovative Companies survey last week. The survey is conducted by BCG as follows:
As in past surveys, the 2013 results reveal the 50 companies that executives rank as the most innovative, weighted to incorporate relative three-year shareholder returns, revenue growth, and margin growth. The list has its share, as always, of well-known technology innovators (especially among the top ten), but automakers also show a strong surge, a trend that began last year and gathered strength in the current results. This time, we also asked respondents to identify up-and-coming companies at which innovation is driving rapid growth.
Since one of the “next big things” in technology is the introduction of hundreds of new Top Level Domains (TLDs) to the Internet, we decided to do a little research: What percentage of these successful, envelope-pushing companies applied to run their own new gTLD?
And, it turns out, over half of the most innovative companies – 28 out of the 50 – invested in new TLDs. Of these, 16 applied for more than one new TLD.
A whopping 7 of the top 10 innovative companies applied for a total of 194 new extensions, including:
- Apple’s .APPLE,
- Amazon’s .IMDB, and
- Google’s .CHROME.
It seems that the most innovative companies also invested the most. BCG’s:
- 3rd most innovative company – Google – applied for 101 new TLDs
- 7th most innovative company, Amazon, applied for 76.
“This isn’t a coincidence,” said Taylor Frank, VP of Strategy and Development at FairWinds Partners. “Tech, search, e-commerce and automotive companies are going to do very well with their new gTLDs, whether they applied for their .BRAND, a .GENERIC, or both.”
Frank went on to explain that these new extensions are fertile ground for new business models and innovative approaches to community engagement, brand protection, human resources, and product development.
“The more interesting question is not whether there’s a relationship between being the most innovative and having applied for a new gTLD but whether companies that didn’t apply for a new gTLD will hold their ranking come next year.”