The Top 100 Global Innovators list honors the 100 corporations and institutions around the world that are at the heart of innovation as measured by a series of proprietary patent-related metrics. BlackBerry is listed as one of the 100 in that list, and is a new entry to the list. The 2013 award focuses on companies which are responsible for generating a sizeable amount of innovation.

According to Reuters, all of these 100 organizations in the 2013 study outperformed the S&P 500 for the third consecutive year, by 4 percent in annual stock price growth and 2 percent in market cap weighted revenue growth. Collectively they generated $4.5 trillion in revenue, nearly twice the GDP of the United Kingdom. The Top Innovators also added 266,152 new jobs over the last year, a rate that was 0.81 percent higher than the new job creation rate among constituents of the S&P 500. This year’s winners also outspent the S&P 500 by 8.8 percent on R&D; collectively they invested $223 billion in their research and development efforts.

The 4 criteria includes:

1. A unique invention is defined as the first publication in a patent document of a new technology, drug, business process, etc. In DWPI, these are called “basic” patents. DWPI provides a record of patents published by 48 patent issuing authorities worldwide to enable a comprehensive picture of activity produced. Subsequent filings for the same invention are recorded as “equivalents” in DWPI and collated in “patent families” and, for this analysis, were not included.
2. Patenting an invention through one or more patent offices is expensive. Not all patent applications pass through the patent examination process at the patent offices to become granted. Therefore, the ratio of published applications to granted patents over the most recent three years is a measure of success.
3. Protecting an invention in major world markets is an indication that the company places a significant value on those pieces of their intellectual property. The number of unique inventions that have quadrilateral patents in their patent families, according to the Thomson Reuters Quadrilateral Patent Index™, was calculated to create a ratio to show which companies place a high value on their portfolios. The quadrilateral authorities comprise the Chinese Patent Office, the European Patent Office, the Japanese Patent Office, and the United States Patent & Trademark Office.
4. The impact of an invention “down the line” can be determined by looking at how often it is subsequently cited by other companies in their inventions. Thomson Reuters used its Derwent Patents Citation Index™ database to count citations to organization’s patents over the most recent 5 years, excluding self-citations.

The final list was determined using the combination of these key performance indices to give a multi-faceted perspective and enable them to identify the 2013 Top 100 Global Innovators.

So what is the reason for BlackBerry getting added to the list?

It was driven by a 38 percent surge in patent filings between 2010 and 2011, and 17 percent growth in patent filings between 2011 and 2012. The rapid expansion of the company’s patent portfolio is certain to be a factor in BlackBerry’s recently-announced plans to pursue strategic alternatives, including a possible sale.

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