Every year I look forward to Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) rankings of innovation companies.

BCG surveys senior executives around the world from a variety of industry asking them to rank the most innovative companies inside and outside their industries.

Again, the highly ranked companies are about the same as last year, except for a number of new entrants.

China’s Alibaba group and Uber have entered the top 10.

China’s Tencent has joined the top 20 along with Airbnb, SpaceX, Cisco System, Orange and Marriott.

This year rankings signals a significant shift to digital.

More companies in the top 50 have built digital technologies into their innovation programs.

Eleven of the fifty companies are “digital natives”.

Seven of the top ten most innovative companies have gone digital.

With more companies shifting to digital to drive their innovation strategy, there is a big push into big data analytics.

“It’s now along with new products, the most pursued type of innovation”.

More than half of the respondents use data analytics to help identify opportunities.

Some use it to generate ideas.

Some use data to understand trends.

Others use data to guide investment decisions.

Some key points from the report:

• Strong innovators are far more likely to use big data and advanced analytics throughout the innovation process than weak innovators, which struggle to leverage data analytics effectively;

 

• Strong innovators also consistent- ly use multiple sources of data, originating both internally and externally; and

 

• Almost three- quarters of strong innovators, compared with less than 20% of weak innovators, reported that new projects or ideas for growth come from social media or data mining.