Five Indian firms on 50 most innovative companies

Five Indian companies - Larsen & Toubro, Hindustan Unilever, Infosys, TCS and Sun Pharma - have made to a list of the world's 50 most innovative firms, with the engineering giant L&T ranking among the top-10.

While the global list, released by US-based business magazine Forbes, is topped by IT firm Salesforce.com, Indian major L&T is ranked 9th worldwide, followed by HUL (12th), Infosys (19th), Tata Consultancy Services (29th) and Sun Pharma (38th) among the Indian companies.

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In the overall list, Salesforce.com is followed by Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Amazon.com, software firm Red Hat and China's Baidu, Intuitive Surgical, Japanese internet retail firm Rakuten, Edward Lifesciences, L&T and ARM Holdings.

American companies dominate the top-10 group with seven positions, while there are one each from China, Japan and India.

However, some of the Indian firms, such as L&T, HUL and Infosys, have been ranked higher than global giants like Starbucks (21st), Estee Lauder (23rd), Google (24th), Danone (25th), Apple (26th), P&G (27th) and Diageo (33rd).

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Forbes said that the list has been compiled based on "innovation premium" offered by the companies - measured by how much investors have bid up the stock price above the value of its existing business based on expectations of future innovative results (new products, services and markets).

Only those companies have been considered for the ranking that have a minimum market capitalisation of $10 billion, have spent at least 2.5 per cent of revenue on research and development, and have seven years of public data.