The 50 Most Inventive Companies
In business, creativity is a competitive advantage. The Daily Beast ranks which public companies have the employees that turn out the most new ideas.
Industry: Communications equipment
CEO: William J. Merritt
Total patents 2005-2009: 717
Total employees: 299
Market Cap: $1.09 billion
Notable breakthrough: InterDigital’s technology subsidiary has had its hand in the evolution of cellular phone technology since the 1960s. Specifically, the company helped develop High Speed Download Packet Access and High Speed Upload Packet Access, which allow 3G network users to turn their phones into mini personal computers.
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Abhijit Y. Talwalkar
Total patents 2005-2009: 2,405
Total employees: 5,451
Market Cap: $3.25 billion
Notable breakthrough: LSI engineers were
honored in 2006 with an award for their Domino[X] Architecture, which improves digital video encoding and decoding for Blu-ray players, high definition-DVD players and other home movie players.
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: John P. Daane
Total patents 2005-2009: 1,064
Total employees: 2,559
Market Cap: $7.06 billion
Notable breakthrough: What's a programmable logic device? An electronic component that allows customers to build electronic circuits suited to their needs. Altera
invented the first reprogrammable version in 1983, and it remains one of the top players in the market.
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Moshe N. Gavrielov
Total patents 2005-2009: 1,176
Total employees: 2,948
Market Cap: $6.68 billion
Notable breakthrough: PLDs—programmable logic devices—are a mainstay at Xilinx, the biggest fish in the PLD bowl. A year after Altera created the first PLD, Xilinx invented the first commercially manufactured field programmable gate array, another electronic component used chiefly in semiconductors that is programmable by the customer.
Newscom
Industry: Computer hardware
CEO: WenChi Chen
Total patents 2005-2009: 840
Total employees: 2,135
Market Cap: $0.79 billion
Notable breakthrough: Tawian-based VIA struck gold in 1999 with its SDRAM computer chips that were included in Intel's Pentium III processors. The ubiquitous Pentium processors helped establish SDRAM as the standard in computer memory for future processors.
Getty Images
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Scott A. McGregor
Total patents 2005-2009: 2,964
Total employees: 7,769
Market Cap: $15.91 billion
Notable breakthrough: There was a time when cellphones were once only capable of making—gasp—calls. Thanks to Broadcom’s video chips, the iPhone can now play last night's
True Blood highlights.
Arnd Wiegmann / Reuters
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Steven R. Appleton
Total patents 2005-2009: 6,863
Total employees: 18,200
Market Cap: $7.29 billion
Notable breakthrough: Two Micron engineers were recognized for innovation last year with awards from the Joint Electronic Device Engineering Councils. Todd Farrell received a lifetime achievement award and George Pax was celebrated for his work on DDR3 SDRAM, which allows faster processing speeds—up to 6,400 megabytes per second.
Ho New / Reuters
Industry: Semiconductors
Chairman: Junshi Yamaguchi
Total patents 2005-2009: 6,923
Total employees: 22,211
Market Cap: $1.15 billion
Notable breakthrough: The world's foremost manufacturer of microcontrollers (small computers that use a single circuit), Renesas created the technology that powers television remote controls and power tools. Another reason for its high invention rank: The company, formerly known as Renesas Technology, merged with NEC Electronics in April. NEC accumulated more than 4,000 patents of its own in the last five years.
Industry: Consumer electronics
CEO: Tomonori Hayashi
Total patents 2005-2009: 673
Total employees: 2,533
Market Cap: $1.21 billion
Notable breakthrough: Funai produces televisions and other electronics for major brands like Philips, Magnavox, and Sylvania. A
recent innovative development at Funai comes from outside the company—an agreement with Microsoft to start using an improved file allocation table to develop audio and video products with higher video and processing capabilities.
YoshikazuTsuno, AFP / Getty Images
Industry: Computer Storage Devices
CEO: Eli Harari
Total patents 2005-2009: 731
Total employees: 3,267
Market Cap: $10.22 biliion
Notable breakthrough: SanDisk is a pioneer in the development of commercially viable flash drives—removable, rewritable data storage for use in USB computer drives and consumer products like digital cameras. The modern flash drive, marketed as CompactFlash, was released by SanDisk in 1994.
Mark Lennihan / AP Photo
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Donald Macleod
Total patents 2005-2009: 1,100
Total employees: 5,800
Market Cap: $3.17 billion
Notable breakthrough: Computers and home entertainment systems are virtually indistinguishable today, but National Semiconductor was one of the first to integrate computing and decent audiophonics. National Semiconductor's Boomer audio amplifiers in 1994 brought, along with competitors' products, high-quality sound to the PC, even if it would be another decade or so before computers, television and audio would become one.
Paul Sakuma / AP Photo
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Stephen G. Newberry
Total patents 2005-2009: 491
Total employees: 2,711
Market Cap: $4.89 billion
Notable breakthrough: The Lam Rainbow Etcher was created in 1985 and was, at the time, the pinnacle in using plasma to make semiconductors. The
Lam Rainbow Etcher was enshrined at
The Tech Museum in San Jose in 1998.
Jay Solmonson / Newscom
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: T. J. Rodgers
Total patents 2005-2009: 594
Total employees: 3,600
Market Cap: $1.72 billion
Notable breakthrough: In the crowded semiconductor market, inventiveness can require diversification. Last month Cypress Envirosystems—Cypress Semiconductor's foray into the green market—showed the Wireless Pneumatic Thermostat, an inexpensive digital system to control heating and cooling systems, at the Sempra Energy-San Diego Gas & Electric Energy Showcase.
Jay Directo, AFP / Getty Images
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Minqiu Wu
Total patents 2005-2009: 636
Total employees: 3,960
Market Cap: $2.15 billion
Notable breakthrough: The fastest low-voltage flash drive on the market—as of January of this year—was developed by Macronix. It's designed for use in phones, GPS, Bluetooth, and other portable devices.
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Derrick R. Meyer
Total patents 2005-2009: 1,644
Total employees: 10,365
Market Cap: $5.12 billion
Notable breakthrough: There's seemingly no end to improvements in computer visual technology. The in-progress AMD Fusion is a single die processor that will improve visual performance of computers, and could also tighten computer security.
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Peter Bauer
Total patents 2005-2009: 3,928
Total employees: 25,216
Market Cap: $5.93 billion
Notable breakthrough: While other semiconductor companies focus mostly on computer products, Infineon semiconductors dominate other markets—it's now the world's top supplier of automotive electronics, according to a study by Strategy Analytics.
Uwe Lein / AP Photo
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Eric Meurice
Total patents 2005-2009: 984
Total employees: 6,591
Market Cap: $12.40 billion
Notable breakthrough: With semiconductors, smaller is usually better. Last year, ASML introduced a "holistic lithography" for producing ever-smaller (and cheaper) components of semiconductors. "By intelligently integrating computational lithography, wafer lithography and process control, we provide a holistic approach that enables shrink by optimizing process windows and lithography system set-up for volume manufacturing," said Bert Koek, senior vice president, applications product group at
ASML.
Jerry Lampen / Reuters
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Haruo Matsuno
Total patents 2005-2009: 454
Total employees: 3,172
Market Cap: $3.75 billion
Notable breakthrough: Every semiconductor must be tested for efficacy before being shipped out, which is Advantest's talent. Earlier this year Advantest introduced improved testing products that use electron beams to take highly detailed images of semiconductors.
Robert Gilhooly / Getty Images
Industries: Semiconductors, consumer electronics
CEO: Sehat Sutardja
Total patents 2005-2009: 743
Total employees: 5,241
Market Cap: $11.10 billion
Notable breakthrough: Marvell recently introduced its ARMADA processors, which it claims are able to revolutionize smartphone technology with fast processing and Internet connectivity. But what's really revolutionary, according to the company's website, is that it can be used across platforms—from smartphones to netbooks to Blu-ray players.
Paul Sakuma / AP Photo
Industries: Semiconductors, consumer electronics
CEO: Richard K. Templeton
Total patents 2005-2009: 3,767
Total employees: 26,584
Market Cap: $29.02 billion
Notable breakthrough: If you have a high-school diploma, you may already be familiar with Texas Instruments' graphic calculators. The company is also responsible for the first speech synthesizer chip, which converts text into computerized speech, and was used in the popular
Speak & Spell educational toy.
Paul Sakuma / AP Photo
Industry: Computer software and programming
CEO: Lawrence J. Ellison
Total patents 2005-2009: 3,948
Total employees: 29,000
Market Cap: $113.80 billion
Notable breakthrough: The Web servers designed by Sun Microsystems, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle, boomed in the late 1990s.
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Ming-Kai Tsai
Total patents 2005-2009: 555
Total employees: 4,319
Market Cap: $17,22 billion
Notable breakthrough: MediaTek is one of the world’s top 20 semiconductor companies, in terms of sales—Garmin recently chose its chips to use in outdoor navigation products.
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Jen-Hsun Huang
Total patents 2005-2009: 708
Total employees: 5,706
Market Cap: $6.43 billion
Notable breakthrough: A Santa Clara, California-based maker of chip sets and semiconductors, Nvidia has about one-third of the U.S. market share for graphics chips. One notable application: Nvidia teamed with Sony this year to allow pictures taken with Sony Alpha cameras to be processed in 3-D with Nvidia's 3-D Vision Photo Viewer software.
AP Photo
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Oh Cheol Gwon
Total patents 2005-2009: 2,221
Total employees: 18,000
Market Cap: $11.90 billion
Notable breakthrough: While Hynix’s engineers have been chunking out thousands of patents, the finance department has had a rougher go—last year, it defaulted on some loans and earlier this year E.U. regulators fined the company for illegal price fixing.
AP Photo
Industry: Semiconductor Materials
CEO: Michael R. Splinter
Total patents 2005-2009: 1,564
Total employees: 13,000
Market Cap: $16.37 billion
Notable breakthrough: Responsible for the nanotechnology used in the creation of semiconductors, Applied Materials' developments are used in the manufacture of solar panels and LCD screens. Its Precision 5000 chemical vapor deposition system, used in the manufacture of semiconductors, is considered a product pioneer and was inducted into the Smithsonian's permanent collection in 1993.
Industry: Semiconductors
Chairman: Tetsuro Higashi
Total patents 2005-2009: 1,209
Total employees: 10,103
Market Cap: $10.45 billion
Notable breakthrough: Tokyo is the second largest producer of semiconductor equipment in the world. It's taking advantage of the growth in green technology, as it recently announced a partnership with Arrowhead Research subsidiary Unidym to develop equipment that can manufacture solar cells and carbon displays.
Industry: Imaging, photographic equipment
CEO: Antonio M. Perez
Total patents 2005-2009: 2,374
Total employees: 20,250
Market Cap: $1.28 billion
Notable breakthrough: Kodak has been struggling to keep up with competitive developments in the digital photography industry, but it dominated photography in the U.S. during the 20th century. Its most famous product was Kodachrome, a type of color film that became the first commercially successful, mass-marketed film.
Paul Sakuma / AP Photo
Industry: Electronic instruments and controls
CEO: William P. Sullivan
Total patents 2005-2009: 1,748
Total employees: 16,000
Market Cap: $10.27 billion
Notable breakthrough: Agilent Technologies was created in 1999, when it was broken off from Hewlett-Packard in an IPO. It focuses on creativity and innovation with its Agilent Labs division, which has continued H-P Labs' earlier revolutionary developments in traffic-monitoring technology.
AP Photo
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Paul S. Otellini
Total patents 2005-2009: 8,678
Total employees: 79,900
Market Cap: $111.45 billion
Notable breakthrough: One of the most recognizable tech brands in the world, Intel is also one of the most prevalent, found in the majority of personal computers in the U.S. The company created the first microprocessor chip for commercial use in 1971.
Laura Rauch / AP Photo
Industry: Fiber optics
CEO: Eitan Gertel
Total patents 2005-2009: 543
Total employees: 5,004
Market Cap: $0.91 billion
Notable breakthrough: Sunnyvale, California-based Finisar has seen increased demand for its technology as the increase of video usage requires more bandwidth capabillities. At the start of this year, it demonstrated an Ethernet connection that can transmit at 100 Gb/second—10 times the speed of the current standard.
Industry: Casinos and gaming
CEO: Patti S. Hart
Total patents 2005-2009: 531
Total employees: 5,100
Market Cap: $5.64 billion
Notable breakthrough: IGT is the leading slot machine maker, which goes well past bells and whistles. Its ticket-in, ticket-out technology provides users with barcoded slips of paper that can be redeemed for cash or used in other slot machines.
Industry: Software and programming
CEO: Lip-Bu Tan
Total patents 2005-2009: 432
Total employees: 4,400
Market Cap: $1.65 billion
Notable breakthrough: Cadence produces software and services for electronic design firms. Another claim to fame: lawsuits. Its six-year lawsuit with Avanti Corporation, in which it claimed the competing electronic design company stole code, ended in Avanti executives pleading no contest and coughing up millions in restitution.
Industry: Communications equipment
CEO: Paul E. Jacobs
Total patents 2005-2009: 1,519
Total employees: 16,100
Market Cap: 56.95 billion
Notable breakthrough: Qualcomm is the company behind particular standards of 3G mobile technology: CDMA2000 and CDMA EV-DO.
Paul Sakuma / AP Photo
Industry: Software and programming
CEO: Steven A. Ballmer
Total patents 2005-2009: 8,773
Total employees: 93,000
Market Cap: $218.57 billion
Notable breakthrough: Microsoft, famously, introduced one of the most revolutionary products in business history, the Windows operating system. The most recent version available is Windows 7.
Lauren Victoria Burke / AP Photo
Industry: Consumer electronics, semiconductors
CEO: Yun Wu Lee & Ji Seong Choi
Total patents 2005-2009: 13,909
Total employees: 150,000
Market Cap: $9.04 billion
Notable breakthrough: The present iteration of Samsung was formed by the merging of the appliance giant and the semiconductor company in the late 1980s. It's the world's largest memory chip manufacturer.
Isaac Brekken / AP Photo
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Lixing Cai
Total patents 2005-2009: 2,055
Total employees: 23,020
Market Cap: $49.53 billion
Notable breakthrough: The Taiwan-based company offers many different types of products that deal with semiconductors, but is perhaps most well-known for it's "logic" line of semiconductors that control electronic systems by processing digital data.
AP Photo
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Richard P. Wallace
Total patents 2005-2009: 436
Total employees: 4,900
Market Cap: $4.9 billion
Notable breakthrough: Prior to the merger that created KLA-Tencor, Tencor Instruments created the Surfscan in the 1980s, a product that remains among the products offered. Surfscan is an inspection tool used to inspect the surfaces of a wafer, part of the process in manufacturing semiconductor materials.
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Jerald G. Fishman
Total patents 2005-2009: 617
Total employees: 8,300
Market Cap: $8.46 billion
Notable breakthrough: Based in Massachusetts, Analog Devices introduced a new kind of microphone this year that can offer clearer voice quality and better voice recognition for use in portable phones and mobile electronics.
Industry: Electronics
Chairman: Seiji Hanaoka
Total patents 2005-2009: 5,836
Total employees: 79,381
Market Cap: $226.97 billion
Notable breakthrough: One of its most lucrative aspects of its business is also, of course, one that it protects most vigilantly—print cartridge technology. From how fluid is dispersed to how pressure is regulated, Seiko has developed and litigated countless patents related to cartridges in order to maintain an edge over competitors.
Industry: Electronics
CEO: Hideichi Kawasaki
Total patents 2005-2009: 1,224
Total employees: 17,579
Market Cap: $.61 billion
Notable breakthrough: The company responsible for manufacturing the first telephone in Japan has survived by building an international, multi-platform business. OKI Electric announced last year that they developed the world's first micro-surge protector, dubbed the eco Surge, that reduces power consumption and noise.
Industry: Semiconductors
CEO: Yukio Sakamoto
Total patents 2005-2009: 419
Total employees: 6,055
Market Cap: $3.65 billion
Notable breakthrough: In April, Elpida announced it developed the first 4Gb SDRAM, a type of personal-computer memory, which uses 30 percent less power than two 2Gb SDRAMs. It has the potential to enable servers and memory systems to reduce overall power consumption.
Industry: Consumer electronics
CEO: Katsuhiko Machida
Total patents 2005-2009: 3,683
Total employees: 54,384
Market Cap: $11.18 billion
Notable breakthrough: For almost three years, Sharp battled Samsung—the world's largest supplier of LCDs by sales—in multinational feuds over LCD patents. The saga culminated this spring in an undisclosed settlement that ended in favor of Sharp, after the U.S. International Trade Commission and a court in The Hague both ruled that Samsung had infringed on Sharp's patents.
Katsumi Kasahara / AP Photo
Industry: Conglomerate (electronics, sports equipment, machinery, musical instruments)
President: Mitsuru Umemura
Total patents 2005-2009: 1,345
Total employees: 20,151
Market Cap: $175.34 billion
Notable breakthrough: Yamaha pioneered the use of a continuously variable transmission, which was previously commonplace in vehicles, for use in off-road motorcycles via a patent application in 2008. The single-cylinder engine offers more consistent acceleration than other transmissions more commonly used in dirt bikes.
Branimir Kvartuc / AP Photo
Industry: LCD displays
CEO: Yeong Su Gwon
Total patents 2005-2009: 1,370
Total employees: 20,526
Market Cap: $11.51 billion
Notable breakthrough: With Samsung, LG has more than half of the LCD market cornered. One interesting avenue of development: flexible displays, which could be used in mobile devices in the future. It submitted a patent application on the technology earlier this year.
Paul Sakuma / AP Photo
Industry: Photographic equipment
CEO: Shigetaka Komori
Total patents 2005-2009: 4,789
Total employees: 75,333
Market Cap: $13.7 billion
Notable breakthrough: Fujifilm has been developing technology that can distinguish and correct colors for an ever-wider range of hues. A recent patent ensures that magentas and yellows are reduced in color reversal film to ensure clearer cyan hues on film.
Paul Sakuma / AP Photo
Industry: Communications equipment
CEO: Robert E. Switz
Total patents 2005-2009: 528
Total employees: 9,050
Market Cap: $0.72 billion
Notable breakthrough: Its antenna and fiber infrastructure systems have unique value in a range of marketplaces. In Mecca, antenna systems in the King Abdul Aziz Endowment ensure wireless service throughout the complex that stretches 16 million square feet.
AP Photo
Industry: Networking hardware
CEO: Kevin R. Johnson
Total patents 2005-2009: 432
Total employees: 7,453
Market Cap: $12.62 billion
Notable breakthrough: Much like the engineers and technologists in the company, Juniper's patent litigation team is creative. When Peter Shipley of Enhanced Security Research sued the company for patent infringement last year, instead of retaliating with a patent infringement of its own against—a very common tactic in patent litigation—Juniper fired back with a false marketing lawsuit since Shipley was advertising his patents as a way to market unrelated services.
AP Photo
Industry: Electronic equipment
CEO: Chi Hun Choi
Total patents 2005-2009: 1,455
Total employees: 25,230
Market Cap: $6.31 billion
Notable breakthrough: Known as the company that developed the first multi-display tube for digital TVs and computers in 2001, Samsung SDI has since refocused its corporate concentration on the growing battery market. A patent application filed this spring dealt with mesoporous carbon, a highly efficient fuel-cell electrode.
Le Jin-Man / AP Photo
Industry: Digital Imaging, Photography
CEO: Fujio Mitarai
Total patents 2005-2009: 10,485
Total employees: 186,897
Market Cap: $49.18 billion
Notable breakthrough: In a sea of innovative camera lenses and viewfinders, a patent application filed by the company last fall went one step further into Jetson territory: voice recognition controls in cameras for shooting and image review. With the flick of a tongue, flash settings, drive modes and display brightness could be changed.
AP Photo
Industry: Computer peripherals
CEO: Paul J. Curlander
Total patents 2005-2009: 649
Total employees: 11,900
Market Cap: $2.90 billion
Notable breakthrough: A printer company extraordinaire, most of Lexmark's patents relate to the fine points of everything fluid jetting devices and fusers. In an interesting deal with Microsoft announced last year, the two companies will share patents. Under the arrangement, Lexmark has access to a range of Mircosoft's software and Microsoft can use Lexmark's patents for printers and other devices.
Daniel Acker / Getty Images
Register below to read this article for free or subscribe
to unlock unlimited access to The Daily Beast.
Monthly
$1
First month then $5.99/month
Annual
$35
First year then $59.99/year
Premium
$79
First year then $119.99/year
*Substack access provided by the next business day, using your subscription email. Choosing the Premium plan constitutes your permission to share your subscription email with Substack and your agreement to Substack’s Privacy Policy.
Already have an account? Sign In
Looks like you already have a subscription!
You're all set!
Thanks for subscribing.