Zut alors: Not a single UK company makes the Top 100 Global Innovators list again – but French firms make up 10 per cent of the list
The UK may be leading the way when it comes to sectors such as fintech – but it turns out the rest of the world beats us when it comes to innovation. For the fourth year in a row, not a single UK company has been included in the Top 100 Global Innovators list.
The list, compiled by Thomson Reuters, named companies including Google, Post-It Note maker 3M and Nike among the world's most innovative firms.
For the first time, US online retail giant Amazon is included in the rankings, while Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Texas Instruments have all dropped out.
Read more: Britain must up its R&D spend – or we'll be left behind in the innovation race
But despite innovations by UK companies such as Dyson and ARM, which the organisation said were both "near misses" for the top 100, the UK failed to make an appearance in the list.
Meanwhile, in news likely to bruise the egos of UK inventors everywhere, France was named Europe's most innovative country, with 10 per cent of the companies in the rankings, including energy provider Alstom, construction company Saint-Gobain and aerospace giant Safran all included in the list.
Thomson Reuters said the UK's gross domestic expenditure on research and development compared pretty poorly with its rivals': 1.63 per cent, against Japan's 3.47 per cent and France's 2.23 per cent. It also pointed out that government incentives to increase the number of patents filed by UK companies, such as Patent Box legislation, haven't been in place long enough to have a "significant impact".
To be fair, this is hardly surprising. Figures by the EU's official statistics body, Eurostat, published in July, showed the UK applied for 80 patents per million inhabitants – below the EU average of 109 and France's 126, and way below Sweden's 290.
And more figures, by the European Patent Office, found only three UK companies filed more than 100 patent applications in 2014. That's a pretty poor show for a country that considers itself tech-savvy.