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R&D investment rose worldwide, new global scoreboards show.

Article Excerpt
The United States, European Union and Japan accounted for 95 percent of the R&D expenditure by the world's top 1,400 R&D-investing companies in 2007/08, and both the U.S. and EU groups of companies increased R&D spending faster than the Japanese group. Moreover, companies that performed a substantial fraction of their R&D in facilities outside their home countries appeared to show above-average business performance.

These are among the highlights of two newly published R&D Scoreboards. The first, published on October 15, 2008, was the EU Industrial R&D Scoreboard (1), which contains full details and analysis of the world's 1,402 largest R&D investors. The second, released on October 21, was the Booz & Co (previously Booz Allen) Global Innovation 1000 (2), which provides analysis and commentary on the world's top 1,000 R&D investors.

The EU Scoreboard gives details of the R&D, Capex, operating profit, sales, employees, market cap, and key ratios for each of the top 1,402 companies, plus details of an additional 598 smaller EU companies to make 2,000 in all. The Booz & Co Scoreboard gives numerical data only for the top 20 R&D-investing companies although its analysis is based on data for the entire 1,000. Both Scoreboards take their data from the annual reports of the companies listed in them.

Data Collection

A quick glance at the top 20 companies in these two Scoreboards shows a surprising number of differences but these can be explained by the different data collection methodologies. For example, the top...

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