Our Research Methodology

At our team at the IMD business school, we’ve been tracking how likely a firm is to successfully move toward a new knowledge discipline in its effort to prepare for the future. We introduced the Future Readiness Indicator to measure how prepared for a changing future companies are sector by sector. Currently we covered the Future Readiness Indicator for six industries: Automotive, Consumer Packaged Goods, Fashion, Finance, Pharmaceutical, and Technology.

We have included the top key players by revenues in each industry. The ranking is based on seven main factors*: (1) financial fundamentals, (2) investors’ expectations of future growth, (3) business diversity, (4) employee diversity/ESG, (5) research and development, (6) early results of innovation efforts, and (7) cash and debt. These seven main factors, which carry the same weight in the overall result, comprise 33* variables.

All of our variables are hard data; that is, they are publicly available on company websites, annual reports, press releases, news stories, and special reports on topics such as corporate social responsibility. For press counts data, we consulted Factiva, a global news database that covers various premium sources, and counted the number of press releases on each trending topic previously identified in this industry for the past three years (e.g., 2018-2020). The data was also supplemented by third-party data sources from CrunchBase, which specializes in the topic of corporate ventures, Espacenet, which specializes in patent search, Sustainalytics, a leading independent ESG rating company, and Google trends.

To calculate the Indicator, first, we collected historical data for each company. Then we performed calculations for each variable (e.g., 3Y CAGR) before we standardized the criteria data. Next, we aggregated variables to the main factors and then determined the overall ranking. For the purpose of comparison, we ranked each company from 1 (best) to n (worst, n=sample size) on a scale of 1 to 100.

In the spirit of openness that’ll encourage research collaboration, you can find out more about our variables for industries like automotive, consumer packaged goods, financial services, fashion, as well as technology below.

Please contact us if you would like to learn more about our methodology.

* Factors are subject to change by industry, thus the number of variables may vary across industries.
** Data treated differently according to the nature of business (e.g., bank vs. payment company)