Essilor was recently named amongst the World’s 30 Most Innovative Companies for the second year running by US magazine Forbes. Once again recognizing the group’s process of continuous innovation in the production of eyeglass lenses, this year the American magazine ranked Essilor:
- 28th worldwide, ahead of companies such as Pepsi (58th) and Unilever (61st)
- 4th in Europe
- 3rd in France
“Innovation, the driver of Essilor’s growth for more than 160 years, underpins our performance and enables us to offer consumers the best solutions in corrective opti
cs. We are proud of this latest recognition by Forbes, which I want to share with our teams working around the world and committed to our mission of improving vision”, commented Hubert Sagnières, Essilor’s Chairman and CEO.
With three Innovation and Technology Centers and 550 researchers around the world developing the lenses of the future, and an investment of €150 million each year, Essilor claims to put innovation at the heart of its growth strategy. As a result, in an industry that is still young and where the innovation curve is promising, some 45% of Essilor’s sales every year come from products that have been launched within the past three years.
In 2011-12, Essilor launched three major innovations:
- the first high-performance anti-fog lenses, Optifog;
- Crizal UV, the first corrective lens to offer effective UV protection to the eye;
- and lastly the Varilux S series, a new step for progressive lenses, offering presbyopes unlimited vision.
According to the company spokesperson, in its approach to innovation the Group draws on an extensive network of international partnerships with universities, industrial companies and specialists in cutting-edge technologies, such as the Institut de la V
ision and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, the Nikon-Essilor International Joint Research Center, a joint venture researching into breakthrough technologies, and the University of Montreal in Canada.
About the Forbes Most Innovative Companies List
“The World’s Most Innovative Companies” list aims to identify the leading-edge corporations most likely to succeed now and in the future. It is based on
an eight-year study by Harvard Business School professor and master of disruptive innovation Clayton M. Christensen, along with colleagues Jeff Dyer, a professor at Brigham Young University, and Hal B Gregersen, a professor of leadership at INSEAD, the three co-authors of the recently published book “The Innovator’s DNA”. The rankings are based on an assessment of the “innovation premium” that the stock market places on each company for anticipated or expected innovation.
The full ranking is available at: http://www.forbes.com/innovative-companies/list
