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Future Readiness Indicator

Future Readiness Indicator

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What is future readiness?

Future readiness refers to a company’s ability to anticipate and adapt to external changes. This readiness is achieved through strategic foresight and tactical adaptability. As the world grows more ambiguous, companies must scale up new capabilities to maintain a competitive edge.

In practical terms, for every business leader to generate a future-ready organization, they must extend their horizon beyond immediate market trends, but to anticipate changes in the future to achieve sustained profitability. It requires a deep understanding of emerging technologies, market shifts, and evolving customer behaviors to ready themselves.
By focusing on innovation in the long term and adaptability in the short run (and noting that it is not an either-or choice, but both), companies can then not only survive but also thrive in extremely dynamic business environments. This proactive approach is key to success and resilience in an ever-changing global economy.

How is future readiness measured?

Our Future Readiness Indicator is designed to measure a company’s readiness for deep, long-term, secular trends. We use a rule-based methodology to arrive at a composite score for each company, enabling us to identify industry leaders. We can then investigate the behaviors and attitudes of specific companies.

The Future Readiness Indicator assesses a company’s preparedness for the future through a comprehensive methodology. This includes evaluating key factors such as financial fundamentals, investor expectations of future growth, business and employee diversity, research and development, innovation, and cash and debt management. 
The methodology uses publicly available data, including company websites, annual metric reports, business models, press releases, and third-party sources like CrunchBase, Espacenet, Sustainalytics, and Google Trends. The ranking is based on these factors and aims to provide a holistic roadmap of a company’s position and potential for future success.

Our latest Future Readiness Indicator includes six industries:

Top Press Highlights

Key insights from the Future Readiness Indicator

It’s hard not to be worried when confronted with surging inflation, energy crisis, supply chain disruption, and geopolitical decoupling. But smart companies don’t simply curtail corporate development. They don’t blindly scale back every innovation during tough times. Instead, they prioritize; they choose. Being future-ready means delivering today and winning tomorrow.

Companies at the forefront of future readiness

Our ranking includes 94 leading revenue-producing firms in Technology, Pharma, and Fashion, evaluated for their capacity to foresee upcoming challenges using our Future Readiness Indicator

Observe Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Meta reshaping the Technology industry. See Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Eli Lilly & Co embracing digital acceleration and direct-to-consumer (D2C) approaches for innovation. And watch Nike, Hermès, and Kering as they lead the way in the fashion realm.

Research methodology

Within each industry, highly ranked companies repeatedly reinvent themselves. They redefine how to design and manufacture their products, or they reimagine how to deliver their services.

Learn more about our research methods on building the Indicator and on A.I. powered text analysis.

Concept of LEAP

Future-ready organizations “leap” repeatedly. They have leaped from their historic areas of expertise to new knowledge: 

  • They are outward-looking.
  • They are curious.
  • They assimilate new concepts from other industries. 

Learn more about the concept of leaping.

What does a future-ready company look like?

A future-ready company is characterized by its ability to scale new capabilities faster than competitors. They make tactical decisions to ensure short-term performance while simultaneously transforming for the future. That is, winning now, winning tomorrow. Such preparedness for disruptions also serves as a source of resilience during a crisis.

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