Ricoh has been named to the 2014 Top 100 Global Innovators list by Thomson Reuters, one of the world’s top sources of intelligent information for businesses and professionals.
The Thomson Reuters Top 100 Global Innovators Award honours companies that lead global business by protecting the creative ideas of inventions through intellectual property rights and transforming them into successful forms of business.
“Ricoh continuously invests in research and development (R&D),” says Jacques van Wyk, COO at Ricoh SA. “In fact, the company was created to commercialise the R&D efforts of the Rikagaku Kogyo company in 1936. Today we continue that tradition by anticipating how societies and work styles may change in the future then consider what we can do to offer our customers new value and contribute to sustainability.”
Thomson Reuters analyses data for the past five years based on four principal criteria: overall patent volume, patent grant success rate, global reach of the portfolio, and patent influence as evidenced by citations.
Ricoh was selected due to the high number of patents granted to the company. It shows the percentage of all patent applications that were successfully registered, as well as the global reach of the portfolio, which includes a balance of patents acquired in China, the US, Europe and Japan.
“The Ricoh Group is dedicated to accelerating our efforts in growth areas, such as commercial printing, industry products and the consumer business area, with its main focus being the office business,” says Van Wyk.
Ricoh seeks to create new value by improving technology strengths and customer contact capabilities in anticipation of market changes. Intellectual property (IP) created as a result of those efforts are important assets, which is why the business is committed to creating highly-valued IP, and will continue to work actively to acquire and implement IP rights.
