Chapter 21 The Innovation Revolution: Money Isn't Everything

The corporate pursuit of innovation has long been an exercise based on confidence: the more money spent, the more profits will be made. Is your business losing out to faster-moving competitors?Or lose out in the high-cost competition of globalization?Is your business's sales growth rate declining?Are profit margins shrinking?Would you like to let Wall Street know that you care about growing your business?You might think "don't worry, just increase the R&D budget and all these problems will be solved. A new product or service will be able to turn this around" - but will they?

It turns out that turning things around isn't that easy.A recent study we conducted called the Booz Allen Global Innovation 1000—the 1,000 public companies worldwide that spend the most on research and development—may make you doubt that view.This study, which we believe is the most comprehensive assessment to date of the impact of R&D efforts on firm performance, finds that non-monetary factors may be more important for firm return on investment in innovation (ROI2).Key findings of this study include: *Capital investment may not necessarily be exchanged for performance.There was no statistically significant correlation between the level of corporate R&D spending and key economic indicators of corporate success, including sales growth, gross profit, operating profit, corporate profit, market capitalization, and total shareholder return .

*The size of the business is very important.The size of the business can bring advantages.Larger organizations are able to invest a smaller percentage of revenue in R&D without having a noticeable impact on business performance. * Too much is not beneficial, too little is harmful.Spending more is not necessarily beneficial, but spending too little is definitely harmful. *There is no clear standard as to what level of spending should be sufficient.However, the level of R&D budgets of various companies has not been concentrated to form a fixed pattern, and even varies widely within the industry.This situation suggests that no single approach to innovation development spending is universally recognized as the most effective strategy.

*It is the process that matters, not the quantity.Excellent performance seems to be brought about by an efficient organizational innovation process—that is, the process of choosing research directions and conducting research—rather than from the relative or absolute amount of its innovation investment. *Collaboration is key.The relationship between effort and performance is strongest in areas dominated by research and development, such as product design, and weakest in areas such as merchandising, where cross-functional collaboration is most difficult. These findings call to mind some very familiar failure scenarios.Hard-working R&D personnel spend time and money on the wrong projects; production, marketing, and sales personnel miss out on promising products and services; while senior management and decision makers invest more money in R&D efforts , and mistakenly believe that this can change the situation.When it comes to investing in innovation, it seems that in many cases, less investment yields more benefits.

The idea that higher R&D spending can translate into a competitive advantage has been popular for decades, and it's becoming especially prevalent now.You can pick up a business magazine or a newspaper and find plenty of evidence of how good a bigger budget can be, both in business and in national competition. This view is likely a continuation of some past thinking.In the era of simpler products, less mature technological processes, and less intense competition, companies produced new products, and of course their customers would come to buy these new products.R&D, production, marketing, and sales departments only need to complete their own work, and rarely need to conduct cross-departmental management and operation activities.

But the environment around us has undergone earth-shaking changes.Products have shorter life cycles, which allows for a faster flow of new product projects.Customer demands for product features make products extremely complex.Logically, these factors greatly increase the competitive value of a fast and effective innovation engine.But of all the core functions of most businesses, the management of innovation is perhaps the most incoherent and disciplined. By comparing corporate R&D investment with corporate economic performance, we are able to judge the innovation efficiency of companies in the Global Innovation 1000 study.Although their innovation investment levels vary greatly, it can be seen from the absolute value of these enterprises' investment funds that they are all fully committed to innovation work.But the decoupling between R&D investment and performance levels also shows that this kind of all-out commitment does not guarantee business success.

Fortunately, our analysis of top performers also provides important clues about how we can improve the efficiency of innovation.The analysis revealed that organizations that wish to gain an innovation edge must rely more on creativity, analysis, and disciplined management than on simple confidence. In mid-2005, we undertook an analysis of the top 1,000 global R&D spenders in order to gain a better understanding of how an organization can maximize its return on investment in innovation.Because such an analysis would require extremely extensive comparative data on R&D spending and financial performance over time, we focused our work on publicly traded companies.We first ranked the 1,000 firms based on their R&D expenditures reported in their 2004 financial statements.Therefore, the Global Innovation 1000 research project ignores private companies, as well as public companies that do not disclose their R&D expenditures.For this reason, most financial services firms and retailers were excluded from the study.

The 1,000 companies in the Global Innovation 1000 study invested a total of US$384 billion in R&D in 2004, an annual growth rate of 6.5% since 1999.The pace of investment is still accelerating—an annual growth rate of 11.0 percent since 2002.Research and development spending follows a highly concentrated pattern.The top 2,000 companies in R&D spending combined spent $410 billion—only $26 billion, or 2.6 percent, more than the top 1,000 spent on R&D.We estimate that the top 1,000 global R&D spenders account for 80-90% of global corporate R&D spending and about 60% of global R&D spending, which also includes government R&D spending.

So what exactly did the huge R&D spending of the 1,000 companies in the Global Innovation 1000 study bring? While there are indeed some isolated success stories, we find few statistically significant relationships between R&D spending and operating performance.There is no statistically significant correlation between the level of firm R&D spending and key economic indicators of firm success. For the purposes of our analysis, we use the ratio of R&D expenditures to sales as the primary measure of expenditures, that is, the proportion of an organization's revenue that is devoted to R&D.Although this indicator has its limitations, it is widely used, familiar, and relevant information is publicly available.Comparisons using this metric can also reveal the relative importance of innovation in different industry sectors (for example, pharmaceutical companies have a higher R&D spending-to-revenue ratio than public infrastructure).This indicator also eliminates the bias and influence of firm size on the research.For example, Intel Corporation (#12 out of 1000 companies, note: numbers in parentheses indicate each company’s rank in the Booz Allen Global Innovation 1000 research program) spends more on R&D than Cymer Corporation (#766) 80 times, but the ratio of their R&D expenditures to sales is 14%; Ford (#3) spends 130 times more on R&D than NissinKogyo (#790), but their R&D expenditures are equal to sales The rate is 4.3%.Finally, the R&D spending-to-sales ratio can be indexed across industries, allowing for more meaningful analytical comparisons of the Global Innovation 1000 as a whole.

Contrary to conventional assumptions, the level of R&D spending of the 1,000 companies in the Global Innovation 1000 study has no significant impact on their sales growth, gross profit, operating profit, corporate profit, market capitalization, or total shareholder return.Whether we look at R&D as a driving or lagging indicator, looking at absolute spend or trends in performance metrics, and regardless of the time horizon, we always come to the same conclusion (see Exhibit 1) The above distribution plot shows that there is no correlation between the sales growth rate (Y-axis) and the indexed R&D-to-Sales ratio (R&D-to-Sales) of the 1000 largest global innovation companies between 1999 and 2004. R2=0.0079 shows that the distribution is random.Similarly, there is no relationship between the R&D-to-sales ratio and growth in gross profit, operating profit, and net profit, market capitalization, and total shareholder return.

This is a major discovery.Although no one fully understands the process by which innovation is a "black box" effort that translates R&D investment into business performance, this research suggests that strategies that rely on increasing investment in innovation are likely to fail to deliver the desired performance . We only found one indicator that is strongly correlated with the R&D investment rate, which is the gross profit margin.Gross profit margin is the ratio of the amount to revenue after deducting the cost of materials, labor, production, direct transportation, and other expenses incurred in the production of a product or the provision of a service. The positive correlation between R&D expenditure and gross profit rate is very obvious. The median gross profit rate of the top 500 companies in terms of R&D expenditure/sales ratio is 40% higher than that of the bottom 500 companies.Across the 10 industries we assessed, all exhibited the same pattern, although the level of performance improvement varied across industries. Gross profit level is an indicator that reflects the degree of product differentiation and the level of production costs.Among all the 2004 Global Innovation 1000 studies, gross margin was the only financial measure that was statistically significantly correlated with the median R&D expenditure/sales ratio.As shown in this graph, firms with a higher R&D spending ratio than the median (right column) have higher gross margins than companies with a lower R&D spending ratio (left column). Among all the performance evaluation indicators we studied, gross profit margin is controlled and influenced by R&D work skills to the greatest extent.It has long been clear to innovation researchers that 70% of the final cost of a product (as reflected in gross margin expenditure) comes from design decisions based on R&D efforts, such as the degree to which components are standardized, which technology is critical to which supplier to use specifications, and the level of complexity of the product.The relationship between gross profit and R&D spending levels in this study suggests that the R&D department has only done its traditional but limited job of "making a better mousetrap": that is, providing computer), or a product or service that can be sold with added value (such as a BMW car), or both (such as Apple’s iPod). But these so-called "mouse traps," while better, have no way of catching more mice.The created product or service cannot always improve business performance.Once you account for all costs that are not directly related to the product or service—for example, marketing, sales, and general overhead—the gross profit benefit is completely overshadowed by the correlation between R&D spending and business performance. will also disappear completely. The case of Sony Corporation (#14) and its Betamax videotape format is a classic example. Betamax, while high in quality, would lose out to the VHS format, largely because more corporate products supported the latter format—a factor that had nothing to do with R&D spending per se.Of course, the Betamax VCRs sold generated very attractive margins, but the total volume sold was not enough to generate a significant improvement in Sony's performance.Especially in the technical field, the high quality of a certain product or service may mask shortcomings in other parts of the enterprise system.In short, if an enterprise hopes to achieve enterprise development through innovation, it is more important to develop a reliable business model and excellent cross-functional department coordination ability, rather than simply increasing the R&D budget. Numerous studies have discussed the advantages of fast-moving market entrants.But, contrary to popular belief, the data show that incumbents also have a huge advantage: scale. Compared with enterprises with a medium-to-lower scale, the investment in research and development of above-medium-sized enterprises tends to account for a smaller proportion of their income.In fact, the Global Innovation Research 1000 study shows that the bottom 500 companies, based on the ratio of R&D spending to sales, have 2.5 times the sales of the top 500 companies.As for different industries, 9 out of 10 industries we studied fit this situation.In the consumer goods industry, for example, companies with income levels above the median were twice as likely to rank in the bottom 50% when sorted by the ratio of R&D spending to sales. The ratio of R&D expenditure to sales is the ratio of a company's revenue spent on R&D to its total revenue.In 9 of the 10 industries we studied, relatively small firms (left column) spent more on R&D than relatively large firms (right column) in 2004.This model demonstrates the value of scale: In order to meet the minimum level of innovation spending required by its industry, smaller firms must devote a greater proportion of their revenues to research and development. While larger firms may spend a smaller proportion of their R&D spending, they will not be hurt by thrift.Their performance measures, such as sales growth, profit margins, and market value growth, were not statistically significantly different from those of smaller firms with relatively high R&D expenditures. If spending more doesn't bring more benefits, should the R&D budget be cut?It is possible, however, that budget cuts should be made with great caution.In the Global Innovation 1000 study, it was found that both overspending and underspending may cause the decoupling of R&D spending and corporate performance. Compared with other companies, the bottom 10% of companies in the ratio of R&D expenditure to sales have worse performance.Not only are their gross profits, gross margins, and shareholder returns not as good as those of the top 10% of companies, they are even worse than the middle 80% of companies. The relative performance of the three groups of R&D spending firms can be seen: the bottom 10% of firms ranked according to the ratio of R&D spending to sales (left column, with a performance index of 1.0), the middle 80% (middle column), and Top 10% spenders (right column).Both the top and middle groups outperformed the bottom 10%.This figure shows that there is relative consistency among the four evaluation indicators.Although it is often assumed that firms in the top 10 percent of R&D spenders outperform firms with middling R&D spending, our study found no significant difference between the performance of these two groups. But we found signs that the top 10 percent of companies in the Global Innovation 1000 study may also be spending too much.Although there were differences in performance between the top 10 percent and the middle 80 percent, these differences were not statistically significant. These results give us a very clear hint: Unless you have a clear and very convincing reason, you should avoid being the top or bottom company in R&D spending.For example, companies may overspend for a time to gain a leadership position in a key emerging technology area; they may also underspend for a certain period of time to focus scarce resources on a major product project.However, once these short-term targets are met, companies are more likely to turn around as their R&D spending returns to normal levels. The wider use of partnerships to share the costs and risks of investments can go a long way in reducing the level of R&D investment, as can broad acceptance of ideas from outside the firm.These approaches can help companies that spend too much on R&D to cut spending, and can provide smaller companies with a critical means of overcoming their innovation scale disadvantage. We can think of many examples of once-great companies that, despite their history of innovation and corporate culture of research and development, did not have much return on R&D investments that made them above average.Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center (#101), Xerox Corporation PARC was once famous for its breakthrough innovations, but these innovations did not bring much benefit to Xerox shareholders.Xerox's most famous invention, the Graphical User Interface, was first commercialized by Apple (#148) and then by Microsoft (#1); Xerox's Ethernet protocol for computer communications was also developed for 3Com (#527 ) brought the gospel.Likewise, Bell Laboratories is arguably state property.In the early 1980s, just before a court order broke up its parent company, AT&T, the company spent $2 billion on research and development.Throughout its 80-year history, Bell Labs scientists have created transistors, communications satellites, lasers, and the Unix system—but it wasn't "Mother Bell" who reaped the enormous economic benefits of these discoveries. Ma Bell)". These findings seem to suggest that, at any given moment, a firm can only develop and commercialize a limited number of research programs.Beyond that, corporations provide a public service—a service that may be good for society, but does nothing for shareholders. How much R&D spending is enough? Optimizing innovation spend is a difficult job, but it is critical to achieving high ROI2.There are statistics that demonstrate the difficulty of the job.If there is a clear industry standard for R&D expenditure, we can speculate on the approximate level of R&D expenditure in any industry in a certain period of time, and fluctuate around this level.However, the Global Innovation 1000 study found that all industries do not appear to follow this pattern, which means that even companies with the highest R&D spending will struggle to find the optimal level of investment. Perhaps as managers gain a better understanding of the true drivers of innovative job performance, we may discover a clearer pattern.It seems that with the increasing knowledge of market analysis, the budget of marketing work has increasingly returned to a reasonable level.The same will eventually happen to budgets for R&D and innovation, although we don't know when that day will come. A number of potential overspending identified in this study echoes previous research by Booz Allen Vice President Alexander Kandybin, who demonstrated that the financial return on investment in innovation work depends on the efficiency of the innovation process: a certain The method by which an enterprise is generated from various ideas to selection, development, and commercialization.Toyota's (#5) innovation efficiency is regarded by its competitors as the industry benchmark, and Toyota's R&D spending ranks only third in the automotive industry.Because the company focuses on product and process improvement, the company's product development cycle time is the shortest in the industry, and it is in a leading position in the field of hybrid technology, while its market value is higher than that of the next three large automobiles Total market capitalization of manufacturers (ranked by market capitalization) ($167 billion vs $160 billion) (October 2005). At the level of R&D expenditure found in the Global Innovation 1000 study, each company can maximize the return on its innovation investment through more optimized concept design, project selection, development and commercialization processes.The problem that must then be addressed is to identify the focus areas where process improvements can bring the greatest upward movement on the growth curve. For Apple in 1996, the problem was investment program management.After Steve Jobs returned to the CEO throne, he conducted a large-scale evaluation of the company's research and development efforts.Since then, Apple has cut a large number of projects and shifted its development resources to the few products with the greatest potential. After this innovation mechanism was launched, it eventually created products such as the iMac, iBook, iPod, and iTunes.The experience has helped Apple regain its reputation as the world's most innovative company.Apple has achieved these feats, however, by using an intelligent filter rather than flooding new products with good and bad.Apple's R&D spending-to-sales ratio of 5.9 percent in 2004 was below the computer industry average of 7.6 percent and remained below the industry average over the five-year period we studied (1999 to 2004).In addition, Apple invested $489 million in R&D, which is not even 1/10 of that of IBM (#9), which ranks first in R&D expenditure in the computer and electronics industry. (The period covered in this study was before IBM sold its personal computer business to Lenovo.) Successful innovation requires a high level of cross-functional collaboration between R&D, marketing, sales, service, and production.Failure to do so can have disastrous consequences for the success of the innovation process: * Conceive the design.Customer knowledge gained from marketing, sales, and service personnel is critical to identifying opportunities for new products and services. * Item selection.Reliable estimates of sales and potential profits by marketers enable developers to select projects with value propositions most likely to succeed in the market. * Development.Marketing staff can also provide an in-depth understanding of customer needs, while production departments and suppliers can provide key opinions on production processes and efficient use of resources. * Commoditization.A product or service can only be delivered when all functions—including R&D, marketing, production, sales and service—are integrated as one team, each function plays its part, and its value proposition is realized through seamless collaboration. be successful. So, what can an organization do?Based on the in-depth observation of innovation work in the real world and the analysis results of the Booz Allen Global Innovation 1000, we found that highly efficient innovative companies should do the following four things well: 1.Align innovation strategy with corporate strategy.Surprisingly, the two are often hard to come by.Once the two are aligned, all functional departments can be motivated to jointly support the realization of corporate strategic goals. 2.Make the right choice.This important work requires effective management not only of the portfolio of projects and technologies that maximize future profits, but also of the business models used to bring these products or services to market.Any project that is about to be "approved" should be evaluated in terms of customer needs and development costs. 3.Manage channels quickly and efficiently.Forming a clear process in the management of innovation work (such as project management standards) and the support of innovation work (such as knowledge management) is a very critical task. 4.Reorganize the "innovative DNA" of the enterprise to promote the growth of enterprise performance.According to extensive recent research by Booz Allen and other consulting firms, an organization's DNA consists of its structures and systems, and the degree to which these elements are aligned with strategy.Businesses should do some self-examination: Are there adequate incentives to achieve the desired performance?Is the allocation of corporate governance and decision-making power clearly aligned?Is the structure of the reporting relationship to improve the efficiency of the process and support the strategy of the enterprise?Are there open channels within the company to share knowledge about innovation and productivity? Different organizations will have their own choices in these aspects, so they also have different organizational DNA.There is a very clear link between a firm's organizational DNA and innovation performance outcomes: firms with healthy organizational DNA will outperform firms with abnormal DNA significantly. The Global Innovation 1000 study found that among the seven performance indicators mentioned above, if there are six out-performing companies, they usually follow the four steps described above. These companies, and similar high-performing businesses, have learned that the risks involved in leaving business performance to chance are simply too high.For other companies, the results of the Booz Allen Global Innovation 1000 study should be a wake-up call.Investment in R&D may bring prestige to the business, or it may confer other benefits, but for most businesses the primary obligation should be to create value for shareholders.Regulated monopolies have also sometimes justified excessive investment in innovation when bargaining with government regulators, explicitly or implicitly, as AT&T did with Bell Labs.These organizations create a national benefit, such as increasing the number of skilled trainees and creating a strategic infrastructure that stimulates investment, employment, and strengthens the country's competitive advantage. But for firms competing in a free market, excessive or inefficient R&D spending can drain shareholder returns and ultimately drain resources that could be used for future innovation efforts.Leaders of these businesses should ask themselves: Are we focusing our energy on the right projects?Do we have sufficient resources and efficiency to realize these projects? As Larry Huston, vice president of innovation and knowledge at Procter & Gamble (#51), pointed out in 2003: "The vast amount of R&D in the United States is unsustainable... R&D spending has grown faster than sales." For policymakers, the findings of the Global Innovation 1000 study raise a number of different questions.If spending on R&D does not guarantee a company's competitiveness, which evaluation criteria can provide the most reasonable guidance for the company's future success?What effective role can governments play in promoting innovative best practices? From every point of view, the traditional concept is wrong.There are no shortcuts to sustainable innovation performance—you can't buy success by paying for it.If you're a business leader, now is the time to roll up your sleeves, open the black box of innovation work, and get back to work.The future viability of the business is all about it. Booz Allen first identified the top 1,000 global listed companies that spent the most on R&D based on their 2004 spending reports.For a business whose fiscal year does not match the calendar year, if (a) its fiscal year ends before June 2005 and (b) its results for fiscal year 2005 have been announced; the fiscal year shall be counted as fiscal year 2004 ; in other cases, the company's 2004 financial year performance is applied. We then obtained a series of financial metrics used in the Global Innovation 1000 study over the past six years: revenue, gross profit, SG&A (selling and general and administrative) expenses, operating profit, net profit, capital expenditures, and past R&D expenditure etc.We also added six years of shareholder value metrics to the dataset, including total shareholder return (TSR) as well as market value. According to Bloomberg's industry taxonomy, each company is classified into one of 10 industry sectors, and according to the location of each company's published headquarters, these companies are divided into six country regions.These approaches mean, for example, that DaimlerChrysler (#4) should European firms are counted, and we do not consider consolidated subsidiaries in the rankings for this study.This is the best method we can use, because the R&D expenditure of subsidiaries or regional branches is rarely broken down in corporate financial reports. To make more meaningful comparisons of R&D spending levels across industries, we index each industry's R&D spending level based on the median R&D spending level for that industry.Similarly, in order to avoid the impact of differences in the performance of stock markets in different regions on the results of shareholder return analysis, we adjusted the shareholder return data to show the relative performance of companies compared with leading companies in their regional markets. (All data on R&D expenditures and financial evaluation criteria come from the Bloomberg financial statement database of listed companies; shareholder-related evaluation indicators come from Datastream.) The samples collected by Booz Allen Global Innovation 1000 are diverse, but they are also strictly screened.Enterprise R&D spending varies from as high as $8 billion (Microsoft Corporation) to as low as $39 million (McCormick & Company (#1000)).As shown by the span of spending, R&D spending in the Global Innovation 1000 study is highly concentrated, with the top 100 companies accounting for 64% of total spending. On average, companies in the Global Innovation 1000 study spend 4.2 percent of their total revenue on R&D.This average has been relatively problematic over the past five years, fluctuating between 4.0% and 4.4%, and more stable over the last three years, between 4.2% and 4.4%. R&D spending is concentrated in the technology, healthcare and automotive sectors.R&D expenditures in the computer and electronics sector topped the list, accounting for 25% of the total R&D expenditures of the world's 1,000 companies with the largest innovation spenders; the medical and health sector followed, accounting for 20%, and the automotive industry accounted for 18%. The annual growth rate of R&D expenditure in the software and Internet field is 15%, and the annual growth rate of the medical and health industry is 12.4%. , Chemicals and Energy (1.4%) industries experienced the slowest growth. The ratio of R&D spending to sales—a measure of the importance of R&D to an industry or firm—shows wide variation.We found that, on average, the Software & Internet (12.7%) and Healthcare (11.2%) industries spent more than the Consumer Goods (2.1%) and Chemicals & Energy (1.5%) industries.In addition, we also found that the gap between industries that spend more on R&D and industries that spend less is widening. While the ratio of R&D spending to sales in the software/Internet and healthcare industries is increasing, the ratio of R&D spending to sales in the chemical and industrial industries is increasing. The ratio of R&D spending to sales has declined. Since companies seldom disclose the breakdown of their R&D costs by region, this study attributes R&D spending to the region where the company is headquartered (see the section “Booz Allen Global Innovation 1000 Study: Research Methodology” on page 14).Therefore, it is difficult to determine where the research and development funds are spent through this study. However, we also found some regional differences in the data.Although companies headquartered in North America, Europe, and Japan accounted for 96.8 percent of all corporate R&D output in the Global Innovation 1000 study, and they are likely to maintain their dominance for the foreseeable future, China, India, and Japan Companies elsewhere in the world are also investing more in research and development.North America (6.6%), Europe (6.2%) and Japan (4.8%) have lower growth rates in the past five years, which may be due to the relatively mature companies in these countries and the fact that their current expenditures are already quite large.The difference between the three major spending regions can be partly explained by their different industry structures, with Japan experiencing lower growth rates for automotive and consumer electronics, and North America and Europe experiencing higher growth rates for software and healthcare. There are also regional differences in the R&D spending-to-sales ratio.China and India are far behind in this regard, spending only 1% of their total revenue on R&D, compared with 4.9% for North American companies, 4% for European companies, and 3.8% for Japanese companies. Global investment in innovation is growing rapidly, which is a very obvious trend.Large corporations are increasingly moving R&D away from their headquarters and gradually spreading it out to local markets and development partners.Although this trend is not necessarily reflected in the published R&D volumes (where firms are classified according to where they are headquartered), it is evident in the activities of the firms that spend the most on R&D themselves.For example, only one of the top 10 R&D spenders recently opened a new factory in the United States, and only two in Europe. The 20 companies with the largest R&D spending reached US$111 billion, accounting for 28% of the total R&D spending in the Global Innovation 1000 study. Most of these 20 companies are American or European companies.Four of them are Japanese companies, and one is Samsung in South Korea. The average R&D spending-to-sales ratio of the top 20 companies (6.8 percent) is almost double that of the remaining 980 companies (3.6 percent).这种差别主要是由于前支出最多的20家企业中大多是医药卫生与计算机公司。 博思艾伦咨询公司（Booz Allen Hamilton）是一家全球性战略和技术咨询公司，于1914年在美国成立，在企业和政府咨询领域内已有92年的历史，并一直处于领先地位。目前是全球最大的咨询公司之一，拥有超过18000名员工，在全球六大洲75个国家和地区拥有100多个办事处，年收入超过37亿美元。《财富》500强企业中的有400多家都是博思艾伦的客户。根据权威机构肯尼迪信息最近的一次独立研究，博思艾伦公司在执行能力、合时性、领导思想和客户印象四个方面均排名第一，并取得了咨询公司综合表现的全球排名第一。目前博思艾伦在中国的上海、北京、香港和台北四地设有办事处。