OEMs celebrated as Clarivate Top 100 Global Innovators

March 13, 2025

Brother Industries, Ltd., Ricoh, Epson and Kyocera announced that they were selected for the “Clarivate Top 100 Global Innovators 2025” as one of the 100 organisations leading the world in technology research and innovation.

Clarivate Top 100 Global Innovators is a list of the world’s top 100 organisations leading the world in technology research and innovation, which are selected once annually based on patent data that Clarivate holds.

For this year’s selection, five factors of registered patents were used for score calculation: influence, success, investment, and rarity in addition to quantity. Among these factors, Brother achieved a particularly high score for “success”, which led to this award.

This marks the eighth time that Brother has received this award, sixth selection overall and its fourth consecutive inclusion since 2022, the 12th time that Epson has been named to the list since its inception in 2012 and Kyocera’s ninth appearance, with 2025 marking the fourth consecutive year.

Toshihiko Kobayashi, General Administrative Manager of the Intellectual Property Division, Epson commented: “We are deeply honoured to be selected as one of the Top 100 Global Innovators. In March 2021, we announced our strategic corporate vision, Epson 25 Renewed. Fiscal year 2025 marks the final year of this vision. Epson always leveraged its proprietary technologies to solve societal issues. However, under Epson 25 Renewed, we have shifted our focus from doing everything in-house to emphasizing co-creation with like-minded partners.

“These cooperative relationships enable us to swiftly create new value. I believe that intellectual property is a powerful tool for facilitating such co-creation. The reason is that possessing strong intellectual property rights serves as a ticket to building co-creation relationships with excellent, capable partner companies. Moving forward, we will continue to protect our proprietary technologies that solve societal issues through intellectual property rights and, using this ticket, work together with like-minded companies to address societal challenges.”

In 2025, a total of 33 Japanese companies were selected as part of the top 100.