Future Readiness Indicator

The Future Readiness Indicator is an indicator developed by the IMD Center for Future Readiness. It evaluates a company's preparedness for long-term trends. A systematic methodology generates a composite score for each entity, allowing identification of industry leaders and an examination of their respective behaviors and attitudes. It is developed by Howard Yu, and has been covered by Al-Jazeera Bloomberg TV, and CNBC. The Future Readiness Indicator currently covers 182 companies across six different industries. The latest update was released in May 2024.

History
The Future Readiness Indicator, developed in 2021 (some rankings are backdated to 2010 as analysis only), annually evaluates the adaptability of the largest companies of the world to future challenges.

Methodology
The ranking derives from seven primary, equally-weighted factors: financial indicators, projected growth, business diversification, workforce diversity/ESG, R&D, innovation outcomes, and liquidity/debt status, totaling 33 distinct variables.

The data is publicly accessible from company outlets, news sources, and thematic reports. Factiva, CrunchBase, Espacenet, Sustainalytics, and Google Trends also supplement data collection.

The indicator is calculated by collecting each company's historical data, performing computations for each variable, standardizing criteria data, aggregating variables into main factors, and assigning an overall ranking. Each company is ranked from 1 (best) to n (worst, n=sample size) on a 1-100 scale.