Is the most innovative firm of the world really innovative?

The essence of the knowledge economy is the permanent innovational process and implementation of intensive development factors. Decision-making about innovation is strategic and belongs to the most crucial factors. It is thus important to use sufficiently universal, practicable, and well-interpretable quality analysis to determine how successful an innovation is. The paper suggests the methodology for evaluating process and organizational innovation and does not require a great amount of information – only data about company costs and revenues as the inputs which are easily ascertainable. The outputs of the method are the values of  intensite and extensite dynamic parameters. The dynamic intensive parameter evaluates the share of the change of the intensive factors on firm development whereas the dynamic extensive parameter fulfils the same function for the change in extensive factors. The sum of both parameters equals one or 100 %. The parameters are able to describe all possible firm developments which are summarized in the paper. The proposed methodology has been applied to the development analysis of the company Nike and the comparison of 7 prominent companies of the United States that are seen as innovative ones. Our analysis however shows that development is primarily based on the extensive factors. Even Nike focuses on the development of extensive factors as it relies on a cheap labor force – their products are made especially in East Asia, where there is plenty of cheap labor. The most intensive firm is, maybe surprisingly, Ford Motor. The increase of intensive factors compensates and even outweighs the decline of extensive factors. We think that Ford must innovate – the company faces huge costs due to expensive labor force. If it reduces the number of employees with the aim of reducing costs and wants to keep or to increase its production, innovation is a necessary consequence.