The Boston Consulting Group’s annual list of the world’s most innovative companies has again named Apple as the leader of the pack, a position it has held since the survey began in 2005.

The list is based on a survey of 1500 senior execs across a range of industries, with five criteria applied:

The report singles out five factors that lead to strength in innovation: senior-management commitment, the ability to leverage intellectual property, customer focus, innovation portfolio management and well-defined and governed processes.

BCG also created a second list of up-and-coming companies that it feels to be innovative without having yet hit the big time. These companies include Groupon, Pinterest, Spotify, Rakuten, Netflix, Alibaba, Xiaomi Tech and WhatsApp.

Back in March, Apple retained the top spot in the JD Power phone satisfaction survey, also for the 9th year running, and earlier this month did the same for PCs in the American Customer Satisfaction Index for the 10th year in a row.

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