NEW YORK—Two optical companies, Essilor and Valeant Pharmaceuticals, have been named among the world’s top innovators by Strategy+Business (s+b), a management magazine for decision makers in businesses and organizations. The two were among 88 companies that made the listing of top innovators, which is part of s+b’s Global Innovation 1000 study, an annual analysis of the 1,000 publicly held companies that spend the most on research and development (R&D). The magazine looked at a subset of companies they refer to as “high-leverage innovators.” These are companies that outperformed their industry groups on seven key measures of financial success for the previous five years, while at the same time spending less on R&D as a percentage of sales, s+b said.

As the magazine explained on its website, “Achieving high performance is difficult in any given year, and remarkably difficult to sustain. But the success of these high-leverage innovators reaffirms a finding of our study that has held true over time: There is no long-term correlation between the amount of money a company spends on its innovation efforts and its overall financial performance. Instead, what matters is how companies use that money and other resources to create products and services that connect with their customers. Also important is the quality of companies’ talent, processes, and decision making.”

Essilor, based in France, generated $7.5 billion in revenue in 2017, of which it spent $0.2 billion on research and development, about 3.0 percent of revenue.

Valeant, which changed its name to Bausch Health Companies in July, 2018, in recognition of the importance of its Bausch+Lomb subsidiary, generated $9.7 in revenue in 2017, of which $0.4 billion was spent on R&D, about 4.4 percent of revenue.