Chicago's Most Innovative Companies 2025
Chicago-area companies are coming up with new ideas to tackle tough problems, from protein to PFAS, anddevising potentially game-changing technologies.
That's where Crain's Most Innovative Companies takes its inspiration. Our exclusive ranking examines the quality ofpatents awarded last year in a wide range of industries: wireless communication and display-screen technologies,health care and industrial safety, football helmets and handbags.
What these startups and established manufacturers have in common is ingenuity and grit, whether they're takingfresh approaches to old problems or coming up with solutions to challenges that didn't exist before.
Some are serial innovators who continue to reinvent an industry. Others reinvented their companies and productsuntil they found the right market.
- ISCO International
- Numat Technologies
- The Fynder Group
- Sloan Valve
- Azumo
- Parasol Medical
- QualSights
- Travelon
- UncommonX
- Riddell
10. Riddell
What it makes: Sports equipment
Patents last year: 7
Riddell's quest for the perfect football helmet is a journey through data.
The Des Plaines-based company has been systematically rethinking the way it builds helmets, using scans ofplayers' heads and detailed analysis of the differences in contact experienced by athletes depending on thepositions they play.
Now it's customizing helmets for elite players in professional and college programs based on that contact data, aprocess made possible by analytics technology Riddell introduced in 2004 as part of a broad effort to reduceconcussions.
"A football helmet isn't a particularly friendly environment to have electronics in," Ide says. "Getting data off the helmet to the sideline is challenging. Getting it up to the cloud and down in a format you can present to the team. . . All these things take a lot of brainpower and effort to solve."
He predicts the impact-sensor technology will be ubiquitous in a decade.
And Riddell isn't finished. There is always more data to gather.
"You could imagine other metrics that could be collected: player-motion metrics, temperature, hydration, things like that," he says. "It's something we're considering."