Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University top the third annual Reuters Top 100 ranking of the world’s most innovative universities. The Reuters Top 100 aims to identify and rank the educational institutions doing the most to advance science, invent new technologies, and power new markets and industries. Compiled in partnership with Clarivate Analytics, the ranking is based on proprietary data and analysis of numerous indicators including patent filings and research paper citations.
The most innovative university in the world, for the third consecutive year, is Stanford University. Located in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, Stanford has long played a key role in the development of our modern networked world: A Stanford professor designed the basic communication standard for the Internet, and university alumni founded some of the biggest tech companies in the world, including Google, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Netflix. Today the university continues to consistently produce original research and technology. Innovations that originate at Stanford are frequently cited by researchers elsewhere in academia and in private industry.
Overall, the top ranks of the World’s Most Innovative Universities remain largely unchanged, with nine of last year’s 10 highest-ranked universities remaining in the top 10. And the most elite institutions are almost all large, well-established universities based in the United States and Western Europe. Rounding out the top three are MIT and Harvard, which have held onto their respective 2nd and 3rd place rankings for the past three years. In fourth place is the University of Pennsylvania, which climbed four spots from #8 last year. The highest ranked university outside the U.S., Belgium’s KU Leuven (#5), is a nearly 600-year-old institution that maintains one of the largest independent research and development organizations on the planet.
In contrast, there are only two Asian universities in the top 20, both of which are based in South Korea, and one of them actually teaches the majority of its classes in English: South Korea’s KAIST, formerly the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, ranked #6. Established in 1971 by the Korean government, KAIST was modeled after engineering schools in the United States, and initially funded with a multimillion-dollar loan from the United States Agency for International Development.
Overall, the top 100 consists of 51 universities based in North America, 26 in Europe, 20 in Asia and three in the Middle East.
For more on the Reuters Top 100, including a detailed methodology and profiles of the universities, visit www.reuters.com/innovative-universities-2017/.
The Reuters Top 100: The World’s Most Innovative Universities
1 Stanford University
2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
3 Harvard University
4 University of Pennsylvania
5 KU Leuven
6 KAIST
7 University of Washington
8 University of Michigan System
9 University of Texas System
10 Vanderbilt University
11 Duke University
12 University of California System
13 Northwestern University
14 Pohang University of Science & Technology (POSTECH)
15 Imperial College London
16 Cornell University
17 California Institute of Technology
18 University of Wisconsin System
19 Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne
20 University of Southern California
21 University of Tokyo
22 Johns Hopkins University
23 Georgia Institute of Technology
24 Seoul National University
25 University of Illinois System
26 University of Cambridge
27 Indiana University System
28 Pierre & Marie Curie University – Paris 6
29 University of Colorado System
30 University of Pittsburgh
31 University of Oxford
32 Purdue University System
33 University of Chicago
34 Osaka University
35 University of North Carolina System
36 Princeton University
37 Ohio State University
38 Tufts University
39 Tohoku University
40 Technical University of Munich
41 Columbia University
42 Kyoto University
43 Yale University
44 Baylor College of Medicine
45 Tokyo Institute of Technology
46 University of Toronto
47 University of Minnesota System
48 Sungkyunkwan University
49 University of Utah
50 University of Erlangen Nuremberg
51 Tsinghua University
52 Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
53 Oregon Health & Science University
54 Emory University
55 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
56 Delft University of Technology
57 University of Massachusetts System
58 University of British Columbia
59 University of Zurich
60 Peking University
61 Hanyang University
62 University of Montpellier
63 Boston University
64 University of Munich
65 Technical University of Denmark
66 University of Florida
67 University College London
68 Kyushu University
69 Yonsei University
70 National University of Singapore
71 State University of New York System
72 Case Western Reserve University
73 Keio University
74 University of Copenhagen
75 Ghent University
76 Florida State University
77 Korea University
78 Rutgers State University
79 University of Rochester
80 University of Manchester
81 University of Freiburg
82 Hebrew University of Jerusalem
83 Gwangju Institute of Science & Technology
84 Leiden University
85 Arizona State University
86 Free University of Berlin
87 University of Claude Bernard – Lyon 1
88 Tel Aviv University
89 Technion Israel Institute of Technology
90 University of Paris Descartes – Paris 5
91 Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz
92 Rice University
93 University of Paris Sud – Paris 11
94 University of Iowa
95 Hokkaido University
96 University of Virginia
97 Dresden University of Technology
98 Carnegie Mellon University
99 Wake Forest University
100 Zhejiang University