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    Cream of the crop: Stanford, MIT and Harvard are the world’s most innovative universities

    Innovative Universities
    MIT has been ranked second on the list of the world's most innovative universities. Source: Shutterstock

    For the fifth consecutive year, Stanford University, MIT and Harvard topped Reuters’ ranking of the World’s Most Innovative Universities, a list that identifies and ranks the educational institutions doing the most to advance science, invent new technologies and power new markets and industries.

    Stanford holds onto its top spot year after year because it produces a steady stream of innovations that are cited by other researchers in academia and private industry, a key measure of the ranking of the world’s most innovative universities, which was compiled in partnership with Clarivate Analytics, based on proprietary data and analysis including patent filings and research paper citations.

    Eight of last year’s 10 highest-ranked universities remained in the top 10, and 18 of the top 20. The highest-ranked university outside the US, Belgium’s KU Leuven (#7), is a nearly 600-year-old institution that maintains one of the largest independent research and development organisations on the planet. The highest-ranked university in Asia is Pohang University of Science & Technology, or POSTECH (#12), an institution founded in 1986 by the South Korean steel company POSCO, noted for its unique ties to industry.

    Overall, the United States continues to dominate the list, with 46 universities in the top 100. Germany is the second best performing country with nine universities featured. France climbs to third, with eight universities on the list; Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom each have six; China has four; the Netherlands and Switzerland have three; Belgium, Canada, Israel and Singapore have two, and Denmark has one. Considered on a regional basis, North America has 48 universities in the top 100, Europe has 32 (up five from last year), Asia has 18 (down five), and the Middle East has two. There are no universities in the top 100 located in Africa, South America or Oceania.

    France shows the biggest improvement this year, with all its universities making big gains, including new entrants Aix-Marseille Université (#96) and Sorbonne Université (#56). In contrast, Japanese universities continue to lose ground on the global ranking: three Japanese universities dropped off the list in 2019, and the institutions that remained fell an average of 16 places.

    For more on the Reuters Top 100, including a detailed methodology and profiles of the universities, visit https://www.reuters.com/innovative-universities-2019. For reprints, e-prints, logo and accolade licensing, permissions, plaques and other products, please visit http://bit.ly/2LjbptV.

    Innovative universities

    These innovative universities are research-intensive and highly impactful. Source: Shutterstock

    The Reuters Top 100: The World’s Most Innovative Universities

    Rank Name Country
    1 Stanford University USA
    2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology USA
    3 Harvard University USA
    4 University of Pennsylvania USA
    5 University of Washington USA
    6 University of North Carolina Chapel Hill USA
    7 KU Leuven Belgium
    8 University of Southern California USA
    9 Cornell University USA
    10 Imperial College London UK
    11 University of Texas System USA
    12 Pohang University of Science & Technology (POSTECH) South Korea
    13 University of California System USA
    14 University of Erlangen Nuremberg Germany
    15 Johns Hopkins University USA
    16 California Institute of Technology USA
    17 EPFL – Swiss Federal lnstitute of Technology Lausanne Switzerland
    18 University of Cambridge UK
    19 Vanderbilt University USA
    20 Yale University USA
    21 University of Michigan System USA
    22 University of Minnesota System USA
    23 Duke University USA
    24 Northwestern University USA
    25 University of Illinois System USA
    26 University of Tokyo Japan
    27 University of Toronto Canada
    28 Columbia University USA
    29 Seoul National University South Korea
    30 Georgia Institute of Technology USA
    31 University College London UK
    32 University of Oxford UK
    33 University of Colorado System USA
    34 Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) South Korea
    35 Osaka University Japan
    36 University of Wisconsin System USA
    37 Baylor College of Medicine USA
    38 University of Utah USA
    39 University of Chicago USA
    40 ETH Zurich Switzerland
    41 Tsinghua University China
    42 Oregon Health & Science University USA
    43 Kyoto University Japan
    44 University of Montpellier France
    45 Sungkyunkwan University South Korea
    46 Technical University of Munich Germany
    47 Case Western Reserve University USA
    48 Technical University of Denmark Denmark
    49 University of Manchester UK
    50 Emory University USA
    51 University of Zurich Switzerland
    52 University of Pittsburgh USA
    53 University of British Columbia Canada
    54 Ohio State University USA
    55 Peking University China
    56 Sorbonne University France
    57 Kyushu University Japan
    58 National University of Singapore Singapore
    59 Ruprecht Karl University Heidelberg Germany
    60 Delft University of Technology Netherlands
    61 Tohoku University Japan
    62 Purdue University System USA
    63 University of Massachusetts System USA
    64 Universite Paris Sud – Paris 11 France
    65 Princeton University USA
    66 University of Paris Descartes France
    67 Nanyang Technological University Singapore
    68 Tufts University USA
    69 State University of New York System USA
    70 Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz Germany
    71 Leiden University Netherlands
    72 Hanyang University South Korea
    73 Rutgers State University New Brunswick USA
    74 Tokyo Institute of Technology Japan
    75 University of Munich Germany
    76 Yonsei University South Korea
    77 Universite Claude Bernard – Lyon 1 France
    78 Indiana University System USA
    79 Dresden University of Technology Germany
    80 University of Bordeaux France
    81 University of Iowa USA
    82 University of Freiburg Germany
    83 Boston University USA
    84 University System of Maryland USA
    85 Wake Forest University USA
    86 Zhejiang University China
    87 Carnegie Mellon University USA
    88 Hebrew University of Jerusalem Israel
    89 RWTH Aachen University Germany
    90 University of Connecticut USA
    91 Grenoble Alpes University France
    92 University of Florida USA
    93 Utrecht University Netherlands
    94 Technical University of Berlin Germany
    95 Tel Aviv University Israel
    96 University of Aix-Marseille France
    97 University of Virginia USA
    98 Ghent University Belgium
    99 Kings College London UK
    100 Shanghai Jiao Tong University China

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