HEW Newsletter - Foreword to the September 2015 Edition

Innovation is one of the themes that many of those seeking broader global rankings of universities would like to be able to include.

The most comprehensive attempt to capture this slightly elusive quality was published last week by Thomson Reuters. The company used ten metrics to measure universities’ success in innovation, and produced a global top 100.

The ranking was dominated by US universities with a reputation in this field, unlike a first attempt at measuring innovation by Times Higher Education magazine, which placed Russian and Chinese universities top of two of their four preliminary rankings. The other two were from Germany and Belgium, the latter sharing top place for ‘paper citations’ with a US research institute.

Reuters’ criteria all involve patents and academic papers, examined in a number of different ways. Three measure the volume, success rates and international coverage of patents, two look at the citation and impact derived from patents, and the remainder examine the number of articles published, collaboration with industry, and the impact of citations.

Stanford took first place with particularly high scores for articles and patents that were cited frequently by researchers both in the academic and corporate worlds. The most innovative university in Europe, Imperial College London, ranked just outside the top ten, while Switzerland had more leading universities per capita than any other country in the world, with three in the top 100.

Universities in the United States filled half of the available ranking places and KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, was the only non-US university in the top ten. Japan was the next most-frequently-represented nation in the top 100, with nine universities.

The four innovation indicators published in Times Higher Education magazine last month were headed by Siberian State University of Geosystems and Technologies, China’s Southwest Petroleum University, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and Florida’s Scripps Research Institute. None of THE’s four top 15 listings contained any of the Reuter’s top 15 universities.

The Reuters Top 100 Most Innovative Universities

Stanford UniversityMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)Harvard UniversityUniversity of WashingtonUniversity of Michigan SystemNorthwestern UniversityUniversity of Texas SystemUniversity of Wisconsin SystemUniversity of PennsylvaniaKorea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)Imperial College LondonPohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH)University of California SystemUniversity of Southern CaliforniaUniversity of North Carolina Chapel HillKU LeuvenDuke UniversityOsaka UniversityJohns Hopkins UniversityCalifornia Institute of Technology