Top 100 most innovative universities in the world 2017

Stanford University maintains its position as the world’s most innovative university for the third year running according to the Reuters 2017 ranking

September 29 2017

By Seeta Bhardwa

Email: seeta.bhardwa@timeshighereducation.com

Stanford University has been named the most innovative university in the world for the third consecutive year according to the latest ranking by Reuters.

The top 10 of the annual ranking remains largely unchanged from 2016, with nine of last year’s top 10 remaining in this year’s top 10. Vanderbilt University in the US is this year’s new entry into the top 10 at number 10.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University have retained their second and third places from last year. US universities take just over half of the places in the table with 51 universities represented in the top 100.

In fifth place, KU Leuven in Belgium, which topped Reuters’ ranking of the top 100 most innovative universities in Europe 2017, is the highest ranked university from outside the US. At number 15, Imperial College London is the highest ranked UK university. European universities take 26 places in the top 100, with Germany, France and the UK as the most represented European countries.

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) is the highest ranked Asian university at number 6 and there are 20 universities from Asia in the ranking, including institutions from Japan, South Korea and China.

Institutions were ranked across 10 different metrics including academic papers and patent filings.

Top 100 most innovative universities in the world 2017

Innovation Rank 2017	University	Country
1	Stanford University	USA
2	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	USA
3	Harvard University	USA
4	University of Pennsylvania	USA
5	KU Leuven	Belgium
6	Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)	South Korea
7	University of Washington	USA
8	University of Michigan System	USA
9	University of Texas System	USA
10	Vanderbilt University	USA
11	Duke University	USA
12	University of California System	USA
13	Northwestern University	USA
14	Pohang University of Science and Technology	South Korea
15	Imperial College London	United Kingdom
16	Cornell University	USA
17	California Institute of Technology	USA
18	University of Wisconsin System	USA
19	École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne	Switzerland
20	University of Southern California	USA
21	University of Tokyo	Japan
22	Johns Hopkins University	USA
23	Georgia Institute of Technology	USA
24	Seoul National University	South Korea
25	University of Illinois System	USA
26	University of Cambridge	United Kingdom
27	Indiana University System	USA
28	Pierre and Marie Curie University	France
29	University of Colorado System	USA
30	University of Pittsburgh	USA
31	University of Oxford	United Kingdom
32	Purdue University System	USA
33	University of Chicago	USA
34	Osaka University	Japan
35	University of North Carolina System	USA
36	Princeton University	USA
37	Ohio State University	USA
38	Tufts University	USA
39	Tohoku University	Japan
40	Technical University of Munich	Germany
41	Columbia University	USA
42	Kyoto University	Japan
43	Yale University	USA
44	Baylor College of Medicine	USA
45	Tokyo Institute of Technology	Japan
46	University of Toronto	Canada
47	University of Minnesota System	USa
48	Sungkyunkwan University	South Korea
49	University of Utah	USA
50	University of Erlangen-Nuremberg	Germany
51	Tsinghua University	China
52	Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai	USA
53	Oregon Health and Science University	USA
54	Emory University	USA
55	ETH Zurich - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich	Switzerland
56	Delft University of Technology	Netherlands
57	University of Massachusetts System	USA
58	University of British Columbia	Canada
59	University of Zurich	Switzerland
60	Peking University	China
61	Hanyang University	South Korea
62	Montpellier University	France
63	Boston University	USA
64	LMU Munich	Germany
65	Technical University of Denmark	Denmark
66	University of Florida	USA
67	University College London	United Kingdom
68	Kyushu University	Japan
69	Yonsei University	South Korea
70	National University of Singapore	Singapore
71	State University of New York System	USA
72	Case Western Reserve University	USA
73	Keio University	Japan
74	University of Copenhagen	Denmark
75	Ghent University	Belgium
76	Florida State University	USA
77	Korea University	South Korea
78	Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey	USA
79	University of Rochester	USA
80	University of Manchester	United Kingdom
81	University of Freiburg	Germany
82	Hebrew University of Jerusalem	Jerusalem
83	Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology	South Korea
84	Leiden University	Netherlands
85	Arizona State University	USA
86	Free University of Berlin	Germany
87	Claude Bernard University Lyon 1	France
88	Tel Aviv University	Israel
89	Technion Israel Institute of Technology	Israel
90	Paris Descartes University	France
91	Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz	Germany
92	Rice University	USA
93	Paris-Sud University	France
94	University of Iowa	USA
95	Hokkaido University	Japan
96	University of Virginia	USA
97	TU Dresden	Germany
98	Carnegie Mellon University	USA
99	Wake Forest University	USA
100	Zhejiang University	China