UW system ranks 8th in list of world’s 100 most innovative universities

The inaugural Reuters Top one hundred survey, revealed on Wednesday, locations Stanford University in prime spot, reflecting its place as a crucible for brand spanking new concepts on the coronary heart of Silicon Valley.

Stanford. MIT. Harvard. The top three most innovative universities are predictable enough, but there’s a nice surprise at No. 4 – the University of Washington.

The criteria for the rankings focused on academic papers, which indicate basic research performed at a university, and patent filings, which show an institution’s interest in protecting and commercializing its discoveries.

Evidently, US universities occupied the top nine.

The National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technology University have risen to be among the top 15 varsities in the world for the first time. A study from the university showed that businessmen from Stanford contribute a total of $2.7 trillion revenue every year. Founded in 1907, it is relatively young compared with the continent’s second and third-place universities, Belgium’s KU Leuven (No. 16, founded in 1425) and England’s University of Cambridge (No. 25, established in 1209). The highest ranking non-American school was Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology in 10th place, followed in 11th by Imperial College London.

QS also ranked the Institute as the world’s best university in chemistry; economics; linguistics; materials sciences; and physics and astronomy.

“The leading universities may have lost ground, but they still make up four of the top 10 in the world”.

Two other New York universities – Cornell University, which was ranked 33rd, and Columbia University, which was ranked 45th – made the top 100.

“In fiscal 2014, UW says its Center for Commercialization [now CoMotion] launched 18 new startups based on its research technologies, a record for the university, bringing the 10-year total to 103 technology startups from UW”. Thomson Reuters reviewed hundreds of universities to produce this ranking, and the ones that appear here are the most elite.