One of the fundamental parameters to judge which countries are going to have a brighter future is the quality and quantity of Universities of that particular nation.
Reuters’ Ranking of the World’s Most Innovative Universities is a qualified list of institutions doing the most to invent new technologies, advance science and boost new markets. Some of the parameters used to build this list are the stream of patents and research and other indicators, including patent filings and research paper citations.
Not surprisingly, American universities confirm their domain with Stanford, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard respectively first, second and third in the ranking, while a few UK and Asian universities surged many places (in particular University of Manchester climbed 27 positions, from 80th to 53rd, thanks to researches about a material called Graphene).
Overall, in the top 100, 46 are American universities, Germany and Japan have 9 institutions each, South Korea 8, China, UK and France 5 each, Switzerland 3. A really huge achievement for Sout Korea, considered its 8 institutions in the top 100 despite having a population of only 51 million people.
There is usually a strong correlation between GDP and top Universities in a country, as we can check here: List of countries by GDP (nominal)
For the International Monetary Fund, the top ranked countries for their GDP are The United States, China, Japan, Germany, UK etc., suggesting South Korea (in 11th position at the moment) could be higher ranked in a matter of few years in the GDP rankings.
The Reuters’ Ranking of the World’s Most Innovative Universities:
1 Stanford University
2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
3 Harvard University
4 University of Pennsylvania
5 University of Washington
6 University of Texas System
7 KU Leuven
8 Imperial College London
9 University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
10 Vanderbilt University
11 KAIST
12 Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
13 Pohang University of Science & Technology (POSTECH)
14 University of California System
15 University of Southern California
16 Cornell University
17 Duke University
18 University of Cambridge
19 Johns Hopkins University
20 University of Tokyo
21 California Institute of Technology
22 Osaka University
23 University of Michigan System
24 Northwestern University
25 University of Wisconsin System
26 Kyoto University
27 University of Minnesota System
28 University of Illinois System
29 Georgia Institute of Technology
30 University of Utah
31 University of Erlangen Nuremberg
32 Ohio State University
33 Columbia University
34 Seoul National University
35 University of Toronto
36 Tohoku University
37 University of Pittsburgh
38 Yale University
39 Sungkyunkwan University
40 University of Oxford
41 University of Colorado System
42 Tufts University
43 Baylor College of Medicine
44 Tsinghua University
45 Technical University of Munich
46 Kyushu University
47 University of Minnesota System
48 University College London
49 ETH Zurich
50 Purdue University System
51 University of Chicago
52 Oregon Health & Science University
53 University of Manchester
54 Indiana University System
55 University of Montpellier
56 University of Munich
57 Technical University of Denmark
58 Emory University
59 Peking University
60 Sorbonne University
61 University of British Columbia
62 Delft University of Technology
63 National University of Singapore
64 Princeton University
65 University of Zurich
66 Hanyang University
67 Case Western Reserve University
68 Yonsei University
69 Rutgers State University
70 Boston University
71 University of Massachusetts System
72 Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz
73 Wake Forest University
74 Keio University
75 Korea University
76 University of Florida
77 Leiden University
78 University of Paris Descartes - Paris 5
79 Hebrew University of Jerusalem
80 University of Cincinnati
81 University of Freiburg
82 Ruprecht Karl University Heidelberg
83 State University of New York System
84 University of Claude Bernard - Lyon 1
85 University of Virginia
86 Dresden University of Technology
87 University of Iowa
88 Ghent University
89 Shanghai Jiao Tong University
90 Hokkaido University
91 Tel Aviv University
92 Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
93 Zhejiang University
94 Fudan University
95 University of Miami
96 Arizona State University
97 University of Paris Sud - Paris 11
98 Gwangju Institute of Science & Technology
99 Nagoya University
100 Free University of Berlin
