Innovation is one of those things that most companies want to be good at, but the desire to be innovative is not just restricted to the private sector, with governments and academia also striving to show off their creative mettle.

To reflect this, a number of projects exist to measure and rank the innovative capabilities of these various groups.  For instance, INSEAD produce an annual league table of innovative nations, with Switzerland regular leaders of the pack.

Or you have Reuters who produce an annual league table of the most innovative universities, with KU Leuven pipping Imperial College London to the top spot in the latest rankings.

Innovative Research Institutions

The Reuters Top 25 Global Innovators aims to rank the leading government research institutions according to their ability to produce the best science and technology advances.

The rankings, which were produced in partnership with Clarivate Analytics, are based on proprietary data and analysis of things such as number of patent filings research paper citations.

Whilst America didn’t do well in the INSEAD rankings, they score very highly here, with the Health & Human Services Laboratories securing the top spot, rising from 4th place in last year’s ranking.  They pip France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) to the top spot, with CEA moving down one position from last year.  Rounding out the top three is Germany’s Fraunhofer Society, which is the largest applied research institution in Europe.

In terms of national success, the United States has five entries in the top 25, which is equal with Germany, with France and Japan both having four entries.  Viewed by continent, Europe dominates with 11 entries, compared to eight in Asia-Pacific and six in North America.

The league table was constructed after analyzing over 600 organizations from around the world according to their academic publishing record.  They then compared this with their patent output, and the quality of those patents to infer the innovative capabilities of each institution.

The top 25 institutions are included below

1.     Health & Human Services Laboratories (United States) 2.     Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (France) 3.     Fraunhofer Society (Germany) 4.     Japan Science & Technology Agency (Japan) 5.     National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science & Technology (Japan) 6.     Korea Institute of Science & Technology (South Korea) 7.     Medical Research Council (UK) 8.     National Center for Scientific Research (France) 9.     French Institute of Health & Medical Research (France) 10.  Agency for Science Technology & Research (Singapore) 11.  Chinese Academy of Sciences (China) 12.  National Institute of Materials Science (Japan) 13.  RIKEN (Japan) 14.  National Research Council Canada (Canada) 15.  Pasteur Institute International Network (France) 16.  Max Planck Society (Germany) 17.  US Department of Veteran Affairs (U.S.) 18.  Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (Australia) 19.  German Cancer Research Center (German) 20.  German Research Center For Environmental Health Munich (German) 21.  Julich Research Center (Germany) 22.  United States Navy (U.S.) 23.  Spanish National Research Council (Spain) 24.  Los Alamos National Laboratory (U.S.) 25.  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (U.S.)