When you’re looking to innovate, it’s useful to have a good understanding of the businesses and technologies that are emerging both in your industry and in related industries. A great way of doing this is to tap into the work being done by researchers at one of the hundreds of universities around the world.
Suffice to say, the job is not for the feint hearted as thousands of papers are published every day, making it challenging to find the research that could make a real difference to your business. Whilst there have been a number of tools developed to try and help you navigate the research environment, I’m still not convinced that they are quite there yet.
Following the best
A more manageable solution might be to identify a number of institutions that do good work in your area, and follow those in more detail. A good place to start might be the recently published Reuters Top 100: Europe’s Most Innovative Universities, which aimed to highlight the most innovative universities in Europe.
The league table has been put together by the IP & Science division of Thomson Reuters so it has an inevitable focus on things such as the number of patents produced by a university alongside nine other metrics, including the number of academic papers published.
Whilst I’m not convinced that patents are a good measure of innovation, the use of 10 distinct metrics should hopefully provide a decent picture of which universities are the most innovative.
Who comes out on top
Interestingly, the league table suggests that the most innovative university in Europe is Belgium’s KU Leuven. Whilst this may appear surprising, they do in fact have one of the largest independent R&D organizations in the world, and this helped them churn out a huge number of influential inventions. Indeed, KU Leuven research is often cited in external patent applications.
In terms of countries, Germany comes out on top with 24 entries, with the UK in second place with 17 institutions in the top 100.
The full league table is at the foot of this post, but if you end up following a university and feel you want to work with them on a project, I can recommend the Lambert Guide, which was produced by the UK’s Intellectual Property Office to help guide you.
The guide looks at various factors, including:
- the resources devoted to the project by both parties
- the IP arrangements for the final product
- the financial contributions of both parties
- the confidentiality of the results
- who is liable, and how the arrangement can be terminated
Anyway, without further ado, here are the top 100 most innovative universities in Europe, as determined by Reuters.
The Reuters Top 100: The Most Innovative European Universities
| 1 | KU Leuven |
| 2 | Imperial College London |
| 3 | University of Cambridge |
| 4 | Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne |
| 5 | Technical University of Munich |
| 6 | University of Erlangen Nuremberg |
| 7 | Delft University of Technology |
| 8 | University of Oxford |
| 9 | University of Munich |
| 10 | University of Zurich |
| 11 | University of Copenhagen |
| 12 | Technical University of Denmark |
| 13 | Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich |
| 14 | Pierre & Marie Curie University – Paris 6 |
| 15 | University of Paris Sud – Paris 11 |
| 16 | Eindhoven University of Technology |
| 17 | University of Manchester |
| 18 | University of Dundee |
| 19 | Free University of Berlin |
| 20 | Dresden University of Technology |
| 21 | University Libre Brussels |
| 22 | Ghent University |
| 23 | University of Montpellier |
| 24 | University of Freiburg |
| 25 | University of Paris Descartes – Paris 5 |
| 26 | Erasmus University Rotterdam |
| 27 | University of Claude Bernard – Lyon 1 |
| 28 | University of Strasbourg |
| 29 | Ruprecht Karl University Heidelberg |
| 30 | University of London |
| 31 | Humboldt University of Berlin |
| 32 | University of Edinburgh |
| 33 | University of Basel |
| 34 | University of Aix-Marseille |
| 35 | Grenoble Alpes University |
| 36 | Charite Medical University of Berlin |
| 37 | University of Paris Diderot – Paris VII |
| 38 | Leiden University |
| 39 | Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble |
| 40 | Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz |
| 41 | University of Oslo |
| 42 | Polytechnic University of Milan |
| 43 | Ecole Polytechnique |
| 44 | Karlsruhe Institute of Technology |
| 45 | Cardiff University |
| 46 | Saarland University |
| 47 | University of Utrecht |
| 48 | Trinity College Dublin |
| 49 | University of Paul Sabatier – Toulouse III |
| 50 | Vrije University of Brussels |
| 51 | University of Amsterdam |
| 52 | University of Milan |
| 53 | University of Birmingham |
| 54 | University of Munster |
| 55 | Eberhard Karls University of Tubingen |
| 56 | University of Leeds |
| 57 | Universite de Bordeaux |
| 58 | Aarhus University |
| 59 | University of Sheffield |
| 60 | RWTH Aachen University |
| 61 | Universite Catholique Louvain |
| 62 | Technical University of Berlin |
| 63 | University of Twente |
| 64 | University of Stuttgart |
| 65 | University of Barcelona |
| 66 | Hannover Medical School |
| 67 | Vienna University of Technology |
| 68 | University of Groningen |
| 69 | University of Kiel |
| 70 | University of Nottingham |
| 71 | University of Liege |
| 72 | Sapienza University Rome |
| 73 | University of Loire Bretagne |
| 74 | University College Cork |
| 75 | Friedrich Schiller University of Jena |
| 76 | Maastricht University |
| 77 | University of Southampton |
| 78 | University of Lorraine |
| 79 | University of Bologna |
| 80 | University of Rennes 1 |
| 81 | University of Bristol |
| 82 | University of St Andrews |
| 83 | University of Bonn |
| 84 | University of Warwick |
| 85 | Polytechnic University of Catalonia |
| 86 | Autonomous University of Barcelona |
| 87 | Queens University Belfast |
| 88 | Universitat Politecnica de Valencia |
| 89 | Darmstadt University of Technology |
| 90 | University of Hannover |
| 91 | University of Rostock |
| 92 | Jagiellonian University |
| 93 | University of Santiago De Compostela |
| 94 | University College Dublin |
| 95 | University of Valencia |
| 96 | University of Sevilla |
| 97 | Polytechnic University of Madrid |
| 98 | University of Padua |
| 99 | Complutense University of Madrid |
| 100 | University of Granada |
