KU Leuven in Belgium has taken the crown as the most innovative university in Europe for the third year running, in Reuters’ latest innovation ranking.

The Reuters Top 100: Europe’s Most Innovative Universities ranks institutions across the continent that are doing the most to advance science, to invent new technologies and to boost new markets and industries.

Two universities from the UK enter the top five in second and third place (Imperial College London and University of Cambridge, respectively). The fourth place position is taken by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. The University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany rounds out the top five in fifth place.

This year’s ranking shows that universities in smaller countries are perhaps demonstrating greater levels of innovation than those in the larger countries. For example, Belgium has seven universities in the ranking, but has a population of 11 million people. In contrast, Russia is the most populous country in Europe but no Russian universities made it into the top 100.

To compile the ranking, Clarivate Analytics identified the 600 global organisations that published the most articles in academic journals. This list was then reduced to institutions that filed at least 50 patents with the World Intellectual Property Organisation between 2011 and 2016. Each of these institutions were then evaluated on 10 different metrics focused on academic papers and patent filings and ranked accordingly. The full methodology can be found here.

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