The UB is the most innovative University in Spain and the 63rd in Europe

The Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the University of València, the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, the Polytechnic University of Valencia, the University of Santiago de Compostela, the University of Seville, and the Technical University of Madrid are the other Spanish centers that appear in the Top 100 in innovation. The ranking is led by KU Leuven (Belgium), the Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge.  

Reuters lists the universities according to the number of patent applications, which for the UB was about 106 between 2010 and 2015,  the relation between requested patents and given ones, in which the UB gets a 60,4%, and the commercial impact on basic research of the University, calculated with the citation of the institutionʼs academic articles. The tasks in knowledge transfer at the University of Barcelona are developed by the Bosch i Gimpera Foundation.

The same countries that dominate the productive, business and political sector are the ones leading the ranking, according to Reuters. Thus, Germany accounts for 23 of the 100 universities, followed by the United Kingdom and France, each with 17 institutions. Spain has 11 universities.

However, Ireland has only three centers among the top 100, but since they have a population of less than 5 million people, it is the country with more universities in the Top 100 per capita. Regarding the per capita basis, the second country with higher results would be Denmark, followed by Belgium.

This classification has been carried out identifying, at first, the 600 global institutions that publish the most scientific articles on academic journals. This first list has been shortened to the institutions that filed at least 50 patents in the World Intellectual Property Organization between 2010 and 2015. Then, each institution was assessed on 10 different metrics, related to publications, patents and basic research, among others.