The 100 most innovative universities in Europe 2016

Belgian university KU Leuven has topped the inaugural Reuters Top 100: Europe’s Most Innovative Universities ranking, with Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge completing the top three. 

The innovation league table aims to identify which institutions contribute the most to science and technology, and have the greatest impact on the global economy. Its methodology, available on the Reuters site, uses proprietary data and analysis tools from the Intellectual Property and Science division of Thomson Reuters to examine a series of patent and research-related metrics.

It follows on from last year's list of the most innovative universities in the world – a topic that Times Higher Education has also investigated in some depth.

Read next: Reuter's 75 most innovative universities in Asia 2016

According to the latest results, the most innovative university in Europe is KU Leuven, a Dutch-speaking school based in Belgium’s Flanders region, that maintains one of the largest independent research and development organisations on the planet. Its researchers submit more patents than almost any other university in Europe. 

Universities in Western Europe claim 60 universities of the top 100, with Northern Europe second with 24, Southern Europe boasting 15 and Eastern Europe just one – Poland’s Jagiellonian University, ranked 92.

German universities account for 24 of the 100 most innovative universities in Europe, more than any other country, while the United Kingdom came second with 17 institutions.

The Reuters top 100 most innovative universities in Europe 2016