One of the fundamental parameters to judge which countries are going to have a brighter future is the quality and quantity of Universities of that particular nation.

Reuters’ *Ranking of the World’s Most Innovative Universities* is a qualified list of institutions doing the most to invent new technologies, advance science and boost new markets. Some of the parameters used to build this list are the stream of patents and research and other indicators, including patent filings and research paper citations.

[![Cork University](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUBmvT4sEYVSuojrRArUYaVjMc7ZneWc2vEhW2MUNi4Jm/cork-2199757_1280.jpg)](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmUBmvT4sEYVSuojrRArUYaVjMc7ZneWc2vEhW2MUNi4Jm/cork-2199757_1280.jpg)

Not surprisingly, American universities confirm their domain with Stanford, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard respectively first, second and third in the ranking, while a few UK and Asian universities surged many places (in particular University of Manchester climbed 27 positions, from 80th to 53rd, thanks to researches about a material called *Graphene*).

Overall, in the top 100, 46 are American universities, Germany and Japan have 9 institutions each, South Korea 8, China, UK and France 5 each, Switzerland 3. A really huge achievement for Sout Korea, considered its 8 institutions in the top 100 despite having a population of *only* 51 million people.

There is usually a strong correlation between GDP and top Universities in a country, as we can check here: [List of countries by GDP (nominal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal))
For the International Monetary Fund, the top ranked countries for their GDP are The United States, China, Japan, Germany, UK etc., suggesting South Korea (in 11th position at the moment) could be higher ranked in a matter of few years in the GDP rankings.

The Reuters’ *Ranking of the World’s Most Innovative Universities:*

<h6>1          Stanford University
2          Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
3          Harvard University
4          University of Pennsylvania
5          University of Washington
6          University of Texas System
7          KU Leuven
8          Imperial College London
9          University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
10         Vanderbilt University
11         KAIST
12         Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
13         Pohang University of Science & Technology (POSTECH)
14         University of California System
15         University of Southern California
16         Cornell University
17         Duke University
18         University of Cambridge
19         Johns Hopkins University
20         University of Tokyo
21         California Institute of Technology
22         Osaka University
23         University of Michigan System
24         Northwestern University
25         University of Wisconsin System
26         Kyoto University
27         University of Minnesota System
28         University of Illinois System
29         Georgia Institute of Technology
30         University of Utah
31         University of Erlangen Nuremberg
32         Ohio State University
33         Columbia University
34         Seoul National University
35         University of Toronto
36         Tohoku University
37         University of Pittsburgh
38         Yale University
39         Sungkyunkwan University
40         University of Oxford
41         University of Colorado System
42         Tufts University
43         Baylor College of Medicine
44         Tsinghua University
45         Technical University of Munich
46         Kyushu University
47         University of Minnesota System
48         University College London
49         ETH Zurich
50         Purdue University System
51         University of Chicago
52         Oregon Health & Science University
53         University of Manchester
54         Indiana University System
55         University of Montpellier
56         University of Munich
57         Technical University of Denmark
58         Emory University
59         Peking University
60         Sorbonne University
61         University of British Columbia
62         Delft University of Technology
63         National University of Singapore
64         Princeton University
65         University of Zurich
66         Hanyang University
67         Case Western Reserve University
68         Yonsei University
69         Rutgers State University
70         Boston University
71         University of Massachusetts System
72         Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz
73         Wake Forest University
74         Keio University
75         Korea University
76         University of Florida
77         Leiden University
78         University of Paris Descartes - Paris 5
79         Hebrew University of Jerusalem
80         University of Cincinnati
81         University of Freiburg
82         Ruprecht Karl University Heidelberg
83         State University of New York System
84         University of Claude Bernard - Lyon 1
85         University of Virginia
86         Dresden University of Technology
87         University of Iowa
88         Ghent University
89         Shanghai Jiao Tong University
90         Hokkaido University
91         Tel Aviv University
92         Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
93         Zhejiang University
94         Fudan University
95         University of Miami
96         Arizona State University
97         University of Paris Sud - Paris 11
98         Gwangju Institute of Science & Technology
99         Nagoya University
100       Free University of Berlin</h6>

<h6>source: [The World Economic Forum](https://www.weforum.org/)
pic source: [Pixabay](https://pixabay.com/en/cork-university-college-cork-2199757/)