The University of California San Diego was ranked eighth in the world among universities whose research translated to patented innovations, according to a list by Clarivate, a British analytics company.
The research firm ranked universities influencing patented inventions on its 2024 top 100 global innovators list, which includes San Diego’s Qualcomm. For the university ranking, five organizations — including Roche and Johnson & Johnson — ed for more than half of the citations from top innovations to academic research.
Universities were ranked by how many times their research was cited in patents and papers for inventions. Clarivate’s database showed that UC San Diego had a total of 2,559 citations.
Harvard University came in at No. 1 with 8,315 citations, almost twice as many citations as No. 2 Stanford University.
The ranking helps stakeholders, such as investors, executives, university officials, and policymakers identify leading innovative universities for partnerships and illustrate the societal impact of their academic work, Clarivate said.
In recent years, UC San Diego has invested considerable resources into bridging the gap between academia and private industry. For example, the university’s Institute for the Global Entrepreneur provides mentorship and accelerator resources to help ideas from the school of engineering and business.
As a result, the university has also had success spinning out startups and reported that UC San Diego-d companies raised $1.9 billion in capital in 2024, a record milestone, according to the university’s Entrepreneurship Center.
UC San Diego was the only university in the county to make the top 50 ranking. There were plenty of UC schools in the top 50 ranking, but only two other California institutions were ranked higher than UCSD. Stanford was No. 2 and UC Berkeley was No. 4.
The top 10 spots were dominated by institutions in the United States, except for Université Paris Cité in (No. 5) and University of Toronto in Canada (No. 10).
