Impact Rankings 2023: industry, innovation, and infrastructure

The Times Higher Education Impact Rankings are the only global performance tables that assess universities against the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We use carefully calibrated indicators to provide comprehensive and balanced comparison across four broad areas: research, stewardship, outreach and teaching.

This table on SDG 9 – industry, innovation and infrastructure measures universities’ research on industry and innovation, their number of patents and spin-off companies and their research income from industry.

The list includes 873 institutions from 87 countries/regions.

View the methodology for Impact Rankings 2023: industry, innovation and infrastructure (SDG 9)

The ranking is led by three German institutions and one Dutch institution in joint first place: University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, University of Stuttgart, Technical University of Munich and University of Twente.

South Korea is the most-represented nation in the top 100 with 11 institutions, followed by Canada with nine and Japan with seven.

The Impact Rankings are inherently dynamic: they are growing rapidly each year as many more universities seek to demonstrate their commitment to delivering the SDGs by joining our database; and they allow institutions to demonstrate rapid improvement year-on-year, by introducing clear new policies, for example, or by providing clearer and more open evidence of their progress. Therefore, we expect and welcome regular change in the ranked order of institutions (and we discourage year-on-year comparisons) as universities continue to drive this urgent agenda.

View the full results of the overall Impact Rankings 2023

Read our analysis of the Impact Rankings 2023 results


To participate in next year's Impact Rankings, email us

To raise your university’s global profile with Times Higher Education, contact branding@timeshighereducation.com

To unlock the data behind THE’s Impact Rankings and access a range of analytical and benchmarking tools, click here

How to get your uni ranked

Explore Impact Rankings for individual SDGs

rank order Rank Name Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure Node ID
Overall