PITTSBURGH — Two Pittsburgh-area universities rank among the best in the nation for university tech transfers, with Carnegie Mellon University coming out on top as it relates to various indexing metrics established by Heartland Forward, a nonprofit and nonpartisan advocacy group based in Bentonville, Arkansas.
“The American research university is a unique institution that much of the world has long tried to emulate,” Ross DeVol, Heartland president and CEO, said in a post announcing the rankings. “Many times under-appreciated in the U.S., research universities are one of the most important knowledge assets of cities and states for economic development purposes.”
For its analysis, Heartland looked to evaluate which universities are most adept at creating new knowledge. It did this by indexing each university’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates and how those graduates went on to transfer their learnings to either new or existing enterprises. Heartland also looked at invention disclosures, the number of licenses and options, licensing incomes and startups formed from each university to compile a composite index ranking list. To a lesser extent, it also looked at citations of university articles contained in patents granted to firms and the number of STEM graduates with bachelor’s and master’s degrees and their proportion of total degrees, among other metrics.