The 50 colleges and universities making an outsize impact on business and society

Welcome to the first-ever edition of Ignition Schools, a collaboration between Fast Company and our sibling publication, Inc.

The Ignition Schools list honors the top academic institutions that play an enormous role in shaping the businesses that influence society. Innovation and entrepreneurship—the editorial lodestars for Fast Company and Inc., respectively—are also the focus of Ignition Schools. The 50 colleges and universities we’re honoring in our inaugural list don’t just produce elite students and groundbreaking research; they also are economic engines that generate the ideas, businesses, and opportunities that move cities, regions, and countries toward a better future.

At Fast Company, we’ve always covered the link between the ideas born in academic settings and their commercialization through public-private partnership, venture capital, visionary leadership, and sheer will. With Ignition Schools, we’re formalizing the analysis of the colleges and universities where some of the world’s greatest ideas originate, using metrics such as the number of venture-backed companies founded by students and alumni, the total venture money raised by students and alumni, and government research and development expenditures. (Read more about our methodology.)

Our dual goals? To better understand how this symbiotic relationship leads to business innovation, and to celebrate the schools where the magic is most likely to happen.

A while back, I interviewed Mung Chiang, the president of Purdue University (an institution that Fast Company has honored previously and is No. 26 on Ignition Schools ‘24). When I asked him how partnerships with the private sector can help universities and vice versa, he gave an answer that doubles as a perfect encapsulation for why we decided to launch this initiative.

“Whether it’s the pharmaceutical industry, or transportation, or digital agriculture, or microelectronic industry, or aerospace industry, Purdue has been doing very well” in forging alliances, Chiang said. “We recognize the benefits this can bring to our students in their learning, including internships and co-op experience, and what this means to research innovation, collaboration with our professors, and, of course, economic development—and that co-creation of jobs, workforce, and innovation.”

Here, then, are the 50 honorees in Ignition Schools 2024. For more, read about Stanford’s and Carnegie Mellon’s different interdisciplinary approaches to innovation, Rutgers as a one-stop innovation shop for its aspiring founders, Johns Hopkins and the burgeoning Baltimore business scene, and how three forward-looking schools are incorporating AI into their syllabuses, not running from it.

And if you’d like more information about applying for next year’s list, you can request it here.

This story is part of Fast Company and Inc.'s Ignition Schools 2024 awards, the 50 colleges and universities making an outsize impact on business and society through entrepreneurship and innovation. Read about the methodology behind our selection process.