HSE Inc., the business incubator of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, a leading Russian university, has been listed number 14 in the world and number 7 in Europe by the UBI Global 2015 ranking. The results were announced in late November in London.
HSE Inc. was the first start-up incubator in Russia when it opened back in 2006. Claiming 30 “successful alumni,” the incubator is currently hosting 15 startups, and organizes more than 100 events per year.
“In nine years of work we went from being unknown startup enthusiasts to professionals in an expert community,” said Mikhail Erman, the incubator’s director.
This year the final participants in the UBI Global ranking were selected by assessing 1,200 incubators, after which over 340 from 64 countries were retained for the benchmark. SETsquared, a joint project involving universities in Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey, was ranked the best university business incubator in the world; and the number two spot went to the business incubator at Chaoyang University of Technology in Taiwan. Third place was taken by Ryerson University in Canada.
A previous ranking, in October, saw iDealMachine, a venture fund and startup accelerator from St. Petersburg, ranked third among 330 university business accelerators from 64 countries.
“The importance of discovering and identifying these top performing incubators is underlined by our studies, which show that top benchmarked incubators provide almost half of the total economic impact within the incubation market” says UBI Global CEO and co-founder, Ali Amin.
“Highlighting some of their best practices will help universities, governments, incubation agencies and corporations to improve the incubators they support,” he added.
The UBI ranking takes into consideration the results obtained by both residents and graduates, the volume of investment attracted, the survival rate of startups, and the number of deals they made.
UBI Global claims to be the only ranking that compares the productivity of the world’s business incubators. Productivity is measured according to the incubators’ economic impact, the service quality provided to client startups, and other criteria.
