Another day, another high national ranking for Raleigh.

A day after Portfolio.com/bizjournals declared that the Raleigh-Cary area has the best quality of life among large U.S. metros, Forbes.com on Tuesday placed Raleigh No. 3 on the magazine’s first ranking of the most innovative U.S. cities.

Forbes.com examined the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas and ranked them according to each area’s patents per person, venture capital investment per capita, and ratio of high-tech, science and "creative" jobs.

The area comprising Wake, Johnston and Chatham counties – officially the Raleigh-Cary Metropolitan Statistical Area, or MSA, but referred to exclusively as Raleigh by Forbes – trailed only Silicon Valley technology Mecca San Jose, Calif., and Austin, Texas in the rankings. The Durham metropolitan area technically was not part of the study because it is not among the 100 largest MSAs, but the Forbes article gave Raleigh points for the large number of patents produced by IBM (NYSE: IBM), which is located on the Durham County side of Research Triangle Park, and for the streams of graduates produced by the Triangle’s three major research universities – Duke, North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Of the three, only NCSU is located in the Raleigh-Cary MSA.

Forbes ranked Raleigh fourth highest for tech and sciences jobs and also for patents per capita. The area was fifth for venture capital investment per capita and tenth for creative jobs.

San Jose, Calif., ranked No. 1 in all four categories.

The rest of the top 10 were San Francisco (No. 4), Seattle (No. 5), San Diego (No. 6), Madison, Wis. (No. 7); Boston (No. 8); Provo, Utah (No. 9); and Portland, Ore. (No. 10).

 

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