For over a decade, global university rankings have played a growing role in the status competition in higher education. More recently, we have seen a proliferation in rankings of innovation and urbanization. In this article, we argue that while these new measurements bring with them some conceptual adjustments, they draw heavily on existing rankings and embrace the embedded competitive logic. Local rankings of innovation objectify higher education as an element of global competitiveness. Furthermore, we argue that this logical shift is made with the help university rankings that now come to bridge global competition and local innovation; the existing global university rankings are directly used in the composite indicators of local innovation or their methodology is copied. Consequently, political imaginaries of global competition are now projected to regional and city level.