Asia’s most innovative universities

Published: 1 September 2016, 11:03 AM
Asia’s most innovative universities

China and India have the biggest populations in the Asia-Pacific region, and the economic news coming out of both countries usually dominates world headlines.

But it’s their relatively small regional neighbours Japan and South Korea that dominate the Reuters Top 75: Asia’s Most Innovative Universities, a list that identifies the educational institutions that are doing the most to advance science, invent new technologies and help drive the global economy.

Out of the top 20 universities, 17 are based in Japan and South Korea, according to Reuters.

Topping the list as the most innovative university in Asia is KAIST, also known as Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology.

Established in 1971 by the Korean government with funding from the United States, the university was modelled after engineering schools in the US, and its instruction stresses problem-solving skills and hands-on experience over textbook learning.

KAIST earned its first-place rank by producing original and influential research.

Organisations around the world cite KAIST’s patent portfolio as significant prior art in their own patent applications more than any other university in Asia - a strong indicator that the university has an outsized impact on global research and development.

That’s a key criterion in the Reuters ranking, which was compiled with data from the Intellectual Property & Science division of Thomson Reuters.

The ranking is based on a methodology that focuses on academic papers, which indicate basic research performed at a university, and patent filings, which point to an institution’s interest in protecting and commercialising its discoveries.

Universities based in Northeast Asia tend to produce a high volume of patent applications, and that helps their home countries stand out as hot spots for innovation in the Asia-Pacific region.

On average, the South Korean and Japanese universities on the list file twice as many patent applications than universities in the seven other ranked countries.

The second most innovative university in Asia is Japan’s University of Tokyo. Established in 1877 as the nation’s first Imperial university, ‘Todai’ now enrols more than 28,000 students, and operates 13 university-wide centres and 11 affiliated research institutes.

Nearly 200 companies from across the world partner with the University of Tokyo on collaborative research projects, including Johnson & Johnson, which helps sponsor the Department of Healthcare Quality Assessment, and Fujifilm Corp, which backs the Laboratory of Next Generation Drug Development.

The highest ranked school outside of Northeast Asia is the National University of Singapore (#11). When it was founded in 1905 as the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States Government Medical School, NUS enrolled just 23 students.

The university took its modern form after a 1980 merger with Nanyang University, and currently has about 38,000 students across three campuses.

China’s highest ranked university is Tsinghua University (#13), a public research university based in Beijing. The university has more than 45,000 students and its faculty includes eight Nobel laureates.

Tsinghua is one of nine schools in mainland China that belong to the C9 League, an elite group of universities analogous to the Ivy League in the United States.

Another league member, Peking University (#16), is the only other Chinese university to crack the top 20.

Overall, there are 22 Chinese universities on Reuters’ ranking - more than any other country. But that’s not as many as you might expect from such a large nation.

China has a massive population of more than 1.37 billion people, so in terms of ranked universities per capita, it ranks eighth out of nine countries.

Compare that with top-ranked South Korea, which has 20 schools on the list and a relatively tiny population of just over 50 million people. (Japan also has 20 ranked universities, Australia has six, Singapore, India and Malaysia each have two, and New Zealand has one.)

One reason Chinese universities don’t perform as well as their competitors: they tend to submit less of their research to international patent authorities.

Universities outside of China are more likely to file patents in the US and Europe as well as in their home country, indicating that those institutions are invested in protecting and commercialising their discoveries.

Chinese universities also don’t spend as much time collaborating with private industry. They publish relatively few journal articles in collaboration with industry co-authors, and are cited less often in articles published by corporate researchers.

The Chinese universities that collaborate most often with industry are all based in the economically autonomous territory of Hong Kong, including the Chinese University of Hong Kong (#21) and Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (#30)

Other nations underperform on the ranking because of the way they organise their university systems. Despite boasting the world’s second-largest population (more than 1.25 billion) and one of its largest economies, only two Indian universities appear in the top 75, The Indian Institutes of Technology (#72) and the Indian Institute of Science - Bangalore (#73).

The Indian Institutes of Technology is a network of 23 universities which centralise their patent administration, so it’s not always possible to identify which constituent university was responsible for what research.

As a result, Reuters ranked the entire system as opposed to individual universities.

World-class campuses like IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay may have ranked much higher on the list if they weren’t grouped in with smaller and newer institutes like IIT Tirupati and IIT Palakkad.

And some countries are missing from the list entirely. There are no ranked universities in Indonesia, which contains Asia’s third largest population.

Nor are there any universities in Pakistan or Bangladesh, the region’s fourth- and fifth-most populous countries, or any universities in the Philippines and Vietnam, two of the region’s largest economies.

Of course, just because a country doesn’t have any schools in the Reuters Top 75 doesn’t mean their universities aren’t doing important research.

Since the ranking measures innovation on an institutional level, it may overlook particularly innovative departments or programs.

A university might rank low for overall innovation, but still operate one of the world’s most innovative nanotechnology laboratories, for instance.

And it’s important to remember that whether they rank in the top 10 or somewhere in the 70s, all the universities ranked in the Asia Top 75 count among the world’s best - they all produce original research, create useful technology and stimulate the global economy.

In order to compile its ranking of Asia’s most innovative universities, the IP & Science division of Thomson Reuters began by identifying more than 600 global organisations - including educational institutions, non-profit charities and government-funded labs - that publish the most academic research.

Then they evaluated each candidate on 10 different metrics, trimmed the list so that it only included universities located in the Asia Pacific region and ranked them based on their performance.

Asia’s most innovative universities:

  Rank  Name                                                       Location

   1  Korea Advanced Institute of                        South Korea

       Science & Technology (KAIST)  

    2  University of Tokyo                                        Japan

    3  Seoul National University                            South Korea

    4  Osaka University                                           Japan

    5  Pohang University of Science                     South Korea

       & Technology (POSTECH)        

    6  Tohoku University                                           Japan

    7  Kyoto University                                              Japan

    8  Sungkyunkwan University                             South Korea

    9  Yonsei University                                            South Korea

   10  Keio University                                                Japan

   11  National University of                                     Singapore

       Singapore                     

   12  Tokyo Institute of Technology                       Japan

   13  Tsinghua University                                        China

   14  Korea University                                              South Korea

   15  Hanyang University                                         South Korea

   16  Peking University                                            China

   17  Gwangju Institute of Science                         South Korea

       & Technology                  

   18  Kyushu University                                           Japan

   19  Nagoya University                                           Japan

   20  Hokkaido University                                        Japan

   21  Chinese University of Hong                           China

         Kong                          

   22  Ajou University                                                 South Korea

   23  Zhejiang University                                         China

   24  Shanghai Jiao Tong University                     China

   25  Kyung Hee University                                     South Korea

   26  Hiroshima University                                       Japan

   27  University of Auckland                                    New Zealand
  

   28  University of Sydney                                       Australia

   29  University of Tsukuba                                     Japan

   30  Hong Kong University of                                China

         Science & Technology          

   31  Tokyo Medical & Dental                                 Japan

         University                    

   32  Monash University                                           Australia

   33  University of Queensland                               Australia

   34  University of Melbourne                                  Australia

   35  Nanyang Technological                                  Singapore

         University                    

   36  Fudan University                                              China

   37  Chonnam National University                        South Korea

   38  Okayama University                                         Japan

   39  Shinshu University                                           Japan

   40  Kumamoto University                                      Japan

   41  Tianjin University                                             China

   42  Kanazawa University                                      Japan

   43  Ewha Womans University                              South Korea

   44  Inha University                                                 South Korea

   45  East China University of                                 China

         Science & Technology          

   46  Chiba University                                              Japan

   47  Beijing University of                                        China

       Chemical Technology           

   48  Waseda University                                          Japan

   49  South China University of                                China

         Technology                    

   50  Kyungpook National University                    South Korea

   51  Chonbuk National University                        South Korea

   52  University of New South Wales                    Australia

   53  Catholic University of Korea                          South Korea

   54  Pusan National University                             South Korea

   55  Nanjing University                                           China

   56  University of Hong Kong                                 China

   57  Huazhong University of                                   China

         Science & Technology          

   58  Southeast University -                                      China

   59  Konkuk University                                            South Korea

   60  Kobe University                                                Japan

   61  Dalian University of                                          China

         Technology                    

   62  Nankai University                                             China

   63  Harbin Institute of                                              China

        Technology                    

   64  Xian Jiaotong University                                 China

   65  Chung Ang University                                     South Korea

   66  Hong Kong Polytechnic                                  China

         University                    

   67  Sichuan University                                           China

   68  Sun Yat-sen University                                    China

   69  Gyeongsang National                                      South Korea

         University                    

   70  Nihon University                                               Japan

   71  Indian Institute of                                               India

       Technology (IIT)              

   72  Indian Institute of Science                               India

       (IISC) - Bangalore            

   73  Putra University Malaysia                               Malaysia

   74  University of South Australia                          Australia

   75  University of Malaya                                        Malaysia

   Source: Reuters