South Korea dominates list of universities with most research links to industry partners

South Korean universities are ahead of its global peers when it comes to publishing research in collaboration with industry partners, a new Times Higher Education‘s (THE) report shows.

THE‘s list of universities with the most industry collaborations reveals South Korea has three universities among the top 20 – Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Among them, they have published an impressive total of 64,719 research publications.

Ranking the universities based on the proportion of university’s publications that are industry collaborations, POSTECH emerged at the top spot with 22.98 percent, followed by France’s National Institute of Applied Sciences of Lyon (INSA Lyon) at 18.01 percent and China’s China University of Petroleum at 14.77 percent.

“Korea has one of the highest R&D intensities in the world and a focus on high-tech industries,” said Martin Hemmert, professor of international business at Korea University Business School.

It was South Korea’s history as a poor, agricultural nation just decades ago that has spurred such intense research and development in the country.

Having to play catch-up, many companies not strongly competent in basic research collaborated with universities to “strengthen and augment them”, according to Hemmert.

Samsung has among the most links with these universities, according to a separate table by THE, which ranks the schools publishing the highest proportions of their total research outputs in collaboration with a single corporation.

Nordic power

Scandinavian universities also featured notably on the list, with seven schools in total – four from Sweden, two from Denmark and one from Norway.

They had a total of 118,100 collaborative research publications among them, nearly twice the amount from the three South Korean universities stated earlier.

However, compared to POSTECH’s proportion of school publications that are industry collaborations (22.98 percent), the proportion of such research publications in these Scandinavian universities were at most, only half of POSTECH’s (Norwegian University of Science and Technology at 11.03 percent).

The Norwegian University of Science and Technology earned fourth place on the list, with its collaboration with industrial research offshoot SINTEF, which focuses on solar, wind and hydro power. Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology’s tie-up with Volvo companies on electric and autonomous vehicles, on the other hand, put it at sixth place.

Here are THE‘s top 20 universities with the most industry collaborations:

Rank	Institution	Country	Number of publications	Proportion of university’s publications that are industry collaborations
1	Pohang University of Science and Technology	South Korea	13,545	22.98
2	National Institute of Applied Sciences of Lyon (INSA Lyon)	France	7,636	18.01
3	China University of Petroleum	China	10,607	14.77
4	Norwegian University of Science and Technology	Norway	19,310	11.03
5	University of East Anglia	UK	12,443	10.23
6	Chalmers University of Technology	Sweden	12,658	9.14
7	Eindhoven University of Technology	Netherlands	14,206	8.96
8	Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU)	South Korea	30,406	8.84
9	Institute of Cancer Research	UK	6,338	6.88
10	CentraleSupélec	France	5,465	6.18
11	Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)	South Korea	20,768	6.05
12	Grenoble Institute of Technology	France	13,249	5.59
13	KTH Royal Institute of Technology	Sweden	20,029	5.57
14	Technical University of Denmark	Denmark	21,956	5.54
15	KU Leuven	Belgium	57,453	5.49
16	University of Copenhagen	Denmark	59,238	5.48
17	Sandia National Laboratories	US	8,388	5
18	Budapest University of Technology and Economics	Hungary	6,228	4.98
19	Karolinska Institute	Sweden	43,033	4.87
=20	University of Gothenburg	Sweden	23,070	4.7
=20	Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute	US	8,121	4.7

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