Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Raising the educational and academic status and ranking of universities to that of internationally accepted world-class universities has become the goal of many university higher administrators around the globe in recent years. This trend has been made possible and accelerated by rapid global economic growth and development. Such efforts inevitably involve the progressive evolution of successful strategies dealing with issues concerning academic and educational excellence, funding, support facilities’ suitability, academic staff qualifications, and graduates’ competencies. Within this global academic context, an initiative for attaining world-class university rank and status was undertaken by King Abdulaziz University (KAU). The aim of this initiative was not primarily to compete with leading internationally recognized universities, but was rather a means of showcasing the academic and educational strengths and potential of KAU, and of creating an appropriate and navigable roadmap to facilitate genuine, academically credible, and enduring improvements in the quality of the higher education provided.

Many scientific institutions and major industrial organizations, in their keenness to benefit from the experience of internationally prestigious advisory and consultative bodies, draw up long and short-term plans for their formation. These advisory and consultative bodies comprise of elite and authoritative groups of scientific, industrial, and administrative experts.

“Excellence as duty” is our title and it is intended to encompass some of the main issues, which a university striving-for-excellence encounters and for which appropriate and effective responses need to be formulated. First and foremost, the university believes it is duty-bound to produce graduates who, when they look back at their university careers, will view them as inspirational stages of their lives which brought out the best of their talents.

The most predictable feature of modern society is its unpredictability. We no longer believe that tomorrow will look much like today. Universities must find ways to sustain the most cherished aspects of their core values, while discovering new ways to respond vigorously to the opportunities of a rapidly evolving world.

World-class universities are defined as providing an excellent undergraduate and postgraduate education, informed by both the quality and extent of their research activity and profile. They conduct research of the very highest international quality and their work informs some of the most important scientific, technical, arts, humanities and social developments in global human society.

The third mission of universities, serving society, has received much attention in international debate on university policy. It is increasingly presented as one of the key tasks of universities, in addition to their traditional tasks of research and teaching.

Strategic planning is a means for a university to tackle the big issues with which it is confronted and to improve its competitive position. In order to gain the status of excellence, it is worthwhile that the university studies past models of success. Interesting examples are the so-called research-intensive university, the entrepreneurial university, or the university as knowledge enterprise. Ultimately, excellence depends on transforming the existing profile to one that successfully copes with future challenges.

This chapter addresses the challenge for middle-income and technologically developing countries to reach sustainable high levels of welfare based on R&D, innovation, and education. The initial discussion focuses on the middle-income trap, and subsequently proceeds to the discussion of the key components of an R&D, innovation, and entrepreneurship system intended to overcome this trap. The key components are built upon four categories of best practices. The first two categories are best practices to foster entrepreneurship (techno-entrepreneurship, venture, entrepreneurship culture) and mission-oriented programs, including mega projects. The third and fourth categories are stimulating research quality (performance-based funding schemes) and supporting the innovation system with R&D awareness. The best practices are drawn from leading examples of policy mechanisms from the Republic of Turkey, the US, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, India, China, Singapore, Mexico, and EU countries (UK, Sweden, Finland, and the Czech Republic). The chapter concludes with policy advice and key recommendations to improve innovation excellence in technologically developing countries, including implications for oil-rich countries.

This chapter deals with ‘excellence’ in international cooperation. Section  discusses different terminologies such as cooperation, collaboration, and aid and the differences between and relationships among them. This is followed by some general insights concerning international cooperation, as a means to put university cooperation in perspective. International cooperation and university cooperation are further explored and elaborated on from this perspective in Sect. . Section  discusses student, expert, and teacher exchanges and the effects and proceeds of such exchanges. Section  deals with three examples of international cooperation.

This chapter deals with the challenges of change towards excellence for universities that find themselves embroiled in the turmoil of globalization and of “informatization”: the intense absorption of information and communication technology (ICT) in even the tiniest blood vessels of social and economic life. External change leads to new and different demands on university output requiring well-trained graduates and research and community engagement (Section 2).