How Arab Universities Can Be Innovative

Arab universities, in order for to be among the world’s innovative universities, all the personnel thereof should be informed and educated about the following factors.

European Most Innovative Universities

In ranking of 2018 European Most Innovative Universities for the year 2018, Belgian University of KU Leuven topped the list, becoming the first innovative university in Europe for the third year in a row, among the universities that work on the advancement of science, development of modern technologies, and support of industries and markets. It should be noted that this University, established in 1425, offers its programs in Dutch. Then comes Imperial College London in the second place and Cambridge University in the third, maintaining their ranking for the third year in a row. However, the ranks of some other universities have changed in 2017 and 2018 lists.

The World’s Most Innovative Universities

Stanford University has been ranked as the World’s Most Innovative University for the fourth year in a row according to the latest Reuters ranking (2018) [26].

Most Innovative Asia-Pacific Universities

Despite of the political instability in South Korea, there are strong and solid relations between universities and industry. These relations continue to lead economic growth and technical innovation in this country. This is the conclusion reached by Reuters in the third annual classification of Asian and Pacific universities, working on achieving progress in sciences and creating new technologies [29]. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, currently known as KAIST, is ranked the first for the third year in a row. Historically speaking, KAIST is the oldest Korean university dedicated for research, sciences, and engineering. It has three branch campuses in the following cities: Daejeon, Seoul, and Busan. The university produces a large number of innovations and applies for more patents than the other 75 universities on the list. In addition, researchers all over the world cite highly the research and patents of this university.

A Study of Some of the World’s Most Innovative Universities

This chapter examines in detail a study of the top twenty most innovative universities in the world according to Table 10.1007/978-3-030-59694-1_6. A study of one university of each country, whose name was not included among the top twenty universities, is also added. The first-ranked university in each country which none of its universities were ranked among the top twenty is selected, and its details described the same way as that of the top twenty universities. The ranking of the added universities is: 31, 35, 44, 55, 57, 62, and 63. This study is shown below.

Ranking Methodology of the World’s Most Innovative Universities

Reuters News Agency started the idea of ranking the World’s Most Innovative Universities. It relied on data compiled by Clarivate Analytics and several of its research platforms [25]. The latter company used to be called “Intellectual Property and Science Business of Thomson Reuters.” The process began by identifying approximately 600 academic and government organizations that published the greatest number of articles in scholarly journals. Reuters, then, put ten criteria for the innovation to evaluate the chosen organizations. These criteria are presented later in Sect. 2.3.

The Roles of Universities in Development

Since the last decades of the twentieth century, most countries, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, have been seeking to transform their economies from depending on primary natural resources to a knowledge-based one, providing a permanent source for economic growth, and thus achieving sustainable development, and helping in diversifying the national economic framework, and multiplying income and wealth resources of the country other than primary resources, mainly crude oil.

Statistics of Patents of the World’s Most Innovative Universities

Patents are the significant factor in ranking universities in terms of innovation. Therefore, in this chapter, we are presenting statistics on patents of different ranked universities in order to encourage other universities to enter the ranking if they work on registering patents. We are especially drawing the attention to the percentage of the number of registered patents in comparison with the number of patents submitted by universities, as we notice that this percentage is lower than 50% for a lot of American universities while it is higher for Asian universities.

Recommendations

At the end of this book, we conclude that innovative universities should work in different ways to reach the classification of innovative universities.