SUNGKYUNKWAN UNIVERSITY (SKKU), SEOUL, KOREA
Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) ranked 1st place in the industrial-educational cooperation field thanks to the 'C-school' which provides hybrid education tailor made for business.
It has been proved that SKKU is the leading university in commercializing its own technology by closely collaborating with industry partners. This is the result of making an effort to provide customized education by establishing a Research & Business Foundation benchmarked by global corporations such as Samsung and IBM. SKKU developed specialized departments such as Semiconductor System Engineering in 2006 and Software Engineering in 2011. Students from the Dept. of Software Engineering get a practical education at Samsung SDS and visit global IT corporates such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. The 'Center for Innovative Higher Education' at SKKU established a hybrid education project which is called the 'C-school'. The 'C-school' is providing all manners of education from primary subjects to global business and economics, education, software, design, and so forth. They are focusing on training students who can solve problems creatively with integrated thinking abilities.
In the Evaluation for Natural Science and Engineering Colleges in 2016, SKKU ranked 1st place in the fields of industrial-educational cooperation and tech-commercialization. Seoul and Sogang University placed second with Yonsei and Hanyang University following them.
The reason SKKU got ahead of Seoul, Korea, and Yonsei Universities because of its effort to develop a curriculum tailor-made to meet industrial demands. SKKU has made 'Computational Theory' a mandatory subject. A representative of SKKU said, "Through collaboration with Samsung Electronics and Samsung SDS and the College of Engineering and College of Information and Communication Engineering have been focusing on training students that corporations want to hire."
SKKU received a high score in many fields. It got especially high scores in the categories of 'number of employees' and 'income from technology transfer'. Last year's income from technology transfer (3.7 billion KRW) is 16 times higher than that of 2004. SKKU successfully made big sales from 'Grappin' in 2013, 'Seawater Desalination' in 2014, and 'AMOLED' in 2015. The university filed an application for 500 intellectual property rights and 427 of them are registered.
