According to Alexander Bikkulov, coordinator for the "Relevant Metrics of Entrepreneurial Universities" international expert group, one of the goals of this monitoring was to promote including indexes of innovative activities into international rankings. According to him, innovative activities in many universities is most important, but is not assessed by the rankings. Presently, more than tencountries all over the world make attempts at elaborating particular methods for assessing such activities, and then introduce them into the ranking systems. ITMO University is one of such pioneers. Alexander Bikkulov underlines that it took them a month to elaborate the method, and one more month to do the monitoring.
"Our final goal is to introduce at least one new international sub-rating that will reflect a university's' innovative activity", notes Mr. Bikkulov.
During the assessment of innovative activities, the experts used three indexes: the presence of an innovative-entrepreneurial environment at the university, the performance of the university's technology transfer, and its effect on the region's socio-economic environment.
Nina Yanikina, Head of ITMO's Project and Innovative Activities Department, explained that ITMO University came second due to several reasons. First of all, ITMO has developed its own culture of innovative-entrepreneurial environment.
"Our university is one of the most active at conducting cultural and educational events. Only this year such experts as Oleg Tinkov, Sylvia Ma and Viktor Kozlov came to speak at ITMO University. Some universities don't do things like that at all. Our innovative projects, startup-weekends and the promotion of technological entrepreneurship is really effective and gives high results. We also create SIE's. Still, we have to work even harder on the system we use to support our innovative projects. Also, we need to continue developing our research, as well. This is the way to maintaining our technological leadership", believes Nina Yanikina.
What's most important is that many results of the university's intellectual activities become commercialized. Many of the universities have only started their innovative activities — they still need a couple of years to get some significant results. Yet, the leaders of the monitoring have already gone through this buffer period.
"The SIE's opened at the universities have yet to bring them any considerable income. Those mostly have to do with R&D, where universities work on the orders or provide engineering services to external companies. Universities began to play an increasing role in the region's social-economic environment, though they are still not active enough. The universities still don't create many jobs, in most cases it's only several positions per university, and only the leaders have created more than a hundred", — conclude the experts.
You can read the full report on RVC’s website.
