Closer cooperation with industry hones KTH position
Increased collaboration with industry will strengthen KTH’s position among the international university elite. This is the message that President Peter Gudmundson has been discussing with the Dagens Industri newspaper in connection with the release of the KTH International Research Assessment Exercise Report on the evaluation carried out this year.
The new KTH Strategic Plan, covering the next four years, includes plans for the introduction of an Industry Faculty, and President Peter Gudmundson would be pleased to see more professorships financed by industry.
“We will purposefully link up with researchers from industry, establish programmes with companies and actively encourage them to locate operations at our school,” he stated to Dagens Industri.
International competition as concerns production of leading edge knowledge is becoming tougher. Consequently this year KTH undertook an evaluation by 80 international experts in order to gain guidance as concerns research operations. In the KTH RAE 2008 (International Research Assessment Exercise) Report the conclusions of this exercise are presented and KTH also formulates a global strategy aimed at strengthening its competitive edge for the future.
“This assessment has provided KTH with essential information about our strengths, weaknesses and future potential. Among other things we apparently produce more spin-off companies than the majority of the leading American universities and our patent levels are rising. At the same time we need to improve our international marketing activities,” says Tuula Teeri, Deputy President of KTH.
In the evaluation it was also noted that KTH has a high level of quotation of published work, actually almost 32 percent above the international average. This is a sign of a high level of research quality and is vital as it affects allocation of external and state grants. The expert panel recommends that KTH should focus its resources on research areas that are able to generate solutions to society’s most urgent needs.
“In a global economy it is becoming increasingly important to generate the breakthrough products and services that revolutionise industry and society. Consequently we have identified five different research fields of vital importance to the future; energy technology, new materials, ICT, transport engineering and medical and healthcare engineering. Major investments will take place within all these fields,” states KTH President Peter Gudmundson.
Håkan Soold