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.

-To train students that possess skills that businesses want colleges also teach business, software, and design to engineering students.

-Seoul National University and Sogang University placed second in the universities with the most technology holdings companies.

-Yonsei University got the highest sales figures with 23.7 billion.  Korea University and Chungbuk University are right behind in third and sixth place.

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.  As we can see, industrial-educational cooperation is in the spotlight with regard to higher education these days.

The reason SKKU got ahead of Seoul, Korea, and Yonsei Universities, or the so called ‘SKY’ schools, is 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.

As industrial-educational cooperation is reinforced, the boundary between universities and corporations is fading.  Many technology holding companies from universities are getting ahead of small businesses.

A technology holding company from Yonsei University made a big sale that reached 23.7 billion KRW.  That amount is the largest among the 50 main universities.  The technology holding company from Yonsei has 16 subsidiary companies.  They established 4 subsidiary companies last year.  Corporations named Wearrom, TNC, I-tech-U, and Stem-more are some of them.

The company, Stem-more, which was established based on 10 years of Professor Sung, Jongheok’s research, is getting attention for its development of medicine for hair loss.  In March, they succeeded in commercializing ‘BAMSONGI Shampoo’.  A representative of Yonsei University said, “We are storing knowhow about investing in subsidiary companies,” he added. “This year we are considering investing in 3 items.”

Seoul National University took 2nd place.  The technology holding company from SNU reached KRW 15.6 billion in sales.  Sogang University and Korea University placed 3rd and 4th each.  Among community colleges, Chungbuk University and Kangwon University ranked high.  Kangwon University got an especially good evaluation due to the fact that it strives to find business items that have specific characteristics.  For example, one subsidiary company from Kangwon, Ecoforest, has been researching items that use forest byproducts.