Innovation and leading universities
Innovation
The ability of companies to transform research, other knowledge and ideas to new commercial products and processes is vital for increasing the ability of global competition for the region. However, this ability is difficult to measure, partly because the concept is difficult to define and partly because of a considerable lack of regional data.
The EU-supported survey “Regional Innovation Scoreboard” makes an attempt to measure the ability of regions to innovate. According to the survey, the regions in Sweden and Denmark are among the most innovative in Europe. The survey is based on an index that is a weighted total of 17 different indicators broken down into three main groups: Background facts that promote innovation (public R&D, higher education, access to broadband etc), innovation activities in companies (R&D expenses, patents etc.) and preformence factors (employees in the high-tech sector, sales of products that are new to the market, new innovation companies etc.). The latest survey was published in December of 2009 and refers to data for 2006. Unfortunately, the statistics from Denmark are not broken down regionally but refer to the entire country. Denmark as a country belongs to the regions judged to have the greatest ability to innovate, while Öresund SE belongs to the second highest group.
Leading universities
The Öresund region plays a leading role in the Nordic countries and in Europe regarding academics, with contributions from the Danish as well as Swedish sides. The region is also globally well positioned.
To compare universities internationally is not easy. This is especially true with regard to their quality of instruction in complicated areas such as education and research. One of the most well established international comparisons of the quality of instruction among universities in both these areas is published annually by the Institute for Higher Education at Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University. Over 2 000 universities from all over the world are included in the comparison, where they are ranked according to a quality evaluation in the following six fields (weights stated in parentheses):
• Persons who are employed by the university and have won a Nobel Prize or another distinguished award in their area of research (10 percent)
• Persons who have studied or conducted research at the university and won a Nobel Prize or another distinguished award in their area of research outside the university (20 percent)
• The most often cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories (20 percent)
• Articles published in Nature and Science (20 percent)
• Articles in citation databases such as Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (20 percent)
• Academic performance with regard to the size of the university (10 percent)- Nordic universities in JTU’s 2009 World class Top 100
Source: www.arwu.org
Copenhagen University is the leading academic environment of the Nordic countries today and has in recent years risen in the ranks to surpass Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The two universities are now respectively in eighth and tenth place in Europe. Of the universities with higher academic standards on the top ten list in Europe are four from the U.K (Cambridge University, Oxford University, Imperial College London and University College London), one in Switzerland (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) one in France (University of Paris) and one in the Netherlands (University of Utrecht). Lund also takes a forward position in Europe. Lund is also one of the two Nordic universities outside the capital cities ranking among the hundred highest quality universities in the world.
However, from a broader European perspective, Stockholm clearly has more high-performance universities than the Öresund region (compare with the map of Number of top 100 universities in Europe). The Technical University of Denmark as well as Chalmers and Gothenburg University are among the hundred foremost universities in Europe, although the latter two have a lower rank than the former. In general terms, the leading academic environments in Europe are concentrated in the central section of western Europe, with London and Paris as the centre. Eastern Europe is clearly outside this area. Further, most of the world leading universities are outside of Europe and are mostly in North America.- Number of top 100 universities in Europe
Source: Institute for higher education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Map: Nordregio.
