President Doh-Yeon Kim spoke on the subject of university-industry collaboration at the Times Higher Education’s Asia Universities Summit, which drew over 220 academic leaders and delegates from 86 institutions across 24 countries.

The three-day summit with the theme of “Forging the future – building stronger alliances between universities and industry” was co-hosted by University of Ulsan and Ulsan Metropolitan City, the industrial capital of Korea.

President Kim started his talk, titled “Driving innovative cooperation: a new paradigm of University-Industry partnership,” with an African proverb saying, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,” to emphasize the importance of collaboration.

POSTECH, founded in 1986 as Korea’s first research university, is to become a university that creates value and directly contributes to society through cooperation, according to President Kim. He pointed to POSTECH’s various collaborative efforts with different sectors – with alumni, the cities of Pohang and Ulsan, as well as corporations.

A case in point was the POSTECH-Industry Integrated Research Center, which invites researchers from industries as tenure-track professors to bridge research collaboration and share their field expertise. President Kim plans to recruit 150 new professors during his term, and one third of them will be through the POSTECH-Industry Integrated Research Center.

President Kim added that the university is helping students create and successfully run startups through mentoring with the Association of POSTECH Grown Companies (APGC) and entrepreneurial support from APGC-Lab, an on-campus startup incubator. To overcome the economic stagnation in the two major industrial cities of Korea, Pohang and Ulsan, POSTECH is also leading the “Univer+City” forum, a collaborative initiative with the two cities’ governments, local chambers of commerce, and other higher education institutions in the region.

2017 THE Asia Universities Summit was in its second run this year. It will be hosted by South University of Science and Technology of China (SUSTech) next year in Shenzhen, China.