The “University Ranking 360°: Benchmarking Performance, Challenges and Opportunities in ASEAN” conference held in July at Four Seasons Hotel highlighted challenges and opportunities for Thai and ASEAN universities to benchmark their performance and improve their international reputation and ranking. This could be done through strategic focus on their research and teaching strengths and closer research collaboration with academia and industry partnerships as research becomes increasingly globalised.

This is the first university ranking conference focusing on Thailand and ASEAN co-organised by British Council Thailand, Office of Higher Education Commission (OHEC), Ministry of Education and the Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters. More than 100 delegates attended, largely university management.

Delivering the welcome remarks on the objective of this seminar and relevance to Thailand’s higher education community were Mr Chris Gibson OBE, Country Director, British Council Thailand;
Associate Professor Dr. Piniti Ratananukul, Deputy Secretary-General, Office of the Higher Education Commission (OHEC), Ministry of Education; and Mr Andrew Yeoh, Regional Director of ASEAN, IP & Science, Thomson Reuters.

Mr Gibson said that the British Council Thailand was pleased to organise this milestone seminar as part of its Connect series promoting dialogue between educators and corporations internationally. Dr Piniti mentioned that the conference provided a good platform to exchange quality information on factors driving success of global leading universities, and best practices to promote Thai universities’ efforts to improve their research performance and teaching to become leading universities in Asia and around the world. Mr Yeoh remarked that universities played a critical role in cultivating talent and promoting innovation to drive a country’s economic growth, particularly in today’s global knowledge-based economy.

The distinguished panel of speakers represents different stakeholders of the higher education and corporate community. They shared their experience and best practices on benchmarking university performance and the importance of ensuring the right talent (who usually had the advantage of good education) in the corporate sector. During the panel discussion, they discussed the unique opportunities, challenges and impact of university rankings in ASEAN, ahead of the integrated ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) in 2015. The host and moderator of the seminar and panel discussion was international journalist Ms Patchari Raksawong.

For the first time in Thailand, the seminar also featured guest speaker, Phil Baty, Editor of Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings from the UK. He presented on lessons learnt from global top universities and trends of ASEAN and Thai universities and the rise of Asia in the world top 100 rankings. THE World University Rankings only ranks the top 400 universities worldwide according to four key pillars which define its world class research universities– teaching, knowledge transfer, global outlook and research. According to THE World University Rankings, representing ASEAN amongst the world’s top 400 were Thailand and Singapore - King Mongkut's University of Technology, Thonburi; National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore).

The second speaker was Professor M.R. Jisnuson Svasti, Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry, Mahidol University and Head of Laboratory of Biochemistry, Chulabhorn Research Institute. He presented on the differences and similarities between the various university rankings, and the importance of understanding their differing methodology in order to identify and compare a university’s strengths and weaknesses against peer institutions for strategic improvement. Observers should also note that different university ranking systems measure different parameters and have different weighting, although research remains a key parameter that influences all rankings, as well as a university’s academic reputation. Good graduate education promotes research excellence and having an international outlook was important for a university as this would lead to more global research collaboration and a more international student and faculty mix.

Dr Wong Woei Fuh, Senior Consultant, IP & Science, Thomson Reuters, presented on how citation indexing and bibliometric analysis are used to benchmark the research performance of selected countries in ASEAN region such as Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. Increasingly, more universities would like to focus on innovation and overcoming challenges that they face in intellectual property (IP) management, collaboration with corporations, and managing scalability. Dr Wong’s presentation gave an overview of how universities in the ASEAN region could understand bibliometric analysis in order to make better informed decisions to position themselves as global universities recognized for research and innovation by focusing on areas of research strengths, and research collaboration with other universities and corporations. The multi-disciplinary nature of research today facilitated such collaboration opportunities. Thomson Reuters is the data partner of Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

Representing the corporate sector was Ms Narderee Arj-Harnwong, Vice President of Human Resources, Thailand & Indochina, Unilever Thai Trading Limited. She shared a case study of the Unilever Future Leadership Programme in Thailand and the challenge of succession planning and ensuring that they had the right talent in place to continue their success. She observed that although it was unplanned, most of the programme trainees were UK-educated.