In Pursuit of Excellence In R&D: Explorations and Reflections
1. Forward
The tradition and style of the university formed gradually during the three developing processes, i.e. constantly bringing for the new ideas around the goal of the country. Nowadays, the goal of the university is: up to the year of 2018 for the 60th anniversary or so, the university would become an international noted research-type one with suitable scale, high quality, reasonable scope, distinct style, and become the teaching and researching center that would be able to develop new knowledge and techniques, and that would cooperate with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, other special research organizations and high-tech enterprises, and foster top-grade persons with creating ability and modern knowledge structure.
2. The Importance of R&D for university development
(1) Fostering first-rate innovative talents. Through developing R&D, universities could provide beneficial research environment for fostering innovative talents, and train their abilities of research practice and innovation.
(2) Upgrading the academic level and fame of universities. Positive fame could help universities to attract excellent talents, produce excellent teaching and research production, obtain more funds, and go into a beneficial cycle for university development.
(3) Pushing forward the high-tech and the social economy. Constant developing R&D would offer various fruits for the society.
3. The exploration and realization on striving for the top-grade R&D at the university
(1) Uniting the fundamental research forces of the university around essential problems in the leading positions of the international scientific research, e.g. fundamental research on nanoscience, quantum information science research by combining theory with experiment.
(2) Uniting the research forces in the engineering scientific domain around the national important and strategic needs.
(3) Supporting a number of new, interdisciplinary and characteristic sciences, e.g. life science, conflagration science and prevention technique, polar region science investigation and research, and scientific archaeology.
(4) Establishing numerous laboratories opening to the whole school for the teaching and research use, e.g. the 4 public laboratories of physics and chemistry science, life science, information science and engineering science etc.
(5) Promoting the basic scientific research and the whole research.
4. Taking the worldwide successful path for industrial development
(1) The problems in school-owned enterprises and the modes for developing scientific enterprises in the top-grade universities of the world.
(2) Combining the advantages in techniques and human in universities with the market and resources in local governments, and probing a new mode for turning the fruits into practice more quickly and developing scientific enterprises.
(3) Improving the school-owned enterprise management in line with modem enterprise system, making property rights definite, sorting out management system, protecting the lawful rights of the university and the reasonable benefits of its enterprises.
(4) Accelerating the construction of the national university scientific garden at Hefei, Pudong R&D center at Shanghai, virtual university garden at Shenzhen, and promoting the scientific fruits into practice and industrialization.
5. Summary
The realization in the process of striving for the top-grade: keeping the tradition and style is essential; insisting on "doing something while not doing something" is necessary; interdisciplinary sciences often contain great opportunities.
(china.org.cn, July 30, 2002)
