A Collaboration-Based Innovation Model Proposed for the Central Black Sea Universities

To compete in today's technology-intensive competitive environment, universities need to be aware of their limitations and collaborate with other universities to overcome them. Several indices that attempt to measure innovation and rank institutions have been proposed. Nevertheless, most innovation indices measure innovation at the political or country level that focuses on a specific country or region. Moreover, national innovation indices investigating innovation level of the universities in Turkey focuses only on their academic activities. This motivated us to design a significantly improved model that attempts to increase collaboration among the universities in Central Black Sea region, providing these under developing universities to observe their innovativeness level in terms of infrastructure as well. Thus, they may identify their infrastructure limitations, specifically for high-tech and high-cost devices, and develop strategic plans that can help them collaborate with other universities to address the limitations. Similar to other indices, the proposed models is neither exhaustive nor definitive, and is open to improvements. The model can be continuously upgraded based on the constructive feedbacks and future researches.