The World 100 Reputation Network
The World 100 Reputation Network formed around 2006 when a small group of top universities came together to create a network and undertake research into reputation. As director of the specialist higher education consultancy The Knowledge Partnership, and former director of communications at the University of Cambridge, I knew that top universities wanted to learn from the best in the world and engage in international reputation management, and therefore the genesis of the group seemed to be naturally useful.
The original partners were King’s, Imperial, UCL and Warwick, and our first research looked at how reputation was managed in the best universities in the world, and funded, which no one had done before. We also compared all 137 websites of the universities that were either in the SJT or THE/QS ranking, looking at visuals, messages and structures. Membership has grown each year and we hope we become less UK-centric as the membership widens. Now we have 13 members, including Helsinki, Lund and the University of Hong Kong.
In 2010 the first World 100 conference at the University of Hong Kong hopefully set the trend and high standards for an intelligence-based gathering of top university communicators and leaders. Sponsored by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, we were able to see three of the best universities in Asia. We arranged this back to back with our second Chinese study tour, which then took the group on to Peking University and Tshingua, both world class giants.
In 2011 we are looking to hold a conference in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, to examine the explosion of off-shore education, and better understand the growing knowledge economy of the Middle East. In 2012, we have our sights set on the Washington area for an American conference.
Rankings allow us to create impartial frames for our membership and our research field, (ie the definition of world class is not in our hands) but they are of course highly subjective tools that do not capture reputation in the sense of aggregated third party opinion. However they are of increasing interest to applicants and faculty, and the splitting of the THE/QS ranking has now led to three rankings of world class universities that we have to keep an eye on! It will be interesting to see how many rankings there will be by 2020. But rankings aside, we continue to welcome the support and interest of world class universities to our group who are interested in reputation and how it is managed in higher education, and want to look outside national boundaries.
Louise Simpson, Director, World 100 Reputation Network
Find out more at http://theworld100.com