President Yao Leeh-Ter isn’t kidding when he calls his school “an incubator for entrepreneurs”: industry is clearly eager to hire his graduates. Cheers magazine declared this year that Taipei Tech graduates are the favorites of Taiwan's top 1000 enterprises, while Global Views Monthly ranked it as a top graduate school, and Commonwealth called it the best tech university.

What makes these graduates so outstanding? President Yao says, “Our students need to do practical things, as our school emphasizes hands-on practice.” Taipei Tech matches every fundamental course with a lab course, so students are able to test their understanding of theory with practice.

This is the advantage that a technology university has over conventional universities, the president says. "University of technology students need to do practical things, especially graduate students. Seventy-five percent of our graduate students come from regular universities, but many of them say that in their previous four years they learned nothing useful, and that they want to learn practical things before they graduate and find a job."

All students complete industry internships with businesses before graduation as well, and these internships often turn into job offers.

Taipei Tech professors are just as motivated to innovate as their students are. President Yao says, "We ask our professors to go into business settings to solve problems." Professors’ projects for industry count as one-third of their research credits for promotion, so Taipei Tech is clearly not an ivory tower of scholarship set apart from the world.

These partnerships extend far beyond Taiwan, and Taipei Tech’s global vision comes from the top. "I don't see any boundaries around the world, so if we can globalize our teaching and research, I believe my faculty and students would benefit from this," President Yao says. "Most of our graduates eventually work abroad, so I want my students to have an international perspective.”

The students come from 35 countries, notably for six all-English graduate programs. “We do our best to recruit as many international students as possible, and we are encouraging every department to invite an international chair professor to teach. So far we have invited more than a hundred international professors this year. While it is very costly, I think it is a way to give our students international perspectives."The Taipei Tech brand opens many doors to interns and graduates, not least because alumni make up 10% of all founders, board directors and CEOs of Taiwan stock companies. Alumni help their school with guidance through the Taipei Tech Alumni Elite Union and 26 other alumni groups (11 in Taiwan and 15 abroad), so successful alumni provide students with role models from day one.

These alumni go beyond being examples; they are generous with funding to help students build their visions. The alumni-funded Taipei Tech Innovation Company provides an “angel fund” to help professors, students and alumni pursue their research and start up their own businesses.

Taipei Tech Electric Car

President Yao says Taipei Tech is "the first university in Taiwan to offer an Innovation and Entrepreneurship program, and we have many donations from alumni to financially support our students’ inventions by funding material and travel expenses if they want to participate in international competitions.”

The results of this “incubator for entrepreneurs” are clear: Taipei Tech students rank #4 in all of Asia in terms of Reddot awards for product innovation, and they won the “Best of the Best” Reddot awards again in 2010 and 2012. Beyond the student level, Taipei Tech was the only school to win this year’s national innovation award, and it was also ranked as the #1 “paradigm technology university” by the Ministry of Education.

Virtual of solar powered street light

"We want to be the best partner for small and medium-sized industry,” the president says. “As the second-oldest university in Taiwan, we have developed close relationships with businesses, especially with the enterprises of our alumni."

President Yao has a lot of history with his university: at age 15 he joined it as an undergraduate, and he returned from two periods of U.S. graduate studies to teach for twenty years before becoming its president. But most significant is his own distinction as an innovator: his work for Taiwan Power is saving energy in every power substation across the nation.

"I'm also doing practical research; currently I design facility management systems,” he says. “I'm also building a geographical information system for Taiwan Power transmission lines so that they can locate and see each tower of the transmission line to better manage all their facilities."

The university recently broke the record that it established 19 years ago for an energy-efficient vehicle. Along with LED, sensor, solar and electric vehicle research, Taipei Tech has identified health technologies as a high priority. The president says it will be less than three years until the university’s wireless glucose monitoring patch linked to mobile phones can be marketed to diabetes patients, and this already been granted five patents in the US and Taiwan.

Visitors cannot miss the university's commitment to green technologies, from its living "green gate" and green roofs to the water-recycling bioswale that meanders as a tree-shaded stream through campus. The U.S. Discovery Channel made Taipei Tech's outstanding green features the focus of a special report in 2009.

Virtural of Interactive road displays

"We are proud of the concepts and technologies used in building the green campus,” the president says. “We have many architecture professors researching and teaching in this area, while the engineering-related colleges are doing research on green energy such as fuel cells, solar cells, wind energy, roadway energy and energy-saving technologies."

Taipei Tech occupies a prime location in the very center of Taipei City, within easy walking distance of the Guanghua computer mall as well as the Huashan Creative Park, a converted brewery complex that hosts dozens of arts events each week. So the neighborhood is a hotbed of cultural innovations as well as the city's high-tech heart, and President Yao has plans to make it even better:

Window of design

"Within two or three months we are going to put many displays along the pathways, and there will be many interactive design technologies and videos. Taipei’s City Government is proposing the project to a world competition called Design Capital Taipei, and they told us that no matter whether they win or lose this competition, our ideas proposed for this project will still be executed.

President Yao Leeh-Ter isn’t kidding when he calls his school “an incubator for entrepreneurs”: industry is clearly eager to hire his graduates. Cheers magazine declared this year that Taipei Tech graduates are the favorites of Taiwan's top 1000 enterprises, while Global Views Monthly ranked it as a top graduate school, and Commonwealth called it the best tech university.

What makes these graduates so outstanding? President Yao says, “Our students need to do practical things, as our school emphasizes hands-on practice.” Taipei Tech matches every fundamental course with a lab course, so students are able to test their understanding of theory with practice.