By Genevieve Balance Kupang
The 6th Annual Conference of the Hanseatic League of Universities and the 2026 WURI Global Ranking Ceremony. National Chi Nan University, Puli, Taiwan. The 6th in a series of nine. If you missed the 5th, the link is: https://www.pressenza.com/2026/05/6th-hlu-annual-conference-wuni-l-assembly-on-collaboration-innovation-and-shared-futures-5th-of-9-series/
The speaker and two circles he was standing between… Dr. Cho, Honorary President of the Hanseatic League of Universities and Chair of the WURI Foundation, has held both vantage points since each began. In 2018, as president of Incheon National University, he stood before nine fellow presidents at Hanze University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands and convinced them to found a league modeled on the old Hanseatic merchant cities, a network built on trading ideas the way the old cities once traded goods. A year later, on his own campus in Incheon, he invited Professor Hwy-Chang Moon to unveil the concept that became WURI, a second circle drawn just outside the first. So, when he stood in Taiwan this May, he was tracing the seams between two structures he had built himself: one as founder of a league, and one as the architect still widening what came after it.
Empowered and innovative leaders, one widening circle for HLU and WURI. Delegates listen as Dr. Dong-sung Cho addresses the 6th HLU Annual Conference at National Chi Nan University.
HLU created WURI. Dr. Cho took the podium at National Chi Nan University on the morning of May 6, 2026, welcomed the delegates, and gave us a lecture. Called “WURI in the Future”, the title turned out to be exact. What followed was less an address than an accounting: where the World University Rankings for Innovation started in 2020, what it grew into by 2025, and where he intends to take it by 2027. I have sat through many opening remarks in my years as WURI Historian. Few have felt like watching an architect walk you through his own blueprint, line by line, in real time.
Dr. Dong-sung Cho recounting the founding story of the Hanseatic League of Universities at the 6th HLU Annual Conference / WURI 2026 Global Conference. Tracing its roots to the 10 university presidents invited by Hanze University of Applied Sciences for its 220th anniversary in April 2018.
The slide he kept returning to was “Evolution and Revolution of University Rankings.” On one half were familiar names: the Academic Ranking of World Universities from 1983, the Times Higher Education and QS split around 2010, and U-Multirank arriving in 2014. On the other half were WURI’s own decade, mapped year by year, starting as what he called a “rebellious ranking” in 2020 and arriving, by his own account, at an “accreditation and validation” ranking in 2027. He didn’t need to say the next part out loud, but he did: WURI was never built to compete with those older systems on their own terms. It was built to ask an entirely different question.
He took us back to 2020, the founding year. Any university willing to work could reach the top, prestige, and budget aside. Statistics were out; submitted cases of innovation were in. What got measured was where a university was headed rather than what it had already accumulated. And the presidents themselves did the evaluating, cross-reading each other’s submissions; hence, he still calls it a learning-based ranking rather than a simple comparison.
By his telling, the years between 2021 and 2025 were about deepening that foundation. Universities started writing their own cases rather than having them written about them. Submissions multiplied as institutions stopped following innovation trends and started setting them. Faculty took case writing seriously enough; it began showing up in research papers and academic journals, not just conference brochures.
Distinguished leaders united on the global stage. Seated together before Taiwanese media on May 7, 2026, at the 6th HLU Annual Conference and WURI 2026 Global Conference: Dr. Kyung-Sung Kim, President of iSTAT and Chair of the WURI Ranking; Dr. In Seok Kang (PhD, Caltech), of aSSIST University; Dr. Dong-sung Cho, founder of WURI; Dr. Dong-Sing Wuu, President of National Chi Nan University; Dr. Anoop Swarup, Secretary General of AUAP; and Dr. Patrice McMahon, Provost of Minerva University. Their gathering reflected a shared commitment, across continents and institutions, to innovation, collaboration, and the advancement of higher education worldwide.
Then he arrived to this year. I could tell it was the part he had been waiting to share. WURI has added a third axis for 2026, “What to Innovate,” alongside the existing “For Whom” and “How” axes, with categories in research, education, service, and commercialization. That brings the total to twenty-four categories across three axes. He also introduced something he called the Torchlight effect: rather than averaging a university’s performance across all two dozen criteria, evaluators are now asked to name the one criterion where that university truly stands apart from everyone else. And the ranking itself has been decentralized, organized now by eight administrative offices and twenty-four academic majors, so that a case from a business school is read differently than one from an engineering department or a president’s office.
WURI Founder and HLU Honorary President Dr. Dong-sung Cho with presenters and participants of Topic 14: IR Presentations by AI-Based Startups for Higher Education Institutions (chaired by Professor Hun-Seok Oh) and WURI Historian Dr. Genevieve B. Kupang, at the 6th HLU Annual Conference, National Chi Nan University. Photo credit: Ji Sang Park (Bob), GyopoolAI Co-Founder.
The numbers behind all this were not small. Dr. Cho reported that 301 university presidents evaluated 13,211 innovative cases from 1,920 universities in this year’s cycle. Judges included Lynn Pasquerella of the American Association of Colleges and Universities and Raynard Kington of Phillips Academy Andover. The WURI Office fact-checked the top 100 cases in every category before anything was released.
Then, because he could not resist looking ahead, he gave us a preview of 2027. A fourth axis, “With Whom to Innovate,” will bring the framework to four axes and thirty-two categories, anchored by a new WURI Impact Summit. Some of the numerical rankings will start giving way to discrete accreditation and validation marks instead, including a World Innovative University Accreditation and a Validation of SDG and ESG-Based Innovation Projects, the latter requiring an independent inspector jointly nominated by UNITAR and the WURI Foundation, valid for three years once granted. Universities will also be nudged toward treating entrepreneurship as something worth evaluating in its own right, with professors, students, and staff each cast in a role as investor, co-developer, local marketer, or customer of the ventures their own campuses produce.
On stage, gratitude took center stage. Dr. Dong-sung Cho, founder of WURI, offered his deepest thanks to National Chi Nan University for boldly stepping up to host the 6th HLU Annual Conference and WURI Global Rankings Ceremony, a challenge NCNU President Dr. Wuu embraced with vision and grace. As the two shook hands, Dr. Cho broke into a warm smile: “Now, finally, we can rest and sleep,” he said, drawing laughter and applause from the room, a moment of quiet relief and shared joy, a sincere thank-you to everyone who traveled far to be part of this milestone.
What stayed with me afterward was not any single one of these additions. It was the pattern underneath all of them. Dr. Cho keeps asking a new question every few years: for whom, then how, then what, and now with whom. Each new question sits on top of the last rather than replacing it. There is something in that habit of building that echoes the kapwa I try to hold onto in this historian’s work: no university stands alone in the ranking, no single criterion carries the whole story, and no single year gets to close the book.
Flanked by the flags of nations gathered under one shared vision, Dr. Dong-sung Cho listens as NCNU President Dr. Dong-Sing Wuu delivers the closing remarks of the 6th HLU Annual Conference. A small, knowing smile plays at the edges of his lips, as if to say: we have done it again, and a still moment of quiet pride before the next chapter begins.
He ended by putting up the League’s host calendar all the way through 2029, a trail running from Groningen to Incheon to Fort Myers to Lugano to Dumaguete to Puli, and on to Cairo, São Paulo, and back to Seoul. It is a map I will be walking again before this year is done, on the road to Deggendorf, Germany, then to other places in Africa, North America, Latin America, and then to Asia.
Three Upcoming Important Schedules for WURI in 2026
Dr. Cho mentioned the upcoming activities and schedules for the WURI network. Three major events stand out on the calendar.
The 1st AUAP-WURI Impact Summit 2026 takes place on July 9-10, 2026, at ICONSIAM in Bangkok, Thailand. The summit carries the theme “University Innovation in Partnership with Government: Policy, Mechanism, and Impact.” It brings together university leaders, innovators, and industry partners to showcase real-world impact and scale solutions for a sustainable future. This joint initiative recognizes and showcases outstanding university innovations that demonstrate strong impact, global relevance, and alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A transparent, peer-review process led by university presidents and senior leaders will evaluate all submissions.
The 3rd WURI Global Conference will be held at the Deggendorf Institute of Technology Deggendorf, Germany, this coming September 23–25, 2026. The conference serves as the global ranking platform for educational innovation. It also marks the official launch of the World University Network for Innovation (WUNI), alongside executive leadership roundtables, strategic workshops, and showcases of award-winning innovation projects from universities across more than 30 countries.
Before Dr. Cho closed, he left an invitation for 2026. This November, the WURI International Research Conference 2026, WIRC-26, will be hosted by the University of Makati in the Philippines, opening a new platform for scholarly exchange on university innovation, higher education transformation, artificial intelligence in education, and the broader themes that animate the WURI Global Rankings ecosystem. He encouraged delegates and their institutions to submit and join the community in Manila as the story continues to be written together.
The conference website is now live, and abstract submissions are open until July 15, 2026.
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About the Author:
Genevieve B. Kupang, PhD, is WURI Historian, Secretary of WUNI-Leaders (WUNI-L), and Board Director of the Cordillera Association of International Relations Officers (CAIRO). She serves as Peace Education Coordinator for the World Council for Curriculum and Instruction (WCCI) and Co-Lead of the Exceptional Women of Peace Awards under Pathways to Peace. She is currently Dean of the Graduate School and International Relations Officer, Baguio Central University, Baguio City, Philippines.
