IIstanbul Technical University is a state university founded as the Imperial School of Naval Engineering of the Ottoman Empire. ITU currently offers graduate and postgraduate education in a wide range of fields today. It has more than 30,000 full-time students across five campuses located in Istanbul. The university employs around 1,130 faculty members, and 1,300 research assistants in 13 faculties and 6 research institutes. Times Higher Education has ranked ITU as the 165th university worldwide in 2014 and 8th university in BRICS & Emerging Economies in 2015. ITU has developed a range of entrepreneurship and innovation platforms for commercializing technology-based knowledge and for facilitating entrepreneurial ecosystem: ITU TEKNOKENT, established in 2002, is one of the largest technology parks of Turkey with its 100,000 square meters area, over 2,000 completed R&D projects, 160 companies with more than 5200 employees. ITU Teknokent generates $137M total income and $110M R&D exports in 2014. ITU CEKIRDEK is the most comprehensive and unique pre-incubator, incubator, and accelerator of Turkey. With its own branded entrepreneurship competition, it attracts thousands of applications and awards seed capital, for example at TRY100,000, TRY50,000 and 2 x TRY25,000 to leading startups in 2014. ITU GINOVA Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation is established in 2012 by a group of faculty members from ITU Management Engineering Department. It aims to diffuse entrepreneurship culture among Istanbul Technical University (ITU) students and faculty; inspire and encourage ITU students and faculty towards creative thinking and innovation; to provide them with entrepreneurial skills and competencies; as well as to conduct research on innovation and entrepreneurship to expand knowledge in these areas, with passion for innovation, courage, creativity, and learning by doing.
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