Determining Evaluation Indicators of the Performance of Centers of Excellence

Higher education introduces a type of investment in human resources that helps to sustainable development by providing and promoting science, technology, creativity and expertise. Also, higher education promotes science and creates new knowledge by basic and applied researches. In the recent decade, much attention has been paid to the sustainable scientific development in Iran.Centers of excellence are established with the aim of collecting and organizing capable faculty members to develop science frontiers and sustainable development of science and technology in universities. Considering the aims of establishing centers of excellence, Continuous evaluation of these centers is important and useful by defined indicators. In this paper, a new model is developed to evaluate the performance of the centers of excellence and as a case study is applied to the centers of excellence of Amirkabir University of Technology. One of the results of this evaluation can be used for identification of useful and effective activities of centers of excellent and is suitable for guiding them to a right position. Furthermore, determining and using an indicator can result in comparison and competition between different centers so that serious measures can be done about them; to direct and better support of them or eliminating the centers that have weak performance.