International Academic Partnerships as a Tool for University’s Development

The strategic importance of international partnerships has increased significantly in recent decades. Partnerships have become a defining characteristic of higher education and an integral part of the internationalization of universities, in Russian higher education system as well. Rapid development of international partnerships in leading Russian universities is not supported by an adequate methodology of monitoring and analyzing their effectiveness to support the processes of strategic management of the university’s internationalization. Building an effective management system depends to a large extent on availability of data, their volume, structure, analytical methods used. This, in turn, is determined by business processes for collecting, recording, storing data in organization, existence of monitoring indicators, regulations and guidelines to monitor their performance. The study identifies key parameters and basic typology of international partnerships, describes the main trends and tools for partnership development in foreign universities, describes the best practices for organizing and managing international partnerships at leading Russian universities, formulates the main requirements for creating databases of international partnerships in Russian universities in the context of monitoring system implementation and analysis of effectiveness of international partnerships. Keywords: international partnerships, internationalization, managed databases