One of the hopes of most country's higher education policymakers is to compete against world-renowned universities, and this issue has become more prominent in the past two decades due to the publicising of the various lists of the world's universities' ranking. The representation of this issue in the national development documents and its retelling in different governments, sometimes as a "resilience economy plan" and sometimes as "scientific diplomacy", all show the great interest of policymakers in the issue of improving the status of universities. Despite this hope, due to the lack of knowledge of the inherent and structural characteristics of these universities, not much success has been achieved. In the past years, the universities of Turkey and the universities of Southeast Asian countries were considered to be among the competitors of Iranian universities, but nowadays the newly emerging Arab universities in the south Persian Gulf countries have stolen the lead from Iranian universities by designing their promotion path. For this reason, in this article, evaluating the data and documents, the structural and functional characteristics of two categories of world-class universities (Pioneer universities) and the top universities in Asia (Fast-following universities) are examined and analyzed due to their important input indicators. These indicators are the number of students and faculty members; infrastructural indexes (budget and information resources) and output indicators (number of articles, international scientific relations, and inventions) and finally examining the relationship between these all indicators together. The status of these universities and their infrastructures are analyzed as the most important foundations of their reputation among the world's universities. These characteristics can provide appropriate policy implications for improving the status of the country's top universities, which is stated in the final part of the article. These propositions can determine the main development policies of the country's top universities in the 7th National Development Plan.
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