Some of the most important discoveries and innovations that you and I use today came from labs in academia. At Columbia University, for example, researchers patent more than 300 inventions a year! At the two Columbia Business School exec education programs I attended, about half a dozen of the faculty who taught had published books based on their research.
Hope this is some inspiration for folks in developing countries, where the pride instead is on numbers (lots of institutions, lots of students) and even a basic such as teaching quality is often poor.