In this article, we compare two recent university reform projects: the Korean Brain Korea 21 project and the German Universities Excellence Initiative. We describe and compare both projects' goals, selection processes, and preliminary outcomes. While the Korean project is characterized by a relatively high level of political intervention and can be seen as mainly a human resources development program with clearly defined strategic goals, the German tradition of university autonomy is also reflected in the reform project analyzed here. The project goal is more vaguely defined for the German project, but lies mainly in the field of research capacity building. Another key difference is the time horizons in both projects and the resulting incentives for publication and chosen research projects: while the Korean projects are evaluated on a yearly basis, the German projects have a longer time horizon for evaluation. A preliminary evaluation shows that both programs have succeeded in increasing publication output in the respective countries. However, an analysis of the quality of the new publications by, for example, their citation numbers, remains to be done in the future.