When the first Institute for Advanced Study was founded in Princeton in 1930, nobody anticipated that it would eventually become a model spreading across the globe. Especially within the past twenty years a significant number of new Institutes for Advanced Study (IAS) have surfaced in many regions of the world. Classified as “academic paradises,” they are often regarded as isolated islands or ivory towers, but this is only one part of the story: I will show that (a) IAS are both products and driving forces of the globalization of research and are closely intertwined with different trends of global science policies, and that (b) IAS, despite their small size, have played an important role for the development of universities and the sciences and continue to do so. Finally, I would like to provide an outlook on future challenges and tasks of IAS as spaces of global production of knowledge.