By Jo Best, 22 February 2006 14:55
NEWS
The European Union has mooted the creation of a new landmark technology institute.
The proposal for a "flagship for excellence" for tech innovation and research has been put before the European parliament.
The new European Institute of Technology (EIT) will be based across several sites and bring together academics and business interests. The institute will be run by a central governing board, which will oversee a collection of 'knowledge communities'.
The EC is hoping that the EIT will encourage companies to finance research into new technologies in return for a cut of the revenues they generate. The EIT will be bankrolled by the EC but individual member states will also contribute funding.
According to Ján Figel, European commissioner for Education, Training, Culture, and Multilingualism, the Institute is necessary to improve Europe's poor record on turning the results of its R&D into commercial projects.
According to the EC, the EIT could be up and running from 2009.
Comments
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1. anonymous
This does not sound very much like MIT.
Although MIT does have a long history of working with industry to develop practical (and hopefully profitable) applications derived from research conducted by members of its faculty, that activity does not define its mission.
MIT is first and foremost a American research university, granting a couple of thousand undergraduate and graduate degrees each year.
It also has many distinguished faculty members who do not interact with industry, including (for example) pure mathematicians and Pulitzer-prize winning composers.
2. Richard Sarson
Anonymous of New Jersey does not mention the most globally effective of MIT people, a Brit called Tim Berners Lee, creator of the WWW, who, incidentally, cut his teeth in a euro nuclear research outfit called CERN in Geneva.
If the EIT is to work, it must have Tim as boss. Previous euro-IT projects, like ESPRIT, have indeed been too bureaucratic, and have produced nothing. An EIT headed by a jobsworth would spend money and do nothing.
So far, European innovation has come from individual inventors and bright companies - with a bit of help from their governments: smart cards in France, ISDN in Germany, mobile phones in Finland, VOIP from Sweden. Not a lot, except the WWW, from the UK.
Only Tim could get it all together.
3. anonymous
What the Eurocrats miss with their wonderful idea about setting up a European MIT is that scientists need to interact with one another not just within their own academic discpiline but with many others.
Why is it that Trinity College in Cambridge has had more Noble Laureates than France!
Surely a better way forward would be to fund directly or indirectly through such things as PhD scholarships research. Europe already lags behind the USA and China in the % of GDP it spends on R&D and it looks set to get worse.
Also, what about getting business involved to. That way the research will enable jobs to be created rather than a few ivory towers, and it may go some to halt the decline in european competitiveness.