Europe Rival to MIT Advances

After years of intensive political debate on policy and funding, Europe now moving ahead with its plans to create rival to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It's been long, bumpy path, with the outcome not at all certain. In June, heads of state from the 27-member European Union chose Budapest for the headquarters of its new European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), along with governing board of 18 eminent figures largely from the science, academic and business sectors. And by the end of 2009, the first three research clusters, called Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs), will be established. These planned steps come after the European Parliament earlier this year gave the final green light for EIT, which to be up and running in 2010. With the EU-wide institute, European policy makers aim to combine all three elements of the so-called knowledge triangle-innovation, research and education. Its core task will be to promote and coordinate research projects in member states as partnerships between public scientific institutes and private industry. In the startup phase, the initial focus will be on three areas, each serving as KIC: renewable energies, environmental protection, and advanced information and communications technologies. The KICs are to consist of at least three partner organizations, situated in at least two different member states and including at least one higher education institution and one private company. Pole of Attraction The European Commission, the EU executive arm, has spent the past few years lobbying member states for approval of the technology institute. In an earlier speech, Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso referred to the technology institute as a pole of attraction for the very best minds, ideas and companies from around the world. He and many other policy makers in Brussels view the institute as crucial factor in advancing the EU's Lisbon agenda for jobs and growth, the faltering initiative aimed initially at setting the Community on path to compete more successfully with the U.S. and, more recently, on meeting the high-tech challenge from China and India. A Commission study paper on EIT warned that China alone produces more math, science and technology graduates each year than the whole of the EU. The establishment of EIT, however, has been anything but easy, and some member states, particularly the U.K., remain skeptical about the technology center's ability to tap into Europe's huge but fragmented research community and spur it to greater achievement. Professor Ian Leslie, vice chancellor for research at Cambridge University, has gone on record saying that EIT is strange way of doing things: The notion of top down innovation an oxymoron. After several months of intensive wrangling over financing subsidies, the Commission agreed at the end of last year to whittle down its direct contribution to EIT to total [euro]308.7 million ($477 million) for the 2008-2013 budget period. That's far cry from the [euro]2.5 billion ($3.7 billion) initially sought by Barroso. The Commission head eventually gave into European parliamentarians who feared that the new institute would create further drain on the heavily depleted allocations to the EU's 7th Research Framework Program (FP7). Under the current agreement, EIT will have budget of [euro]2.4 billion, of which more than [euro]2 billion will now come from public and private partners, as well as from income generated by the institute's activities. That's not the only change. Early plans to have EIT equipped with its own doctoral program and right to award PhD. degrees were shot down after numerous European universities warned that the institute would hire away their best research staff and weaken their dominant position in awarding doctoral degrees. …