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The Cambridge-MIT Institute's International Innovation Benchmarking project found that a high level of partnering already exists between businesses and universities in the United Kingdom. The survey, which contacted 3,600 U.S.- and U.K.-based companies, found that U.K. businesses were 30 percent more likely to cite joint R&D with universities as an activity that contributes to their innovation; and the U.K. companies were roughly three times more likely to cite the licensing of university-held patents.
However, the survey revealed that U.S. companies that collaborate with universities seem to get more out of the partnership than their U.K. counterparts. U.S. companies were more likely to say they valued the partnerships, and so they gave them a larger share of their innovation budget.
Hughes says creating an EIT may not address this "thinness" of the U.K. partnerships relative to those in the United States -- because the problem may lie on the business side. "It probably reflects the extent to which the companies themselves are capable of absorbing what the innovators have to offer," Hughes says. "In the U.S. you have more highly qualified management teams and labor staffs."
Even more important, though, says Hughes, is that both U.S. and U.K. businesses value universities more for their graduates and publications, and for the informal contacts they foster between researchers, than for explicit R&D partnerships and licensing agreements. Hughes thinks national institutions are more likely than an EIT to foster these more informal exchanges businesses value most. "I'm not confident you can do these sorts of things in a top-down way," he says.
Such discussions about the merits of a European-wide technology institute for fostering innovation may turn out to be, well, academic, at least in the short term. Given the well-publicized defeat of a proposed EU constitution last year, some of Europe's national leaders may question whether the timing is right for pursuing another grand European institution. If they do, though, EIT-based research would not begin until 2010 at the earliest.
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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Guest (David Matthews)
MIT in Europe
Having owned and operated companies in Belgium, the UK and the USA and having worked in Spain France and Germany, the missing point in all the above articles is language. I have had great assistance from universities in all of the above countries but have always had to make the first move. This is difficult if the language is not your own. If Europe does intend to set up a world class institution of this type, to attract the kind of people needed it will have to use English as a working language, which excludes France.
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Guest (TheTonster)
European MIT idea
1. MIT itself wasn’t founded by bureaucratic fiat, nor were most US colleges. They started from people’s local desires to further their education, and many were later granted State support. We still have many private schools that started that way, and the collaboration of schools and business arose in due course without a Federal Mandate to do it.
Europeans seldom started things from the ground up; they were dependent on a Royal (or Church) blessing from on high. Because of that history the admittedly neat idea of an EIT will not likely be as efficient nor as innovative as the process here in the US.
I expect the French will scream bloody murder if it goes to someplace like Barcelona, Tübingen or Edinburgh, and move to scuttle it, while Bratislava, Krakow and Vilnius will wonder why it isn’t coming their way. Stay tuned for the fight.
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