European Institute Technology

There’s a lot of terminology in EU science that can be quite baffling: Joint technology initiatives, ERA net, technology platforms, ERC, Eureka, and more. Enough for the would-be interested outsider to throw up his hands.
Ah, but all this is just details, say Eurocrats. The important thing to realise is that the EU is obsessed with the United States, which has a lower gross domestic product and produces fewer scientific papers, yet has a vastly greater influence in global affairs – and wins more Nobel prizes. The reason, officials, say,. is economies of scale. Europe’s many borders and languages, and nation-centred research budgets, means a lot of similar and low-level science is going on several countries – duplication – and the best do not rub shoulders with each, compete, or collaborate, and so the global heights of science are never reached
Te EU vision is to get away from “subcriticality” at the highest level of academic research (quite good, but not good enough) through a single European research area, . The goal is to assemble clusters of specialisation, with the best researchers from across Europe in that particular area, with a penumbra of start up firms and industry support: so, maybe, the best European biotech scientists gathering in Copenhagen,; best experts in another field in Budapest. The parallel is not so much with a premier league, but a capital city for each sport, bringing together the best players in that sport, wherever they are from, to compete and collaborate.
How to get it going? With a new structural concept, yet another acronym, but one worth remembering, called KICS, Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs).
KICS hope to bring together departments of universities, companies and research institutes to form an integrated partnership to perform in response to calls for proposals by the EU’s science funding scheme, in two areas, ICT and Energy research
The researchers will be based at their home universities; linked by email (and European money) but will the idea is that the clusters of contacts and knowledge sharing will coalesce and eventually bandy together to establish bricks and mortar institutions in one of other of the virtual components of the KICs resides. Voila: there’s the European centre of excellence.
It’s early days, but just how optimistic established universities are about these cuckoos in the nest, and whether researchers will forego their regular contacts (often, ironically, across the Atlantic) remains to be seen. But IMEC, in Leuven, Belgium, the world’s leading research centre for nano electronics and nano technology, trickle-funded for decades by the Belgian government and now funded by global industry, offers a model of what the realised KICs might evolve into.
Eurocrats readily agree that there are arguments for and against, and many MEPs, organisations and lobby groups on the inside in Brussels are rather sceptical that the KICs will take off, attract the best researchers, or flourish in their borrowed premises. But they at least have good arguments. Inasmuch in that the EU issue reaches British public consciousness, there is a fixation with what the EU is against, rather than what the EU is about: this naturally leads the average British newspaper reader to assume that Eurocrats’ are dim, sinister or forever self aggrandising. Or there’s a fixation on the ludicrous: personally, laughing at the EU always brings to my mind the underenfranchised British Tommies making jokes about the Kaiser before going over the top and being gunned down by the Huns. It’s a laughter of mistaken superiority. Continentals are serious about the EU, and foreigners are Not. Stupid. Which is always worth reminding the Brits about.. As yet the KICs make up only a vision for EU science, but for what it’s worth, here it is..