EIT Is a False Dawn

The potted biography that Google provides for Sergey Brin, the company's co-founder, notes rather charmingly that he is "currently on leave from the Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University." Given that Brin is now thought to be worth more than $12 billion, one wonders whether he will ever get around to handing in his dissertation.

Google's nod in the direction of Stanford is, however, entirely fitting. Brin met Larry Page, Google's co-founder, when they were both graduate students at Stanford and together they worked on the project that became Google. Yahoo, Google's arch rival, has a very similar history. Jerry Yang and David Filo, its founders, also met as graduate students at Stanford.

When Tony Blair, the British prime minister, recently visited Silicon Valley to try to find the magic elixir for high-tech economic growth, he met Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive of Sun Microsystems -- yet another Silicon Valley company with strong Stanford connections. (Sun originally stood for Stanford University Network.) Schwartz said he had no doubt Blair would "take away from this meeting Sun's relationship with Stanford University."

Blair is not the only European politician fascinated by the way in which U.S. universities have acted as incubators for many of the world's leading technology companies. Later this month, the European Commission in Brussels is scheduled to unveil plans for a "European Institute of Technology." The commission's scheme is said to be inspired more by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology than by Stanford. This could be because MIT has also been a formidable incubator of high-tech businesses, although one suspects that it may actually have more to do with the idea that creating an EIT to match MIT sounds rather appealing to a politician's ear.

Whatever the verbal gimmickry involved, it is laudable that Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the Commission, wants to do something to foster high-tech growth in Europe. But there are problems with his pet project. One of them was pointed out to me by one of Barroso's senior colleagues over a year ago, when the idea of an EIT first began to do the rounds in Brussels. "It will just degenerate into a battle about which country the EIT is going to be based in," he groaned.

The commission has come up with an ingenious idea to get around the problem. The EIT will be a virtual university, issuing degrees and pursuing research projects, but without a single large campus. G?nter Verheugen, the commissioner for enterprise, says that instead it will be "a network of centers of excellence."

The idea of a networked EIT is a neat way of avoiding an unseemly political squabble. But it also ignores one of the main things that makes universities such as Stanford and MIT such formidable generators of new ideas and businesses: The very idea of a high-tech cluster suggests physical proximity. You need a place, a faculty, a campus and a neighborhood where bright, like-minded people can congregate.

It is not just the research scientists who matter. Stanford's campus is bounded on one side by the silicon factories of Apple and Intel, and on the other by the venture capitalists of Sand Hill Road. An EIT that was spread out all over Europe for political reasons would never have a chance to develop a similar cluster of brains, business and finance. A networked EIT with outposts in every one of the EU's 27 member states would also risk frittering away research money, since each EU member would doubtless demand its share of the spoils for its own technology institute.

Rather than creating a new institution such as an EIT, the countries of the EU would do best to foster the ones that they already have. There are already some modest success stories. Over the past decade, a high-tech cluster, Silicon Fen, has developed around Cambridge in Britain. Another has grown up in Finland, fostered by the presence of Nokia and the Helsinki University of Technology.

But Europe's universities need more help. They are losing the battle to retain the world's finest minds. As a recent report from the Centre for European Reform notes: "Between 1901 and 1950, 73 percent of Nobel Prize winners were based in what is now the EU. Between 1951 and 2000, the share dropped to 33 percent, while in the period from 1995 to 2004, the figure was down to just 19 percent."

Over the long term, the fate of European universities may depend on their ability to raise more money for salaries and basic research. That will surely mean liberating more universities from state control -- making it easier for them to charge fees, raise private money and control their admissions policies.

Europe's struggle to keep up is made all the more poignant by the knowledge that it once led the academic race. Stanford's motto is in German -- a reflection of the fact that when the university was founded in the late 19th century, it was Germany that led the way in scientific research. These days, many of the finest young academics from Germany and the rest of Europe are to be found on the campuses of Stanford and other North American universities. Sadly, nothing that is announced in Brussels this month is likely to change that.

Gideon Rachman is a columnist for the Financial Times, where this comment was published.