Proponents of a new EU academic research Mecca -- chief among them is the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso -- believe a new "European Institute of Technology" will help improve the climate for innovation on the continent and plug up the brain drain that has let its brightest young scientific minds flow to America. This, in turn, will spur ailing economies and help the EU fulfill its goal of becoming the world's most dynamic knowledge based economy by 2010.

...Is the EIT really the way to grow a new class of innovators in Europe?


There's no doubt something needs to be done. If its Lisbon agenda to create the world's most dynamic knowledge-based economy were a sort of ten-year doctorate in political economy, the EU would have already failed its midterms and be on its way to a final exam flameout.


So, like a student cramming desperately before a crucial test, Barroso hatched the EIT proposal and, to be fair, it's not a bad one. Even in Europe, few argue against the importance of innovation, and politicians always like to say they're spending money on "improving education."


But it's an idea that, to quote a university report card, "needs improvement". Even though it's being pitched as Europe's answer to MIT, the Barroso proposal does not actually envision a single home for the institution, even if it does set up shop in the Parliament (which will depend on France agreeing to end the Strasbourg sessions -- a long-shot). Rather it will be a virtual campus, a loose affiliation of existing academic institutions across Europe. "Light and flexible," Barroso calls it.


There is something so naïve -- college-freshman naïve -- about thinking it's possible to just conjure up a research institution of the caliber of MIT or Stanford or even Ball State. These fine institutions did not just appear out of the sky, fully formed and preheated for instant success, like, say, the iPod or Jessica Simpson. They grew over decades and even centuries. Some government prodding helped them along but mostly they built reputations for research and innovation the old-fashioned way: they were endowed it.


Then there is the electorate -- sorry, the student body. If European students want to be as successful as their American (or Asian) counterparts, they wouldn't have spent spring break on the streets of Paris dodging tear gas canisters, singing the Internationale and demanding that their first job after graduation be guaranteed for life. They'd have been doing beer bongs in Daytona (or would have long ago dropped out of college to develop the Next Big Thing).


Europe has had mixed success trying to foster innovation through central planning diktat. Consider its efforts to create a European technology cluster à la Silicon Valley. Most feature clever names that play on the original idea (just as EIT echoes MIT): Silicon Glen is in Scotland, Silicon Fen in England, and the Côte du Silicon in the South of France.


But aside from Silicon Fen, home to hundreds of small companies clustered around Cambridge University, few world-shaking innovations have come from these places. (The popular wireless technology Bluetooth is a product of Silicon Fen.) Those that have succeeded have done so because they have been allowed access to venture capital and are largely the result of private initiative, developing organically rather than through what Europe likes to call "Research Framework Programmes."