A decade ago, European Union ministers gathered in Lisbon to set a bold agenda: to make Europe the “most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy” in the world.
To achieve that goal, they turned to the continent’s houses of knowledge, the universities.
The effort, known as the Lisbon Strategy, gave greater impetus—and financing—to an evolution already under way, turning universities from walled-off grandes écoles, producing knowledge for knowledge’s sake, to institutions more connected to society and the economy.
“Knowledge has always been something for the privileged in Europe, and academe developed very much in its own world,” says Gudrun Paulsdottir, the incoming president of the European Association for International Education. “But now people are coming around to the idea that knowledge should impact the world.”
Indeed, the annual meeting of the international-education organization, this week in France, centers around the idea of “making knowledge work,” with sessions on university-industry collaboration and linking graduate education with economic imperatives.
“There’s a lesson to be learned that it’s OK to be a very good research university and to work with society,” says Ms. Paulsdottir, who is head of student affairs at Mälardalen University, in Sweden.
Picking Up Speed
In fact, such work began more than 25 years ago with the first Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, which plowed funds into transnational research projects.
But it picked up particular speed after the Lisbon summit meeting when European Union countries pledged to increase the amount spent on research and technological development to 3 percent of gross domestic product by 2010, from just 1.9 percent in 2000. (Businesses, which then provided about half of all research-and-development money, were called on to increase their contribution to two-thirds of the total, a proportion that had already been reached in the United States.)
Under the current framework program, which runs from 2007 through 2013, the European Union will spend 50 billion euros on research, much of it to be conducted by teams including universities, research institutes, and companies.
And almost every European country and many states within countries have started their own agendas for innovation and research, with separate funds to supplement the European Union effort. The German state of Baden-Württemberg, for example, spends 4.5 percent of its gross domestic product on research and development and recently merged a university and a research institute to form the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, which officials there hope will become a world-class research and science institution.
In Scotland, Kevin Cullen, director of research and enterprise at the University of Glasgow, says he is receiving government support at three levels—from the European Union and the British and Scottish governments—for projects to commercialize research and transfer knowledge.
The influx of funds came after British academic and political leaders in the late 1990s examined the approach of universities to technology transfer and industry partnerships. They concluded that “the U.S. is great at this, and we are rubbish, and the resources need to be put in place for universities to be more effective,” Mr. Cullen says.
Even new European Union member states from the former Soviet bloc are investing in research and development, says Paul Seidler, manager of nanotechnology at IBM’s Zurich research lab. They are taking “structural funds” from the European Union, which can also be used for infrastructure improvements like repairing roads and building bridges, to advance commercially relevant research.
“They are very anxious for job creation and for a knowledge-based economy,” Mr. Seidler says of the countries, mainly in Eastern Europe. “They know they’re missing some of the skills, but they push hard.”
Up From Empty
IBM is active in many consortia that bring together university researchers, often from multiple European countries, and private-sector scientists. “No one entity has all the pieces of the puzzle,” Mr. Seidler says of the European emphasis on collaborative research.
But some observers worry that such an outward focus isn’t in European universities’ DNA.
Ms. Paulsdottir’s institution, Mälardalen, teams with major companies like Sony Ericsson and Volvo on complex research projects, has a lab in which university experts consult with local business to help customize and refine products, and works with nearby municipalities to tackle regional problems. It’s ranked top in Sweden for innovation.
However, she says that too often companies and universities don’t know how to work together, or have unrealistic expectations of partnerships.
The key to making such partnerships work, says Lidia Borrell Damian, who is an expert on university-industry collaborative research and knowledge transfer and on the contribution of universities to regional innovation, is “finding common ground between the two agendas, the agenda of the university and the agenda of industry.”
Research collaborations, like those supported by the European Union and national governments, have helped higher-education institutions and businesses better understand one another, says Ms. Borrell Damian, who works for the European University Association. Universities have become more open to such partnerships, while business leaders have learned that “universities are not there to solve your problems tomorrow—or six months from now.”
Research collaborations between European universities and private-sector partners have a way to go, Ms. Borrell Damian says, but there is progress.
“You may say the bottle is still very empty,” she says. “Yes, but it was totally empty before.”
