On growing new Googles and Amazons in Europe – through better tech training

A conversation with Cinzia Da Vià, Professor at Manchester University

Science|Business reporting 

To succeed in the global tech business today, you need to know a lot: markets, finance, leadership, product design – plus the technology itself. An EU-funded project is working now to teach that long list of skills to young, wanna-be tech entrepreneurs. 

In Europe, “we don’t have the Googles. We don’t have the Amazons,” observes Cinzia Da Vià, a physics professor at Manchester University, in Britain. Part of the problem: silo thinking, with young business and tech students training only in narrow domains. Those disciplinary barriers should be broken down.  

At present in Europe, because of the way many universities are structured, “we are not preparing from the start leaders with multiple skills at the same time,” she says. What’s needed is a single programme teaching all “the skills that the young entrepreneurs will have to have, thinking in a bigger manner from the start.” 

That philosophy is what’s behind ATTRACT Academy, part of an EU-funded project that so far has helped more than 900 students across Europe, and includes Da Vià as an advisor.  It brings the students to training workshops at research infrastructures like the CERN high-energy physics lab in Geneva and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble. There, they get hands-on experience with new technologies, new disciplines and new ideas.  

An important trend in teaching 

The educational theory behind all this is broadly accepted, but hard to implement in a university system that, in most countries, puts students into well-defined career tracks.  

For instance, researchers at the Politecnico di Torino reported in 2019 on bringing together entrepreneurship students from different disciplines into a “Contamination Lab” - a reference to cross-fertilisation of disciplines, rather than pathogens, funded by the Italian government as an educational experiment from 2016. They concluded this kind of training works best as an extracurricular activity, away from the silos of individual university departments – and can indeed advance the students’ entrepreneurial thinking. 

Similarly, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology reported in 2009 on their own efforts to set up “integrated”, multi-disciplinary training programmes, under funding from the US National Science Foundation. They ran before-and-after tests of the students’ abilities, including against a control group that didn’t get the special training. They concluded that the programme, called TI:GER, “has had significant effects on student perceptions of their ability to perform within an innovation-intensive business environment.” Cue up the next Bezos or Jobs. 

Scaling up 

So it’s no mystery that this kind of multi-disciplinary training matters – but how do you scale it up in an academic culture focused on conferring degrees on specific topics like law, computing, marketing or finance? At universities, says Da Vià, “we are still operating in silos.”  

The challenge is big – in part because the range of skills needed is huge. As she sees it, a tech entrepreneur today needs training in artificial intelligence, cyber-security, product design, software, finance, marketing, sustainability,  global markets and more. At the same time, on the boards of start-ups there needs to be diversity as well. “We really need to have very strong, trans-disciplinary skills” throughout a hot new company. 

Also needed, especially for global business growth: “agility and adaptability. The big markets in America, Asia – they change quite fast, and so…to create a business structure which could adapt and change rapidly would really be the key.”  

And ambition matters, she says. “Starting a business with the idea of scaling up – this is one of the key issues that we have in Europe.” 

How it works 

The ATTRACT Academy is about putting this pedagogical philosophy into action. At the big research infrastructures that participate, students form small, multidisciplinary teams – pairing marketing with physics students, finance with biomedical students. They then work with professional researchers who have developed promising new innovations in detectors, sensors or related fields that the labs specialise in. And they dream up new applications, designs and business plans for these technologies. Of course, the tech itself stays with the researchers, but it helps them by providing new perspectives on their inventions – and it helps the students get the broad training they need.  

The Academy is funded as part of the ATTRACT project, a two-phase, multi-year Horizon 2020 initiative led by CERN, and including ESADE, Aalto University, ESRF, the European Space Observatory, European XFEL, Institut Laue-Langevin, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and the European Industrial Research Managers’ Association.  Its ambition is to scale the Academy up in future – to make a real difference for Europe. 

Says Da Vià: “Now we really need to make sure that technology, business, engineering, computing and leadership – the wish list” of skills a tech entrepreneur needs – does in fact get taught around Europe. With the Academy, she says, “we are starting a new culture.”  

Sponsored by ATTRACT, an EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation project, under grant agreement No. 101004462.