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TU Delft ditched the usual model of outlicensing or seeking venture capital backing when it was looking to commercialise a novel wastewater treatment technology.

Ireland's fastest-growing companies hired even more aggressively than other top job-creating European companies during 2001-2004, according to a survey conducted by Entrepreneurs for Growth, a membership-based organisation representing 2,000 European firms.

With high oil prices showing no sign of quitting, "cleantech" is the new darling VC investment sector. But, asks Mary Lisbeth D'Amico, is the market more froth than substance?

Last month the world's leading pharmaceutical company received simultaneous FDA approval for two new therapies. Yet neither drug was invented by the company. Both were originally developed by small biotechs.

"There is a large gap between the rhetoric of a political system that preaches the Knowledge Society and the reality of budgetary and other priorities that have shown little shift in preparing to engage with it." Esko Aho, former Prime Minister of Finland, in Creating an Innovative Europe, January 2006.