For the EIT, more is better

One of the biggest beneficiaries of the European Commission’s new research plan is everywhere and nowhere at once: The widely distributed networks of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology. The EIT’s seven-year budget is to rise to €2.8 billion, from €309 million presently.

The EIT is an EU experiment in trying to get universities, companies and policy makers working together to promote more innovation and enterprise. It has a small headquarters staff in Budapest, from which it supports three scattered clusters of partners - so-called Knowledge and Innovation Communities - in technologies for climate change, energy and ICT. Each KIC has about 30 core partners led by five or six ‘co-location centres’ - in essence, hubs for the lab work, teaching and marketing of innovations that the KICs were formed to do. But beyond these centres, there is no single place that the EIT lives - and that distributed structure is set to grow.

The 2014-2020 plan for the EIT proposed by the Commission 30 November envisions the number of KICs growing from three to nine, adding six new themes:  healthy living, raw materials, food security, added-value manufacturing, online security, and urban mobility. Partners for the first three would be selected in 2014, and the last three in 2018 - provided that a mid-term review of the EIT is favourable. Indeed, the way the Commission has structured the plan, the review promises to more than the usual bureaucratic benediction: The EIT’s budget is coming out of other EU programmes that have a stake in the review, and the final tranche of funding will have to be voted separately by the European Parliament when the time comes.

That reflects the EIT’s painful birth. It began in a 2006 speech by EC President José Manuel Barroso that there should be a ‘European MIT’ - which promptly got the hackles up of leading European universities that already felt there were several: them. A few years of political manoeuvring followed to win allies, and the distributed no-bricks-and-mortar approach appeared, involving the universities as part of the system rather than competitors to it. In 2010 the first three KICs were begun, after prolonged negotiations among the partners about how they would work and fund it (about 25 per cent of the money comes from the EIT; the rest is from other government or private funders.)

The results have started to appear. In a year,  the Commission says, 700 masters students have begun or completed KIC-branded courses, six start-up companies have been formed, and 50 more are planned. Scaled up, the Commission expects by 2020 that the EIT will have fostered 600 start-ups and provided training for 10,000 PhDs and 25,000 other students.

But with the growth is supposed to come tighter management, according to a Commission submission to the European Parliament and Council. The difficulty of setting up the first KICs was “underestimated by all parties,” it said, and “involved a substantial ‘learning by doing.’” It calls for “clearer guidance” for future KICs, more coordination and cross-fertilisation among the KICs, regular evaluation of the KICs’ progress, a  “true EIT ‘corporate identity’ around a set of shared values,” and a shrinking of the EIT’s 22-member Governing Board to 10.