nowEurope

I am pleased to be able to contribute for the first time to a new nowEurope issue that so far has been quite underestimated in some European countries: Technology transfer, in particular in ICT.

The core business of CITT is to devise a strategy to establish and get running a viable cooperation between the ICT industry and research. Although a lot has been done recently on national and EU levels, Europe still gives away too much technology and know how to competing markets.

One of the reasons for that is the structure of Europe’s ICT industry which is dominated by small and medium sized enterprises, another one is the somewhat distant relationship between business and science, ranging from “very good” in the UK down to “poor”, the more you go east.

The Centrope region is therefore in a medium position, coming up, not yet satisfactory, though. Let’s express it frankly: There’s simply too much respect on the business side and too little esteem on the science side. Universities in Central Europe still tend to act as ivory towers although the need for growing private funding eventually forces academia to condescend to talk to private business.

Europe certainly does have the brilliant heads it needs to stand tough competition. If we manage to have the two sides described above approach each other, sustainably and successfully on a long term basis, we can consider this project a big success.

We need, however, your support. This blog is supposed to be an open platform for qualified dialogue on ICT related technology transfer issues. Your contributions, experience, questions, complaints, ideas are most welcome. Let us make technology transfer a top issue on Europe’s research agenda. Let us start in Centrope and then spread the good news to all over Europe.