nowEurope

The title of this post is a quotation from Meir Brand’s presentation, delivered at Innovation Thursday in Prague last week. The event attracted about 130 people and was organised in cooperation with our FIRST Innovation Park and the CITT project. Michael Novak and I also took part in the founding meeting of the Innovators Club where we talked to several key ICT innovation players in the Czech Republic.

I wrote down a few remarks that seem to me highly relevant to the technology transfer activities within CITT and thus I am offering them as the starting points for our cluster strategy development.

Jan Muhlfeit named four issues keeping Europe below the US level. Low willingness to take risk, IPR protection (very expensive and complicated patent system), inflexible bankruptcy and labour law and “not invented here” syndrome. He defined innovation as creativity multiplied by execution. Let me add that unfortunately these are not areas of emphasis for Czech elementary & grammar schools.

The academic representatives in the discussion panel - Richard Hindls (VSE rector) and Vladimir Marik (one of the most successful ICT researchers as concerns international cooperation) - mentioned a need for more frequent communication between industry and academia and for finding a common language. Mutual cooperation must be led by people who understand well both sides. I suppose this is where CITT and nowEurope can help the most.

Hindls and Marik called for mixing the two environments, for more students and academics to work in the private sector and for more businessmen at universities (for a semester at least, not for one lecture only). According to Marik, research universities do not need to do business themselves, though they need more entrepreneurial spirit. Development can be done at innovation centers, technoparks and spin-offs. These institutions can take more risk, pay development costs, earn profits and then give a part of it back to research.

I liked also another quotation from Brand’s presentation. Big will not beat small anymore, it will be fast beating slow. I’m thinking of our four countries in the Central Europe and wondering if our politicians buy this. What would you say?