nowEurope

My fellow nowEurope contributor, Guenther Krumpak, recently pointed out that European universities consistently rank at the bottom of the Times Higher Education Supplement university rankings. Geunther suggested a possible Anglo Saxon bias in the list. Perhaps. It would depend on the methodology.

What I’d like to know is how well are European universities keeping relevant with important commercial trends. I read today that Stanford University has a launched a new course to train iPhone developers. Wired’s Gadget Lab reports that worldwide demand for iPhone developers has jumped 500% in the last six months.

Can you imagine a Centrope university that responds so swiftly to market demand?

This news story got me to thinking about Stanford University, and its well documented relationship relationship with Silicon Valley, a term coined in 1971 to describe what the European Commission would now term a ‘cluster’ of businesses and startup companies located in the Santa Clara Valley, just south of San Francisco.

Stanford University’s decades-long partnership with Silicon Valley has spawned an ecosystem of businesses and professionals, all of whom play a part in developing promising technologies, research and patents, funding new ventures, growing new businesses, marketing and selling products, raising further capital, and so on.

It is these businesses that create the ‘demand’ signal to which Stanford has responded with its program to train iPhone developers. The university, and its students, know that high paying work is available just down the road.

Can the same dynamic work here in Central Europe? Here in Budapest, the Hungarian government launched an ambitious experiment intended to catalyze a Hungarian Silicon Valley (they call it the Silicon Puszta) in the form of an office park located adjacent to Budapest’s Technical University.

The Budapest Infopark was established in 1996 by the Budapest University of Technology, Eötvös Lóránd University, the Prime Minister’s Office (MEH) and the Economy Ministry to promote cooperation in research and development between the tenants and the two universities, which each have a 25% stake in the project.

Some of the country’s top multinational IT companies have office space at Infopark, including Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Magyar Telekom. However, you would not be able to find that out by visiting Infopark’s badly designed and mostly usuable website. For that matter, you would be challenged to find anything at Infopark - the signage is minimal and reception staffs were ignorant and unconcerned the last time I tried to locate my appointment there.

Leaving aside these shortcomings for a moment, it’s worth asking whether Infopark is achieving its promise of building a Silicon Puszta. Unfortunately, that answer would be ‘no’.

You can be sure that Infopark’s tenants enjoy good Internet connectivity. The location is ideally situated for IT companies wishing to recruit students from the Technical University. These businesses may also benefit from proximity to each other. However, Infopark is nothing like Silicon Valley, which seems to crank out exciting new technology businesses on an assembly line.

Hungary has its entrepreneurs, but the capital to fund innovative new businesses is scarce. For Hungary to recreate Silicon Valley, it would also need its own version of Sand Hill Road.

Hungary has attracted a significant share of the region’s venture capitalists, but as I have written previously, these investors favor larger, more developed, less risky deals. Hungary also has a handful of business angels, but you can count them on one hand.

In short, Budapest’s Technical University is unlikely to launch its own program for iPhone developers because Hungarian businesses and startups are not lining up to build new applications for the iPhone. It’s one thing to build office space for existing IT companies. It’s quite another challenge to build the infrastructure for technical innovation and the creation of new businesses and entire new industries.