Brussels - Inspired by the world-renowned Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT), European Union policymakers have come up with their own version of an elite research centre to produce home-grown high-tech leaders.
The message from top EU leaders is clear: Europe needs to move up a gear in research, innovation and high-technology or face falling even further behind competitors such as the United States, Japan - and even China and India.
Boosting EU research and development and speeding up modernisation will be top issues at the bloc's summit in Brussels in March.
But words are not enough, say EU lawmakers who are now pushing for the setting up by 2009 of a European Institute of Technology (EIT).
'We want to create a network of researchers, a research centre which incorporates Europe's top brains,' said Euro MP Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, founder and chair of a European Parliament cross- party group campaigning for the EIT.
The upcoming Institute will be neither a real university nor even an virtual one. It will, in fact, be a management board for European research.
'There won't be scientists working in the EIT, but it will act as a liaison office, coordinating research all over the EU and connecting it with business,' Chatzimarkakis said in an interview.
With many young and brilliant scientists leaving Europe for America once they finish their studies, experts estimate that the EU needs 700,000 skilled researchers by 2010.
'This brain drain damages Europe's competitiveness and economy,' Chatzimarkakis said, adding: 'The EIT could reverse the tide, repatriate them and also attract foreign scientists.'
Plans for the Institute have the backing of the European Commission - the executive arm of the European Union - which has said the EIT must act as a magnet for the best minds, ideas and companies from around the world.
In his sales pitch for the Institute a year ago, Commission chief Jose Manuel Barros said the EU was focused on 'the search for knowledge...the driving force behind our competitiveness.'
The EU wants to raise spending on research and development to 3 per cent of Gross Domestic Product by 2010. The bloc currently pumps 1.96 per cent of its GDP into the sector, compared to 2.6 per cent of GDP in the US and 3.1 per cent of GDP in Japan.
'Europe is weak in translating the results of research into innovative products and services that can boost competitiveness,' Chatzimarkakis said.
Unlike in the US, cooperation between the research and marketing sectors in the EU is almost non-existent, he added.
The quality of European research could do with a boost. Since the beginning of the last century, the number of European Nobel Prize winners has been declining. Between 1980 and 2003, European Nobel laureates for science totaled 68, compared to 154 winners in the US.
Popular Euro MPs such as former EU commissioner for science and research, Philippe Busquin, and Polish ex-Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek support the idea of setting up a European elite university.
The plan will be on the agenda of the EU's March summit in Brussels, Chatzimarkakis says.
But there is still a long way to go. While the Commission backs the idea, it has not said just where the Institute should be located - and as is EU tradition, this will be a crucial question.
Some Euro MPs have said the 200 million euros spent annually on the monthly 'travelling circus' of lawmakers who move from Brussels to Strasbourg should be injected instead into setting up the EIT.
'The buildings in Strasbourg, already too small for the work of the 25 member states, are perfect to meet the needs of a research institute,' Chatzimarkakis argued.
France immediately has rejected the idea, however, saying that it would veto any attempt to transfer the European Parliament's main seat from Strasbourg to Brussels.
Instead, the French government has come up with a new plan: Why not set up the new European Institute of Technology in Paris?
© 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
USA
Your Talkback on this Story