bridges vol. 9, April 2006 / Guest Commentaries on the Institute of Science and Technology - Austria
by Peter Kowalski

Austria is building up a world class research center from scratch, where top minds are more important than subjects

Status quo
Europe will run into severe problems if it does not understand the need to act now to achieve sustained success. The innovation gap - between Europe and the US and certain rapidly developing areas in Asia - is growing for a variety of reasons. European universities are underrepresented in the top tier of international rankings and instead of concentrating resources to achieve critical mass in a few top institutions, resources in Europe are spread across a wide variety of universities. The European higher education system suffers from fragmentation and underinvestment. In addition, there is a certain lack of innovation and entrepreneurial culture in the R&E sector.
Increasing the supply of excellent university graduates and improving the quality of the training and development staff are becoming increasingly crucial to creating the European research capacity required to address this problem.

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