I have an ingenious idea for a company. My company will be in the business of selling computer games. But, unlike other computer game companies, mine will never have to hire a single programmer, game designer, or graphic artist. Instead I’ll simply find people who know how to make games, and ask them to donate their games to me. Naturally, anyone generous enough to donate a game will immediately relinquish all further rights to it. From then on, I alone will be the copyright-holder, distributor, and collector of royalties. This is not to say, however, that I’ll provide no “value-added.” My company will be the one that packages the games in 25-cent cardboard boxes, then resells the boxes for up to $300 apiece.

But why would developers donate their games to me? Because they’ll need my seal of approval. I’ll convince developers that, if a game isn’t distributed by my company, then the game doesn’t “count” — indeed, barely even exists — and all their labor on it has been in vain.

Admittedly, for the scheme to work, my seal of approval will have to mean something. So before putting it on a game, I’ll first send the game out to a team of experts who will test it, debug it, and recommend changes. But will I pay the experts for that service? Not at all: as the final cherry atop my chutzpah sundae, I’ll tell the experts that it’s their professional duty to evaluate, test, and debug my games for free!

On reflection, perhaps no game developer would be gullible enough to fall for my scheme. I need a community that has a higher tolerance for the ridiculous — a community that, even after my operation is unmasked, will study it and hold meetings, but not “rush to judgment” by dissociating itself from me. But who on Earth could possibly be so paralyzed by indecision, so averse to change, so immune to common sense?

I’ve got it: academics!

This was just the hilarious but oh so true intro to the actual review. Read the rest here. Or order Willinsky’s book here. And of course you can also download his book for free right here.

The Board’s 18 high-level members, coming from the worlds of business, higher education and research all have a track record in top-level innovation and are fully independent in their decision-making. The Board will be responsible for steering the EIT’s strategic orientation and for the selection, monitoring and evaluation of the Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs).

After discussions on whether the European version of MIT would become a virtual institute, a brick and mortar institution or something in between… After a study claimed that a European Insitute of Technology was actually not necessary… After feasibility studies had been neglected….

After the decision for the establishment of the EIT was formally taken and published in the Official Journal of the European Union in April earlier this year… After its name was changed into European Institute of Innovation and Technology… After beautiful Budapest won the race and became the official location of the EIT in June… And after the EIT’s first Governing Board was officially appointed on 30th July 2008…

It is now time to get to work!

The only thing still missing is a real logo. As long as there is none, I’ll just keep on using the one I have been using for the last years. Looks familiar, doesn’t it?

The Graduate Junction was established by Daniel Colegate and Esther Dingley, graduate  students in respectively Chemistry and Education at the University of Durham, in the United Kingdom. They set up The Graduate Junction because they were – in their own words – frustrated by a feeling of isolation in their own research projects and wanted to know who, if anyone, was doing similar research. I have had a quick look at it and it looks good and has the potential to be a valuable tool for graduate students. Much of its success obviously depends on the number of participants it will attract. If I still were a student I would definitely sign up and become member of groups like this.

Researchgate targets a larger community. It is meant as a networking tool for all academics and researchers. It is set up by three students from Germany (one of them now being at Harvard). Two of them in Medicine, one in Computer Science. The concept is backed by a world wide network of experts and advisers. Researchgate has big aspirations. Next to a networking tool, it sees itself as the start of a more profound change where researchers take more and more control over their publications and research findings.

So where will all this lead? Well…my experiences with these new tools for – often conservative – academics have not always been positive. Nevertheless I’m positive about these new tools. Graduate Junction has the advantage that it targets a younger group of people and probably more open to these kind of innovations. In addition, I think that the need of these tools might be more substantial with graduate students than with researchers in general. This is simply because the ‘normal’ channels such as journals and conferences are not so readily available to them and don’t provide that many opportunities for direct interaction.

Researchgate on the other hand has a more professional look and already is backed by a large network of academics. It also seems to provide more advanced technological opportunities like importing endnote libraries and linking with databases such as PubMed. I would love to see a further expansion to enable more interaction and maybe new opportunities for open peer reviewing.

I hope both initiatives will succeed. It’s about time for the academic community to start using the technological opportunities available. Both might turn out to be great new opportunities for inter-organisational, interdisciplinary and international cooperation.

WARF filed this complaint to ensure that the interests of the UW-Madison and its inventors are protected and that WARF receives the compensation to which it is entitled for Intel’s unlicensed use of the invention. This compensation will be used to advance continued research at the university. The foundation’s complaint identifies the Intel CoreTM 2 Duo microarchitecture as infringing WARF’s United States Patent No. 5,781,752, entitled “Table Based Data Speculation Circuit for Parallel Processing Computer.”

The technology, patented in 1998, was developed by four researchers at the UW-Madison, including Professor Gurindar Sohi, currently the chair of the university’s Computer Science Department. Intel has aggressively marketed the benefits of this invention as a feature of its Core 2 technology. “The technology significantly enhances opportunities for instruction level parallelism in modern processors, thereby increasing their execution speed,” states Michael Falk, WARF general counsel.

The researchers had several discussions with Intel representatives on the possibility of licensing the technology. Intel repeatedly refused but nevertheless incorporated it into its products. Intel never informed the researchers that it was using the patented technology. WARF is now asking the court to declare that Intel is infringing on its patent and to stop Intel from selling the product. Also they asked for Intel to cover WARF’s legal fees and pay damages to WARF. Considering Intel’s dominant position in this market and the huge success of the Core 2 Duo, this last thing might prove very lucrative for the University of Wisconsin.

If it can be conclusively proven that Intel is using this specific technology, I guess that Intel will soon get together with WARF to come to a settlement…

Now, isn’t this frustrating. After a hard day’s work, putting all effort in converting my thoughts to text, I read this: Philip M Parker is the world’s fastest book author, and given that he has been at it only for about five years and already has more than 85,000 books to his name, he is also probably the most prolific. Parker himself says the total is well over 200,000.

So how does Philip M Parker (professor of innovation, business and society at Insead in France) do all that? When he turns to a new subject, he seizes and shakes it till several books, or several hundred, emerge. Parker invented a machine that writes books. He says it takes about 20 minutes to write one. I don’t know what kind of device this is, but I am sure I want one! Beats an iPod, Kindle or a Mac Air anytime. Next week, the Education Guardian Weekly will have a closer look at the machine…

Update: here is how it works and here’s a video

“Universities are tremendous wellsprings of knowledge. By encouraging widespread access to information and linking researchers with interested parties, we are hoping to more fully realize the innovation potential that research offers.”

Originally proposed by Commission President José Manuel Barroso as part of the relaunched Lisbon Agenda, the aim of the EIT is to strengthen the European ‘knowledge-triangle’ of research, education and technology. The European Commission first expressed a preference for the EIT as a single institution. After a consultation of a wide range of stakeholders it proposed (pdf) a decentralised network structure in October 2006.

This EIT is organised around six Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs). These KIC’s should be seen as joint-ventures of partner organisations representing universities, research organisations and businesses which are intended to form an integrated partnership in response to calls for proposals from the EIT.

Tindemans and Soete find that the decentralized EIT that has been proposed by the Commission is found to be not feasible. It is too dispersed; it would not increase significantly the research output in a field; it cannot match a top tier university in providing an environment for training graduates; and a dispersed institute cannot adequately organize technology transfer. Instead of the decentralised model, they propose a clustered model. One of the major implications seems to be that there will be multiple EITs and that they will be more geared towards the regional context.

While they acknowledge that the underlying rationale for setting up the EIT is critical, they caution against making blanket assumptions about Europe’s inability to convert knowledge into commerce, to organize critical mass, or to reward entrepreneurship and excellence in research and education. The study team cites evidence from the latest European Commission Innovation Scoreboard, which found that several of the smaller European countries and Germany perform significantly better than, or as well as the US and Japan (see below). Not all EU countries, regions and institutions have problems with converting knowledge into commerce and critical mass, rewarding entrepreneurship and excellence in research and education. The authors warn that ignoring this fact might result in assuming too easily that a European level institutional solution is necessary in cases where national or regional approaches might be more appropriate.

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“Nobody in the US would think of establishing an AIT (American Institute of Technology) so if we think of creating a European Institute of Technology it should recognize the present strongholds in research, in graduate training and in innovation. Otherwise, it will represent little more than what the French call ‘un saupoudrage’ of undoubtedly substantial additional research monies but which spread over such a wide number of research centres will barely make an impact.”

Students from local colleges, frequently move out of state when they graduate:

If Stanford can hatch world-famous companies around Palo Alto, politicians assume, their colleges can, too. But with so many trying to spin universities away from their traditional academic focus into engines of economic development, it is worth considering whether investing in local universities can achieve that goal. This strategy is based on the view that research done by professors can form the basis for local start-up companies and that the graduates of the university can supply the entrepreneurs and employees.

But advocates should remember an old maxim of economic development: Beware of investing in things that can move. As it turns out, graduates and research ideas both tend to move around a lot. Subsidizing teaching is problematic as a development strategy because graduates frequently move out of state.

They looked at such factors as having successful patents at universities or where highly influential science articles had originated. They found little evidence that the ideas helped local businesses any more than businesses in other areas. The one thing the study does find to be consistently associated with high-tech start-ups is the presence of star scientists – not the ideas, which can be copied, but the scientists themselves. This seems to be the one way in which a university can be used as an engine of business growth.

Time for some nanotechnology 101:

Nanotechnology is the art and science of manipulating matter at the nanoscale (down to 1/100,000 the width of a human hair) to create new and unique materials and products. An estimated global research and development investment of nearly $9 billion per year is anticipated to lead to new medical treatments and tools; more efficient energy production, storage and transmission; better access to clean water; more effective pollution reduction and prevention; and stronger, lighter materials. And these are just a few of the more significant ways in which people are discussing using the technology.

If that didn’t help: Promotheus‘ weblog had a post on the release by Woodrow Wilson Center’s Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies of an inventory of 200 existing consumer products that claim to incorporate nanotechnology. From chocolate to processors, from sunscreen to washing machines. Click on the picture or go to this BBC-site for the nanotech future. Ever wondered why the iPod Nano is called the iPod Nano?

P.V. Indiresan, the former director of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras: “The future of both China and India is at risk, because neither owns the technology it operates; the intellectual property continues to remain in the West. The short answer to this problem is that we should develop our own technology; we should acquire so much intellectual property that the West will be as much dependent on us as we are on them.”

(…)

There has been a real effort to reach out to Asian diasporas in places such as Silicon Valley and Cambridge University. Successful Chinese, Korean, and Indian scientists are being successfully lured back to their home countries to new labs in new research centers stocked with the most advanced equipment. The Shanghai and Beijing municipal governments offer returning technology entrepreneurs tax breaks, subsidized office space and access to government-investment funds.

(…)

Mr. Wen’s (Premier Wen Jiabao of China, Ed) January speech about ‘independent innovation’ was accompanied by commentaries in Science and Technology Daily that quickly pointed out that self-reliance did not signal the abandonment of the ‘open door’ policy and that ‘independent’ did not equate to ‘insular’ or ‘closed’. Domestic firms themselves, moreover, have business strategies that may conflict with nationalist goals.

The very forces of globalization that are encouraging such knowledge transfers, however, are also undermining the abilities of Asian nations to effectively implement technonationalist policies or any top-down development strategy, for that matter. WTO restrictions on import quotas, tariff barriers, and export subsidies have gradually created more open and market-oriented economies. As a result, policy makers have gradually replaced state-led, highly centralized models of technological innovation with a more flexible and open system, increasingly dependent on foreign enterprises. As they have globalized, Asian societies have become less susceptible to top-down direction.

(…)

The twin forces of nationalism and globalization could, however, push in opposite directions. Changes in the security environment are the most likely scenario that would lead policy makers to more forcefully control the free flow of ideas or talent. Already worried about the rise of China’s military power, the U.S. defense and commerce departments are currently considering new regulations limiting the ability of foreign students and researchers to work with information and technology that is export-controlled. Job loss in developed countries, especially among knowledge workers believed to be immune from the vagaries of international competition, could generate a backlash against globalization. A failure of Asian firms to actually work their way up the value chain and begin to control proprietary technology may also cause decision-makers to question whether they can truly break free of dependence on Western technology through integration with the global economy.

It will not be surprising to see innovation and technological challenges arising from countries not historically known for their scientific prowess. While globalization is a part of this story, an important and often overlooked element of this story is the nationalist agenda promoted by Asian states. The world may be flatter, but it is still populated by nation-states seeking to increase their wealth, power, and status.

The AUTM contributes much of the success in university technology transfer and the resulting economic and health benefits to the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980:

Co-sponsored by Senators Birch Bayh and Robert Dole, the Bayh-Dole Act enabled universities, nonprofit research institutions and small businesses to own and patent inventions developed under federally funded research programs. Before the passage of this legislation, new discoveries resulting from federally sponsored research passed immediately into the public domain. The provisions of the act, however, provided an incentive for universities to protect their innovations and, therefore, for industry to make high-risk investments resulting in products made from those innovations.

The Better World Report.

Reports From the Field.

“The EIT will be a knowledge operator, not a funding agency as such. It will carry out activities around the three parts of the knowledge triangle: it will educate, do research, and seek to apply the outcomes of that research to commercial ends. (…)The European Research Council is a proposal under the Seventh Framework Programme. It will provide funding to research projects which push forward the frontiers of our knowledge, taking us into new areas. It will fund individual teams or even individuals, on the basis of the sole criterion of excellence.”

“..while participants in the Networks of Excellence simply agree to cooperate, the EIT involves a much closer relationship. Institutions and companies will not merely be connected and exchanging information; they will be working together on a daily basis towards common objectives.”

However, what I miss most in the proposal is any statement about the way that education will be organized in the EIT. Since it physically is not a real university, but relies on its knowledge communities, where do students go? The commission is very explicit that it wants to incorporate education and that it also in that sense is different from the ERC. However I have failed to see any concrete proposal on the educational activities of the EIT. Will they physically be located in one university? Or do they go from one university to another (like in the Erasmus Mundus Programme)? Who is responsible for developing the curriculum? Can the EIT award degrees?

It is obvious that the name European Institute of Technology implies that it in some way wants to emulate the success of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Of course, the MIT has a very good reputation and this reputation is to a considerable extent based on its research. But also in terms of education it ranks as one of the best in the US. Proposing an EIT without any idea about your education (except saying that you want to be excellent) is an insult to the reference to MIT.

Apart from some political issues (location, location), I don’t see why there should not be a brick and mortar institution somewhere in Europe. And then, why not take the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy as an example. After all, this university has gained an excellent reputation in the social sciences. The idea of a brick and mortar EIT was still real in October 2005, when Scotland placed a bid to host the institute. Maybe, in terms of location (and climate), the Commission should also learn from the EUI in Florence..