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The potted biography that Google provides for Sergey Brin, the company’s co-founder, notes rather charmingly that he is “currently on leave from the PhD program in computer science at Stanford University”. Given that Mr Brin is now thought to be worth more than $12bn, one wonders whether he will ever get around to handing in his dissertation.
Google’s nod in the direction of Stanford is, however, entirely fitting. Mr Brin met Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, when they were both graduate students at Stanford and together they worked on the project that became Google. Yahoo, Google’s arch rival, has a very similar history. Jerry Yang and David Filo, its founders, also met as graduate students at Stanford.
The article outlines the normal almost-insurmountable obstacles that any EU cross-boundary ventures confront. The politics of siting a campus have made the EU venture a "virtual campus" with outposts in more than 20 countries. Gideon Rachman points out that cross-fertilization takes place in the business and finance worlds that abut the academic campuses of Stanford and MIT, not in some internet e-mail text messaging.
State control is still the bugaboo that prevents trans-boundary projects like the EU high-tech think-tank from flourishing. The UK and Finland have made baby-steps in the right direction, but an overall project is probably not in the cards.
Meanwhile, Rachman points out that US scientists keep racking up the Nobel Prizes in the high sciences, while the Europeans are left in the dust. Except the Europeans based in the USA, who are garnering a fair share of the NPs.
Ideas ferment and are fleshed out in coffee bars and garages near big campuses, like the Google garage the founders just purchased--HP and Apple have already bought their founding garages.
India and China are pouring money into their own high-tech campuses as fast as the US. The EU, once again, is left in the dustbin of history.
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