Cambridge MIT Institute happy to switch to virtual mode as Govt funding runs out
When UK government funding runs out this summer, the six year old Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) will willingly wind down but hope to keep momentum going through a virtual network.
In November 1999, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, keen to promote science, innovation and enterprise, awarded a grant of £65m over five years from July 2000 to establish CMI, which was to be jointly owned by the University of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The grant was administered through the Department of Trade and Industry and required that a further £16m be raised from the UK private sector.
CMI was slow to get started. People underestimated the difficulty in bringing two institutions together, and especially of getting things going from day one, one project manager said.
"You can't go from zero to steady state overnight," CMI Executive Director Professor Mike Gregory (pictured), also the Head of the Manufacturing and Management Division of the University of Cambridge Engineering Department and of the Institute for Manufacturing told BBC Radio 4's 'In Business' programme.
In its first three years, CMI concentrated in four areas: undergraduate education; professional practice education; integrated research; and the National Competitiveness Network for disseminating findings to other universities.
Strategic Review
But a strategic review in 2003 led to the cross-Atlantic collaboration being refocused on a series of headline projects, centred on areas of UK industrial strength, to make greater impact. It was also agreed with the government that there would be a one year no-cost extension of its whole programme, which ran for six years until summer 2006.
This led to several strategic ambitious projects in such areas as next generation communication, nanotubes, next generation drug discovery and the silent airplane, in which Roll Royce and Cambridge-based Marshall Aerospace are partners.
And these collaborative projects remain the way ahead, but outside the confines of a formally constituted CMI.
Professor Gregory said "I don't think we want another £10m dropped into our hat, it was quite difficult to deal handle in the first couple of years. What we can do though is compete in the conventional way for funds to do new and exciting projects in a much more connected way and building on the capabilities and knowledge that has been generated through CMI".
Indeed, the original intention of CMI was to facilitate the creation of relationships and partnerships that will endure after the formal alliance ends.
"I think the CMI will continue probably in a different form," he said. "Definitely virtual because these days we don’t want to create another great edifice. What we want to do is get the capabilities as widely disseminated as we can and encourage people to work together using those new methods."
Professor Gregory said the CMI had been like a large, successful experiment in accelerating innovation. As well as its networks and associations, it will leave a legacy of a mix of over 60 original and newer strategic research projects. The silent aircraft project, for example, has strong support from the aerospace industry, with the private sector partners looking at least a decade ahead before they expect any commercial benefits to emerge.
5th June 2006
