Universities hold the key to economic growth

By Sir Leszek Borysiewicz. Economic growth is the priority of every European government, and it cannot come soon enough. How can universities help?
Europe's research universities are already making a huge economic contribution; that much is obvious. We educate the future workforce, we perform research that governments, business and industry commission through research contracts, and we make discoveries and inventions that – formalised in recent years as 'technology transfer' – are put directly to work by the private sector to generate economic return.
An example from my university: in 1960, a pair of Cambridge graduates formed a company called Cambridge Consultants, starting the development of a cluster of high-tech companies around the university. This was later described as the ‘Cambridge Phenomenon': the process by which entrepreneurial scientists created companies to take advantage of the proximity to a great research university – and, as the cluster grew, to other companies doing similar things. Around the city we now have more than 1,400 high-tech and biotech companies, from tiny recent 'spin-outs' from university laboratories to arms of multinational companies like Microsoft.
Eleven companies that started in the Cambridge cluster are now valued at more than €1 billion (US$1.3 billion) – including Autonomy, whose business software is in use in every industry, and ARM, whose microchips are in your mobile phone, your car and your TV.