Presented to the
Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering
2002 Symposium, OWNING INNOVATION
Sydney, 18-19 November 2002

This paper describes the formation and early development of the Cambridge-MIT Institute and some of the problems that have arisen.  Three of the author’s conclusions are that:

Experience has shown that the long-distance alliance of two universities motivates faculty members, widens their skills base, uses laboratories more intensively and increases the pace of research. A downside is the increase of administrative time needed.

Entrepreneurship studies can be introduced successfully into degree courses, but there has to be a balance between academic and “new” subjects. The goal of a thorough understanding of the fundamental principles of a subject should remain at the core of a university degree course. But the interconnections between specialist subjects and with the knowledge economy and business deserve greater attention.

The extent to which universities can be engines of technological change remains to be established. A recent study suggests that less than 7% of the companies in Cambridge’s Silicon Fen are direct spin-offs from Cambridge University. But the University’s role in attracting technology clusters to the Cambridge region is seen to be pivotal.  MIT’s commitment in its mission statement to ‘working with others’ is recognised as a powerful driver in bringing its knowledge to practical use and encouraging technology outreach.

FORMATION OF CMI

The tag “Cambridge phenomenon” was coined in the 1980s. It described the clustering of new high-tech companies in the Cambridge region, many of them founded by Cambridge University graduates.

The first major step in starting the phenomenon was taken by one of Cambridge University’s colleges. In 1973, Trinity College opened a Science Park (then a new concept) on land that it owned in Cambridge.  It first tenant, Laser-Scan, moved to the park that year while it was still a building site. Now there are about 70 companies employing  some 4,000 people on the Trinity Science Park.

A second college followed Trinity’s lead In 1987, by opening the St John’s College Innovation Centre nearby. As well as providing flexible accommodation,  this provided a range of support services for fledgling companies, including business, legal and financial advice. These were soon in demand as its tenants became aspirational firms working on a diverse range of subjects: neural networks, workflow management software, multimedia, fixed and mobile telecommunications, cryotechnology, biomedical imaging, lasers, chromatography, data communications, instrumentation, films and, increasingly, biotechnology. There are now about 50 companies in the St John’s Innovation Centre employing over 900 people. 

In the Cambridge region as a whole, this cluster of hi-tech companies has grown to such an extent that the region is described as “Silicon Fen” due to the similarities with Silicon Valley in California. In both cases a strongly-scientific university community is on hand to supply ideas and personnel. The boundaries of Silicon Fen have never been defined. One survey listed 1200 companies employing around 35,000 people; another recent survey has counted over 1600 tech companies within 15 miles of Cambridge [2].

By the end of the 1990s, the natural process of technology development was being helped by various UK government schemes of which the University Challenge Fund scheme, announced in March 1998, was probably the most important. This provided £45million for 15 different groups of universities to help turn research projects into viable businesses. Most of these groups established offices with staff dedicated to the task and providing advice on all aspects of developing ideas commercially. In October 1999 a second government initiative called the Science Enterprise Challenge provided seed funding for the establishment of University Entrepreneurship Centres. Many major universities responded to this initiative, including Cambridge.  

But while there have been many success stories and apparently thriving high-tech developments around Cambridge and around other centres in the UK, the distribution of high-technology development in the UK is still geographically patchy.  More importantly, no new high-tech company has yet developed into a major global force. In contrast, there is a perception, particularly in government circles, that American universities have been more successful, not only in the density of  their entrepreneurial spin outs but in nurturing the evolution of new companies to become major industrial forces and long-term contributors to national prosperity.

Against this background, the UK government announced in November 1999 a further initiative. This was strongly driven by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, and was the controversial award of government funding of £65m over 5 years for a joint venture between Cambridge University and MIT.  Its purpose, in a few words, is to capture the entrepreneurial spirit of MIT for the UK by collaborating on teaching, research and professional practice in engineering and science and in management and to establish a network with other universities and agencies in the UK. 

To respond to this initiative, the  two universities have created the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI, for short) as a new educational and research enterprise.

MIT AND CAMBRIDGE COMPARED

By world standards, MIT and Cambridge are not big universities. MIT has about 4,400 undergraduates and 5,500 graduate students. Cambridge has 11,000 undergraduates and 4,500 graduate students. The two universities employ about the same number of people. MIT has 8,000 employees on campus; Cambridge has 7,000 excluding college employees. But although they are of similar size they are different in many respects.

The first and most obvious difference is MIT’s concentration on engineering and the sciences. The Institute’s undergraduate population is dominated by engineers (63% of students) with the sciences next (25%) and management (5%), humanities (4%) and architecture (2%) trailing behind. Graduate students (about half each master’s and doctoral candidates) are more evenly divided, but still favour engineering (44%) over the sciences (22%), management (17%), architecture (10%) and the humanities (6%).  In Cambridge the spread of subjects is much more even with the arts and sciences equally represented. MIT sees the breadth of Cambridge as its strength. Cambridge sees the depth of MIT in technology as its strength.

Next is how the universities are funded. A fundamental difference between the USA and the UK is the availability of large sources of private wealth which benefactors are willing to give to good causes and particularly to the great American universities. Cambridge has succeeded in raising large sums by British standards, most recently from Microsoft (£12 million) and BP (£25 million), but large as these sums are, they are dwarfed by the funds that MIT can raise. A single private benefactor recently gave $100 million (about £63 million). It was an unrestricted gift at the start of MIT’s new capital campaign. The 21^st century campaign intends to raise $1.5 billion from MIT’s graduates and well-wishers. This will be largely uncommitted funding to improve faculty stipends and student grants, and build and renew laboratories and infrastructure. In contrast, industrial gifts usually come with conditions. What is done with the gift has to show perceived benefits for the donor. To that extent the continuous process of renewal and rebuilding is easier for MIT than it is for Cambridge. MIT can plan further ahead. Cambridge is driven by the wheel of fund-raising fortune. 

And there are cultural differences. Cambridge is a collegiate university, rich in history and old buildings, and spread throughout the city of Cambridge and with its departments dispersed over a wide area. Cambridge University’s new site on the west of the city of Cambridge, where new buildings in technology and the physical sciences are being built, is about 150 acres, roughly the same area as the MIT campus. So Cambridge University occupies more land than MIT, but its buildings are generally only 3 or 4 storeys high. In contrast MIT has buildings 25 floors high, which look and feel like a vast industrial research laboratory.  New buildings and laboratories have been packed onto MIT’s site as old ones have disappeared. For some time there was a vacant building site in Vassar Street, once home to the Radiation Laboratory, the centre of MIT’s radar research. Now it is gone and a new centre for computer and information sciences is taking shape to the startling design of the American architect Frank Gehry. Its design has been possible only by the use of the aerospace industry’s CATIA geometric analysis software which can handle its complicated curved beams and surface cladding. Its design is as unconventional or outrageous, whichever way you see it, as Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. It is bound to become an icon of the confidence and vitality of MIT. It is interesting to wonder what Cambridge’s City planners would have said if Cambridge University had proposed such a startling building.

A further difference is MIT’s more directly stated objective of interacting with industry and the working world. This is reflected in the different mission statements of the two universities. Cambridge University’s mission is to “contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence”. MIT’s is “to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21^st century” and goes on to say that “The Institute is committed to generating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge, and to working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges.”

One example of this is the leading position that MIT has established in educational programmes which directly address product development and commercialisation.  MIT’s Leaders for Manufacturing and System Design and Management programmes (which have recently been combined) are designed for practising engineers who have to complete about a dozen courses which are a mixture of engineering and management subjects, with leadership and team-working modules interwoven. Courses are taken either as resident students or by distance learning classes. Some MIT courses are broadcast in real time to company sites by multipoint video-conferencing.  Others are distributed by mailing videotapes and setting up video-conferencing discussion groups with the course instructor.  Cambridge plans to adopt these courses as part of its collaboration agreement as well as sharing practical entrepreneurship courses run by MIT’s School of Management.

INITIAL PROGRESS OF CMI

CMI has been set up as a company limited by guarantee under UK law, with its registered office in Cambridge.  It has no shareholders but is run by a Board of Directors [3] with two Executive Directors, one in Cambridge and one at MIT.  So far, CMI’s programme has had four main strands: undergraduate education, integrated research, professional practice, and outreach through a national competitiveness network. The intention is to draw on the knowledge, expertise and resources of Cambridge University and MIT to provide research, learning and business opportunities and thereby provide a catalyst for improving industrial competitiveness and productivity, whilst working with other UK universities to encourage the entrepreneurial spirit in higher education.

Details of CMI’s plans and progress with each of  these strands of its programme are given in the Appendix.  In summary the highlights are that: an exchange programme for undergraduates has been set up and is working well, with about 50 students exchanging for a year of their courses; joint research projects grouped under two headings (1) new technologies and (2) competitiveness, productivity and entrepreneurship have been established; three new master’s degree courses have been set up at Cambridge on Bio-science Enterprise, Technology Policy, and Environmental Engineering and Sustainable Development; a programme of executive education is being developed; and a network of some 50 British universities, industry groups and regional agencies has been assembled to support the existing UK network of government-funded local development agencies.

It is too early to assess the success of these programmes, but initial indications are that the mutual collaboration and exchange resulting from CMI has been good for both universities and has encouraged a more adventurous spirit among those involved at Cambridge. Now attention is being given to plans for 2005 and beyond, when earmarked government funding finishes. To continue CMI’s mission there will have to be a major fund-raising initiative.

TEACHING ENTREPRENEURSHIP

The University of Cambridge’s Entrepreneurship Centre (CEC) began operation in October 1999, shortly before CMI started,  following the award of a £2.9 million grant from the UK government as part of its “Science Enterprise Challenge”.  CEC’s mission is identified as: to build an entrepreneurial culture within the University of Cambridge, and to train, develop and support the people who will make new knowledge-based ventures successful. Currently the CEC’s activities are (1) teaching and training to inspire and build skills, (2) business creation by advice and mentoring of new ventures and (3) research to support knowledge-based entrepreneurs. It works alongside and largely complements the activities of CMI.

There is an ongoing debate about how to introduce entrepreneurship courses into the regular teaching curricula.

At Cambridge, all undergraduate engineering courses and most of the physical science courses now take four years. Because of the changing school background of incoming students, more preparatory work has to be done at the start than was the case for the old  three-year courses. Also, at the end of the courses, more specialised material has been added to meet professional requirements. For engineering, there is continuing pressure from the UK’s professional engineering bodies who wish to influence curricula and there is little flexibility to introduce new subjects.

Nevertheless, there is a clear desire from within the university to widen the choice of subjects available to students. Whereas the traditional British engineering degree course has been fairly closely prescribed, with relatively limited choice and a long list of required subjects, now there is a trend towards greater freedom of choice. Students may wish to take more computer science, or venture into the physical or biological sciences in greater depth, and staff are generally supportive.

Therefore it is likely that a more open course structure than the traditional  “engineering tripos” will be adopted in Cambridge, closer to the American credit system where students have free choice from a wide range of options. When this happens there will be greater opportunities to introduce enterprise studies.

This pattern follows that of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. Its courses are part of the portfolio of the Sloan School of Management and most of its faculty members are based in the Sloan School.

Currently CEC’s principal teaching course is called Basics of Building a Business and is offered outside normal lecturing hours as an optional course for all full-time students and staff of the University who wish to do it. The material covered is mainly practical information about writing a business plan, forming a company, undertaking financial analysis, coupled with advice on specific business proposals that the participants are encouraged to make.  As the University’s undergraduate courses change to allow more choice, developments of this introductory entrepreneurship material will be introduced into the undergraduate curricula of the main science and engineering departments at Cambridge.

This development has been encouraged by CMI. The Cambridge faculty’s greater awareness of the course structures at MIT and the work of MIT’s Entrepreneurship Center has acted as a catalyst for changes which otherwise would probably would have come anyway, but would have taken longer.

MAKING UNIVERSITIES ENGINES OF CHANGE

A year ago, Cambridge University’s Regius Professor of Divinity, David Ford, spoke in the University church on the subject of “The Future of Cambridge University” [4]. Commenting on the changes that have marked the university’s history, Professor Ford recognised that a new tradition of “the enterprise or entrepreneurial university has become embedded” at Cambridge [5].

Part of his address referred to the culture of specialisation. “There is a great disproportion between, on the one hand, the energy and intelligence that goes into all the special fields [of university enquiry], and, on the other hand, the attention devoted to wrestling with their interrelations, and their significance – intellectual, ethical and practical – for the flourishing of our world. It is this situation of exploding specialisms together with lessening ability to make interconnections or to be responsible for the implications of information, knowledge and know-how that forms the distinctive challenge to all universities today. It is intensified by the fact that universities have never been as important to society as they are in our ‘information age’, with its ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘learning society’; and that in turn means that political and economic interests are keener than ever to shape what universities are and do.”

Recognition that CMI would never have happened without UK government intervention has led to a great deal of discussion within Cambridge and to some well-argued opposition to CMI. The opposing arguments range from objections to outside agencies setting the university’s agenda to outright opposition to accepting funds for purposes deemed to differ from the university’s traditional functions as a place of “religion, education, learning and research”.

The UK government’s decision to allocate a substantial block of funding for Cambridge to collaborate with MIT assumes that universities can act as engines of change.  This is a controversial (and some believe an unproven) conclusion. Did MIT play a part in establishing the entrepreneurial culture of the USA or is MIT the result of that entrepreneurial culture? 

It is interesting to read how MIT describes the activities and purposes of CMI [6].  “CMI offers opportunities for business professionals at several levels, drawing on the experience of MIT in delivering courses that combine cutting-edge knowledge of science and technology with advanced thinking in management, business and policy. Providing a range of courses, workshops and lectures, CMI aims to provide education that combines technical depth with business breadth to benefit managers, technologists and policy makers.” 

The emphasis on business and what Professor Ford called the “interconnections” is central to MIT’s perception of its own role, as well as that of CMI. When MIT was founded in 1865 it was to prepare students for “useful work”. The School of Industrial Science founding documents [7] propose “to give to the teachings such scope and method, that while imparting a due measure of knowledge, and cultivating the habits of observation and exact thought, - so conducive to the progress of invention, and the development of an enlightened industry, - they may help to extend more widely the elevating influences of a generous scientific culture.”  Even so, MIT’s Entrepreneur-ship Center was not set up until 1995 “to train and develop leaders who will make high-tech ventures successful”.

CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF THE CAMBRIDGE PHENOMENON

A recent survey by Cambridge Investment Research , an independent financial services and investment research group, has included 1,630 technology firms within 15 miles of Cambridge [8]. Half of these firms were found to have fewer than 10 employees. Although 30% of the companies have a manufacturing function of some sort, there are very few large manufacturing organisations. The only large manufacturer is the long-established company Marshall of Cambridge, which employs nearly 3,000 people, mainly in aerospace engineering.

Surprisingly the study suggests that only 27% of the companies surveyed are involved in R&D. This is rather different from the traditional perception of the Cambridge Phenomenon.

Also the direct involvement of Cambridge University may be less than expected. Recently Cambridge University’s Entrepreneurship Centre has published a list of 109 companies that were formed (1) partially or wholly using University of Cambridge-derived intellectual property or ideas, and/or (2) by current and former University of Cambridge researchers, faculty, staff or students.  It is emphasised that this list is not exhaustive and it is being regularly updated, but nevertheless the number is small compared with the 1,630 tech firms identified by CIR near Cambridge (less than 7% of the total).  Most of the 109 spin outs are associated with particular departments of the university and their distribution is evenly spread across the sciences:

The tentative conclusion that less than 7% of the companies in Cambridge’s Silicon fen are direct spin-offs from Cambridge University suggests that the role of the university in the Cambridge Phenomenon is a subtle one. For, although the number of companies directly spun-off may be a small proportion of the total number of companies surveyed, the University’s role in drawing technology clusters to the Cambridge region is seen as very important. The university’s research excellence, its policy of attracting to Cambridge national research units sponsored by the Research Councils; the high proportion of research staff on short-term contracts who look for opportunities outside the university; the freedom which Cambridge academics have to pursue their own work provided that they devote themselves to advancing their subject and promoting the interests of the university, are all probably contributors to the success of Silicon Fen [9].

WILL CMI WORK?

Will the MIT-Cambridge collaboration work? Gordon Brown’s intended goals are primarily related to improving entrepreneurship, productivity and competitiveness in the UK. They seek cultural change by exchanging students and faculty members and by carrying out linked research programmes on new technology and joint programmes of entrepreneurship teaching and outreach. The intention is that Cambridge will be the hub of a network to spread the benefits of the collaboration to the whole of the UK.

There have been, and in some cases remain, major hurdles to overcome. The initial suspicion and hesitancy within Cambridge University has largely disappeared as benefits to Cambridge become apparent, but it is likely to resurface if CMI does not continue to succeed. The need to raise industrial funding to support the work of CMI is a second hurdle. Government funding was on condition that an additional £16m could be raised from the UK private sector and there has been good progress to meet that goal. But securing the long-term future of CMI is a third hurdle, because both universities intend that CMI should continue when government funding finishes. To retain the level of operation that CMI now has requires an income stream of at least £12 million per year.

Managing the ownership of intellectual property generated by CMI was initially a major challenge, because of resistance at Cambridge and MIT to CMI taking ownership of IPR generated from any funded activity. This includes teaching and course material as well as inventions and research outputs, but has been tempered by a royalty distribution agreement which is substantially the same as the two institutions normally operate, and has been largely recognised to be a fair and equitable way of sharing the success of CMI’s work. Paradoxically, what may be good for CMI may not be good for the Cambridge Phenomenon. One of the liberal policies of Cambridge University which was suggested as contributing directly or indirectly to the Cambridge Phenomenon was the permissive attitude of the university to the ownership of intellectual property rights. Currently these vest in individual academics unless a research contract which generated the know-how stipulates otherwise. CMI has not followed that policy and Cambridge University is planning to change its own policy in 2003 if the necessary agreement can be obtained.

Both Cambridge and MIT are benefiting from their collaboration. Perhaps the benefits to MIT are less visible than the benefits to Cambridge, but they are still very important. The cultural breadth and strength of Cambridge University is a tremendous attraction. MIT recognises the fine scholarship at Cambridge, its fine undergraduate courses, its strong PhD candidates, and the many splendid faculty members it has. All these are seen as most valuable assets.  And the opportunity to give MIT’s undergraduates a year’s study in Cambridge is seen as a highly desirable feature of the collaboration. It will help MIT to recruit the best undergraduates in America.

CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE

The challenges that face Cambridge University’s science and engineering departments are largely the same as those that face MIT.  They include the following [10] :

These are enormously difficult to manage, and many are completely contradictory. Yet universities have to respond as imaginatively as they can. It is certainly good to have the advantage of sharing problems and solutions where attitudes are more adventurous than Cambridge is used to and traditions less firmly ingrained.

A different problem is the response of outsiders to the collaboration of two such powerful western universities. In 2000, the author attended a colloquium on the future of civil and environmental engineering at MIT [11]. There was an invited audience from industry and academia. Plans for the MIT-Cambridge collaboration and its implications were discussed. A visitor from Ghana took the microphone to ask whether this would lead to further exploitation of the under-developed world by the west. Would knowledge be managed by a network of universities and distributed to the rest of the world as its custodians chose? It was hard to reassure him. There are important issues to be addressed as the move towards international university collaboration gathers momentum. One such issue is to ensure the inclusiveness of the knowledge economy. The poor must not be excluded. A second is that an adequate response to the ‘world’s great challenges’ (the words of MIT’s mission statement) requires more than high technology alone.

CONCLUSIONS

Although an ocean separates us geographically, professionally we are very close. Although our traditions are so different, we have the same problems and priorities. Where there is a difference, it is in the two institutions attitude to change. MIT is quicker to reinvent itself than Cambridge. There are many reasons for this. The superb standard of Cambridge’s undergraduate courses and the pressures of government assessment and professional accreditation in the UK make change slower. MIT’s access to un-earmarked private funding without the close audit that accompanies public funding in the UK makes research more flexible and quicker. This is not an over-whelming difference: it is a question of the speed of response, not of direction. Although essentially different universities, both are very good at what they do. Both have the enthusiasm and confidence to collaborate as equal partners.

But Gordon Brown wants more than a cosy feeling of collaboration and sharing. He wants CMI to improve entrepreneurship, productivity and competitiveness in the UK. A successful outcome of aptly-chosen integrated research projects will contribute, but it is likely to be in teaching, professional practice and outreach that the major benefits will accrue. Can entrepreneurship be taught? The Director of the Cambridge Entrepreneurship Centre has been quoted recently as saying that “I don’t think you can teach people entrepreneurship, just about running a business” [12]. Like the old adage “leaders are born, not made” this is probably partly true. But if entrepreneurs cannot be made, they can be trained and they can be encouraged.

Understanding the interconnections between specialisms and particularly between technology and business lies at the heart of entrepreneurship. Universities understand academic disciplines and the achievement of their subject specialists. Traditionally, they have recognised individual academic brilliance by measuring contributions in specialist fields. Teachers of entrepreneurship need knowledge in many fields. Their contribution must be in establishing and promoting the interconnections. This is where MIT and Cambridge differ in emphasis: MIT puts greater emphasis on the interconnections. Its commitment to “workingwith others … on the world’s great challenges” is its mission to the world. Teaching the tools of entrepreneurship is one part of this mission. The challenge for educators is to continue to teach adequately the fundamentals of science and engineering, while allowing time to study the interconnections between technology and business and their implications for our knowledge economy and for the wider world.

Can CMI help to improve the productivity and competitiveness of the UK?  As part of a process that recognises the ‘interconnections’, it may help, but to what degree who can guess? If cultural change in universities is to impact national prosperity, CMI’s national competitiveness network must impact and lead many other British universities towards the new entrepreneurial tradition.

Whatever the outcome of its first five years, CMI will have been a model for inter-university collaboration on a global scale. CMI’s true test may be, not in whether it meets Gordon Brown’s original goals, because that will be hard if not impossible to measure, but in whether it can survive long-term to build on the ground-breaking Cambridge-MIT collaboration that it has begun.

APPENDIX

PROGRESS IN CMI’S FIRST TWO YEARS

CMI’s programme has had four main strands: undergraduate education, integrated research, professional practice, and outreach through a national competitiveness network.

Undergraduate education

The programme of undergraduate exchanges was the most straightforward of the four strands to organise, although negotiating the credit that Cambridge students would be given for completing MIT courses and vice versa was complicated. There are now about 50 Cambridge undergraduates spending their third year (we have a four-year course) at MIT and the same number of junior-year MIT students at Cambridge. They are split roughly 60:40 men:women and are mainly from engineering, the physical sciences and mathematics. There are also shorter summer assignments for undergraduates to help with research projects and students have worked on nearly 50 different projects at the two institutions. 

These summer exchanges of students are an important outcome from MIT’s Research Opportunities Program for undergraduates. This has been a feature of MIT life for over 30 years. Its popularity is supported by US research grant providers who regularly provide funds to encourage engagement in research and entrepreneurial activity by MIT undergraduates.

A further outcome of the student exchange programme has been a renewed interest in curriculum development that has developed at the two universities, with the objective of making teaching courses more portable and more easily shared. Committees are exploring a range of educational reforms including coursework-lecture integration, multidisciplinary design projects, hardware-software co-design, web labs in chemical engineering, a joint programme in entrepreneurial engineering for undergraduates, on-line courses in computing, and the methodology of teaching and learning.

Integrated research

Establishing a strategy for CMI’s research programme, and seeking and evaluating proposals, necessarily took time.  The portfolio of research has been grouped into two main areas: (1) future technologies, and (2) competitiveness, productivity and entrepreneurship. Future technologies research is broken down into the following subject groups:

The strategy is to encourage research that could impinge on major future new product developments, with potentially valuable IPR, and which will benefit from the combined resources of the two universities by virtue of the availability of expert staff or specialised laboratory facilities. 

Research into competitiveness, productivity and entrepreneurship involves mainly the two management schools (the Sloan School and the Judge Institute of Management Studies) and the two Departments of Economics. It is concerned particularly with modelling and benchmarking enterprise development and industrial interaction. The value of grants allocated to CPE is currently about 20% of the allocation to new technology research. There has been significant management activity to strengthen the CPE portfolio and work is continuing to generate project proposals in additional areas, including (1) how CPE research impacts business, (2) the impact of IT on business and (3) the organisation of wireless technologies.

Professional practice

CMI’s professional practice activity has three main themes: (1) new university postgraduate courses for master’s degrees, (2) new programmes of executive education, and (3) a series of high profile lectures by distinguished speakers intended to attract attention and promote the work of CMI.

Three new master’s degree courses are being set up “to train the next generation of science, engineering and technology innovators and business leaders”. [13]  They are courses at Cambridge for Cambridge University’s MPhil degree, in (1) Bio-science Enterprise, (2) Technology Policy and (3) Environmental Engineering and Sustainable Development. The intention is that all three courses will provide the opportunity to combine a discipline base in science or engineering with courses in business and entrepreneurship provided by the Judge Institute of Management Studies. They will emphasise practical applications, case studies and interaction with industry.

These MPhil courses are being offered for the first time in 2002-03 with the original intention to begin with not more than 10 students in each. In the event the number of applications far exceeded the number of places and there are a total of about 40 CMI MPhil students now in the first run of these courses. The male:female ratio is about 2:1 with the geographical spread as shown below:

Further initatives include a proposed Chemical Engineering Practice School, intended to become the fourth CMI Master’s course next year, and other new courses in Energy and the Environment, Nanotechnology, Digital Product Design nd Digital Archiving.

The executive education programme offers both open and custom-made short courses. These are delivered, usually in the UK, with MIT faculty participating in person and by live video links. The courses cover a wide range of areas, chosen because of the combined expertise of the two universities, and can take the form of industry briefings, or of skills-based instructional sessions. Examples include:

A typical course last two or three days and is a tailor-made course designed for a specific corporate client. The challenge is now to set up a coherent catalogue of courses for inclusion in CMI’s marketing and publicity effort.

The distinguished lecture series is intended to encourage debate, share information and foster an enterprise culture among innovators and business communities. The subjects of the lectures in 2001-02, which were held in Cambridge, ranged from the world wide web to financial architecture. [14]

National competitiveness network

The intention is that CMI’s work will complement other UK government initiatives to share and promote best practice in achieving competitiveness, productivity and entrepreneurship. CMI’s objective is to help achieve this partly by generating and adapting materials for university courses that focus on technology management and entrepreneurship, partly by setting up channels for their dissemination, including a national training programme, and partly by knowledge transfer to industry by executive education and programmes of industry internships for university staff. Two university lectureships and two research posts in enterprise studies have been funded by CMI to take this agenda forward. 

There is already a network of  government-funded local development agencies with which CMI plans to combine a network of 50 or more British universities, industry groups and regional agencies. CMI has sponsored events at Warwick and Nottingham universities and plans future major events on regional technology policy initiatives and on opportunities in the field of micro-electro-mechanical systems.