Microsoft cozying up to EU research
CORDIS news runs a fairly intriguing quadruplet of news items today. It doesn’t take data mining to see the connections…
According to the first news item, an informal meeting of the Competitiveness Council produced “a clear message to politicians from the private sector”. Quoting Irish Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Mary Harney,
‘[We] have been urged this morning to be light on regulation and supportive of innovation,’ she said. ‘We have got to concentrate on productivity growth and we have got to do business differently.’
EU Research Commissioner Philippe Busquin is then quoted as expressing his frustration at the lack of EU funding available for research projects:
‘Sometimes I feel like giving up because we have not been able to fund so many excellent projects,’ said the Commissioner. ‘I think in FP7 we must put our thinking caps on and work out how to fund other projects, even if 100 per cent funding is not a possibility,’ he added.
Then, there’s a piece on the newly established European Microsoft Innovation Centre (announced a year ago), which makes Microsoft eligible to take part in EU funded projects. EMIC “responds to the EC’s call for additional private investment to reach the goal of the Lisbon agenda [..], representing an effort to collaborate with European universities and business on projects orientated more towards basic science than development”, and will focus on enterprise computing, embedded devices and the extended home.
Lastly, there’s coverage of an alarming report, published by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The report is “warning that European economies are significantly lagging behind the US because of their failure to develop IT skills, innovation, and research and development (R&D)”, again mentioning the Lisbon agenda. The newsbyte fails to mention that the report was sponsored by Microsoft (although it’s in the filename).
