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UK Chancellor's bid to breed technology entrepreneurs |
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Government
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Written by Peter Warren
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Friday, 07 September 2001 |
Chancellor Gordon Brown is poised to launch a new breed of entrepreneur on the UK’s boardrooms.
Certain to be dubbed Brown’s Babes, the 33 hand-picked students from
Cambridge University have been carefully chosen by academics from
Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US to
take part in a unique exercise to import US entrepreneurship to the UK.
Young, confident and very clever, they are to be carefully groomed
under a unique scheme started by a phone call from the chancellor to
MIT a year and a half ago aimed at developing the sort of partnerships
between the academic community and business that are now commonplace in
the US.
In line with what Brown hopes to achieve nothing is being left to
chance, even down to using the current Big Brother TV vogue for using
psychologists to assess a student’s progress.
Those on the year long exchange not only being assessed for their
entrepreneurial leanings before selection but also being subjected to
an on-going monitoring during and after they have left by Program
Director David Good, a psychologist whose role includes discovering the
mental makeup of an entrepreneur.
“We have been looking for robust characters who can go to a novel
environment and succeed,” said Good. “It is going to be an interesting
cultural experiment as we will also be seeking to identify the
predictors for success so that we will be able to use that knowledge in
the ongoing selection process.”
A prospect that had not deterred Russell Middleton, a 19 year old IT
engineering student who will start with the first wave in August.
Middleton, who has already set up his own internet company in his home
town of Plymouth, is typical of the student selected for the course.
“We’re going over there to pick up the MIT virus,” said Middleton. “I
welcome the attention that this will bring I think it is an incredibly
exciting opportunity.”
The initiative, set up as a private company called CMI, the
Cambridge-MIT Institute, will use £61.5m of Government money and £15m
from the private sector to fund a five year exchange scheme between
staff and students at both universities intended to break the mould of
UK business.
According to insiders Brown sees the students from CMI as the
shock-troops of a radical new business culture the chancellor
highlighted earlier in the week with his announcement of new measures
to encourage people to start new businesses.
Brown focussed on MIT after reading a report on the university by Bank
Boston called ‘the impact of innovation’, which pointed out that
graduates from MIT have founded 4,000 businesses that account for
revenues of $232 bn, more than the gross domestic product of Thailand.
The companies founded by former students from MIT are quite literally a
who’s who of the US high-tech success stories, including household
names like William Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard, Ken Olsen of Digital,
Robert Noyce of the chip makers Intel and James McDonnell of the
aerospace company McDonnell Douglas.
MIT also boasts 46 Nobel prizewinners and 10 Nobel laureates. Graduates
from MIT are now founding new companies at the rate of 150 a year with
many graduates basing their company headquarters close to the
university.
The Cambridge scheme is part of a raft of entrepreneurial activity planned in East Anglia by CMI.
Next week the organisation is expected to jointly announce with BT
Exact, one of its business sponsors, the creation of an entrepreneur
university at Martlesham Heath in Suffolk.
Essentially a virtual academy, the new institution which will be based
at BT Exact’s high-tech business incubator Brightstar will offer
business executives and students MBAs and Diplomas in business
entrepreneurship taught jointly by academics from MIT and Cambridge.
An unusual academic business partnership BT Exact, the former research
arm of BT, hopes will echo the MIT phenomenon and lead to the creation
of new businesses around its Suffolk site.
Using the latest in high-tech communication tools the academy will
offer seminars, conferences and long distance interactive learning
courses from Martlesham, and according to company spokesman, set the
groundwork for a revolution in the way education is carried out in the
UK.
A crucial part of the CMI collaboration as researchers at MIT and BT
are working on the development of technology allowing students to use
sophisticated telecommunications to remotely attend seminars and meet
tutors.
A push to develop the leaders of the future Gordon Brown is not alone in.
A similar plan to recruit top global talent to foster the technocrats
of the 21st century has been launched in the Republic of Ireland, an
economy founded on technology. Called Science Foundation Ireland
according to Professor Bill O’Riordan, former chief scientist at ICL it
is an all out attempt to make Ireland the technology powerhouse of
Europe.
A technology push being mirrored in Wales and Scotland, where both the
Welsh Development Agency and Scottish Enterprise are claiming to be the
technology powerhouses of Europe.
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