An £84 million sterling (€131 million) joint research partnership between Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced yesterday by the British Chancellor, Mr Gordon Brown, will be "fundamentally different" in nature from MIT's proposed Media Lab Europe (MLE) project for Dublin, according to sources close to the project.
"We wouldn't see the development in the UK as necessarily having any impact" on the Irish proposal, said a Government source familiar with the plans.
The £150 million (€190 million) Irish project, which would see the establishment of an arm of MIT's Media Lab in Dublin, is understood to be entering the final stages and could be formally announced as early as December.
The Dublin MLE project would involve MIT establishing an independent research institute in the Republic - the only such branch of the Media Lab - focused on the development of cutting edge Internet and electronic commerce applications. It is understood that a key aspect of the project is to produce Irish companies developing new technologies. The Government would contribute about 20 per cent of the cost of the project.
The MLE is expected to have a pan-European perspective and to draw teachers and students from across Europe. In contrast, the Cambridge-MIT Institute will have a largely British focus in the areas of education and technology and is intended to extend MIT's model of university-industry partnerships to Britain. MIT already has distance-learning arrangements with the National Universities of Singapore and the Nanyang Technical University.
An undergraduate exchange programme is a key feature of the British programme. The institute will work to develop common courses in engineering, science and management for third-year students. In addition, the institute will conduct research and will aim to "improve UK entrepreneurship", according to a British Treasury Office statement. The British government will provide the bulk of funding for the institute - £14 million sterling for its first five years of operation - with an additional £16 million sterling expected to come from British industry.
As with the Dublin project, the Cambridge proposal had been under discussion for many months but sources say it had not been expected to be revealed until the end of this year or early next year.
MIT, which has been actively pursuing a variety of international partnerships in recent months, is seen widely as the leading institutional player in technology, and has a strong entrepreneurial culture.
According to a 1997 BancBoston report, if the companies its graduates and teachers have established were considered as an economy, it would be ranked the 24th-largest in the world. There are already 20 MIT-related firms in England and a further three in Scotland.
