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The headline seems misleading. They're not planning one "huge hub" in one location. Instead, they're planning a bunch of mid-sized institutes spread across diff
by alexhutcheson 9y ago
The headline seems misleading. They're not planning one "huge hub" in one location. Instead, they're planning a bunch of mid-sized institutes spread across different countries, each with "hundreds of computer engineers, mathematicians and other scientists".
That approach is understandable politically, but it seems much less likely to have the intended effect. If the goal is to kick-start a knowledge cluster in Europe that can compete with the Bay Area, then it seems much more likely to succeed if the funding and talent is concentrated in a single site. "Hundreds of computer engineers" is equivalent to a mid-size remote office of a major tech company.
That's just an observation, though. I realize that the choice probably isn't this plan vs. one mega-site. More realistically it's this plan vs. nothing at all, or vs. competing piecemeal efforts by various EU member states.
- bitL 9y agoI think it would go standard European way - build an institution by a top-down directive reflecting political will, shake each others hands, then a few years later cry that you have all this outdated infrastructure but no inventive people working for you nor any bleeding-edge results, as all relevant people are snatched up and overpaid by industry giants.
- Eridrus 9y agoI think a hundred researchers/engineers is well beyond a midsize company remote office, because the caliber of people and mission will be very different. DeepMind is less than a thousand people, and was probably on the order of a few hundred when it became famous.
- alexhutcheson 9y agoFor comparison, the Fraunhofer Society has 72 institutes in Germany, all focused on applied research. Collectively, these institutes employ ~25,000 scientists and engineers[1], which gives us an average of ~350 scientists and engineers per office. This seems very comparable to what's being proposed, both in mission and in scale of individual institute. This seems to be an effective model for applied R&D, but I haven't seen anyone argue that a Fraunhofer Institute is sufficient to be a seed for a major tech cluster. The scale just isn't big enough. [1] https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fraunhofer/profile-structure/facts-and-figures.html https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fraunhofer/profile-struct...
- Barrin92 9y agoI think it's worth experimenting with a more diverse and distributed model because the 'one megahub' structure also has disadvantages, low spread beyond the borders of the tech industry being one example. Especially countries like Germany with diverse industrial production spread out across the country might benefit more from having technology clusters spread out as well. Even Silicon Valley companies like Google have at least partially taken on this approach by opening labs in Toronto or Paris, Amazon plans to create about a hundred jobs around Stuttgart and Thübingen.