Because in Europe the belief that important and wide research should be carried out by "public" research is much stronger than, say, USA. Also while we have see

Because in Europe the belief that important and wide research should be carried out by "public" research is much stronger than, say, USA. Also while we have seen a somewhat invading process of privatisations ( :( ), European universities are still largely owned publicly and financed via public funding, therefore most [public] moeny for research should and will be directed to them for the time being. You could then argue that it's not as efficient as the VC model, but: - I haven't seen any study confirming such thing - It doesn't seem easy to achieve a reasonable compromise between open research and R&D protectionism unless you are a big company - Academia, even with all its politics and problems, is still a fast and active environment for scientific research EDIT: typesetting