Abstract:

The IDEA League is a network of five leading European universities of technology and science: Imperial College London, TU Delft, ETH Zurich, RWTH Aachen and Paris Tech. Founded in 1999, it is a highly selective university network based on excellence. The IDEA League sees as its task to foster world class scholarship, education and research in science and engineering. In a world of accelerating globalisation of research and technology, the IDEA League aims to actively contribute to the agenda setting in Europe, as well as to participate in the programmes and actions of the EU, most notably the framework programmes, the platforms and the European Institute of Technology (EIT). This is the framework in which the IDEA League anchors its strategy in research, education and innovation.
The IDEA League represents for each partner its most important university collaboration at the European level. The collaborations within the IDEA League are based on the concept of added value by pooling the resources of outstanding research and education programs for the creation of unique, integrated partnerships. Furthermore, the evaluation of the processes involved in this collaboration and the dissemination of the results are ensuring constant further development of the IDEA League while also serving as a model of a European cooperation.
The presentation will introduce the various activities and programmes of the IDEA League for 2011–2012. Special attention is given to two aspects: the establishment of the network as a voice to anticipate, understand and shape the thinking of the stakeholders and policy makers, including those in government, academia and industry, and on the other hand, the creation of bottom-up initiatives of the IDEA League within the partner universities. The presentation will conclude with a short portrait of ASPIRE, a network of five leading Asian universities, one of them being Tsinghua University in China, which was modelled after IDEA League. In the future, the two networks will cooperate and are currently exploring the dimensions of this unique Euro-Asian partnership.

Keywords:

Imperial College London, ETH Zurich, TU Delft, RWTH Aachen, ParisTech, ASPIRE, European cooperation, knowledge triangle, network of excellence, Asia link.