The EuroTech Universities alliance will add yet another elite university to their list of members, as it was announced yesterday that
Technion—Israel Institute of Technology will join the alliance.
“Technion is the leading university in Israel with a long and proud history within technical sciences. Technion has a high competence level, tradition of having a strong business collaboration, and the university shares DTU’s vision of benefiting society. We look forward to working with them,” says Rasmus Larsen, Executive Vice President, Provost, DTU.
The Eurotech alliance was founded in 2011 with the purpose of solving challenges in society and supporting the EU vision of smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth.
The original members consisted of DTU, the German Technical University of Munich (TUM), the Dutch Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), and later the Swiss École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).
Earlier this year, the French École Polytechnique (L’X) was added to the alliance, and now yet another member is admitted: Technion—Israel Institute of Technology.
“The expansion will create new opportunities for DTU’s researchers in relation to forming new research consortia and providing access to new infrastructure. Our students are also offered the educational elements, courses, and study stays at yet another another elite technical university,” says Rasmus Larsen.
But DTU’s education and research environment is not the only benefactor of the alliance.
“We have created an innovation ecosystem among our six universities, which will give DTU spin-outs and start-ups access to more mentors as well as new markets and capital in the other ecosystems. Israel, for example, has a very strong innovation environment and many tech companies that are centered around Technion,” he says.
The presidents of the EuroTech universities have long had an ambition to expand the alliance with about two members who could match the level of the founding elite level universities. These have now been found, which is why Rasmus Larsen believes that the expansion will stop here.
“We believe that EuroTech should be an exclusive group of technical universities from the European elite, as we would rather focus on collaborating at depth than on expanding for the sake of expanding. So we have no current plans to grow even further,” he says.