The R&D Production Model: A Brueg(h)elesque Alternative

Abstract

In his book on the Swedish university system, Den svenska högskolan: Lägesbestämning och framtidsdebatt, published in 1994, Stig Strömholm devoted a chapter to a discussion of the milieus of the universities (Strömholm 1994, pp. 179–206). To create a university milieu that is vital and unique, Strömholm wrote, demands time and persistence. He had little faith in the modern, carefully planned and engineered “knowledge cities,” with their formalized contacts between research and industrial development. Nor did he believe in such extreme traditional elitist institutions as Cambridge University. If a criterion such as the number of Nobel Prizes is to be taken into account, Strömholm wrote, surely a place like Cambridge should be counted among the elite, but the tension between the secluded life behind the ivy-covered walls and the world outside is too stark. Such a place has the character of a greenhouse, and the ivory tower faces the risk of being too high, too isolated and too distant. Strömholm did not venture to forecast the shape of the knowledge cities of the future, but he said that everything we know seems to point in the same direction: namely, that the artificial city, built on research with the hope of industrial applications, is hardly the choice of the future. Strömholm wrote: What remains will be, I am convinced, a city which has both one or more knowledge-generating and knowledge-mediating institutions, of sufficient strength and confidence not to let themselves either be bought by industry or governed by politicians, and also an independent civil, cultural and economic life—large enough to stimulate, small enough to arouse feelings of identity and loyalty.¹ (Strömholm 1994, p. 206)