Media Lab Europe to close

Well, well, there’s a blast from the past. According to The Register the Dublin outpost of the MIT Media Lab which was set up with much hype at the height of the Internet boom is to close. The reason? “Observers say the Lab’s biggest drawback as far as private-sector supporters were concerned, was the lack of near-term commercial potential for technologies developed there.

The [Irish] Minister for Communications, Noel Dempsey, [who provided some of the Lab’s funding] acknowledged that the lab was closing, and said it was a disappointment. He said its failure can be explained in part by the economic downturn that particularly affected the technology sector but also by the changing attitude of business to ‘non-directed research’.”

Nobody who knows anything about the attitude of most companies to research will be in the least surprised. If it doesn’t contribute to the bottom line before the CEO’s stock options mature, then forget it.