Media Lab Europe (MLE) was a research institute in Dublin, Ireland based on the MIT Media Lab. It went into voluntary liquidation early in 2005. The declaration of insolvency declared a surplus of €325,000 by Ernst & Young, the liquidator, who also determined that patents had negigible remaining value as they had already been assigned to multiple partners of the Lab.
MLE was created in July 2000 and was considered a pet-project of the Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. The lab received start-up funding of 35 million Euro from Irish Government, as well as sponsorship from industrial research partners (see below). It was located in a former Guinness warehouse in the historic Liberities area and was to have been a flagship project for the Irish Government's "Digital Hub" project, an urban rejuvanation scheme which aimed to encourage digital media companies to locate in the area. The MLE board included U2's The Edge.
The lab focused on innovation into digital technology and human-machine interaction. The lab was quite successful and managed to recreate the creative play atmosphere of the MIT Media Lab; it published 43 journal and conference proceedings articles in 2004 [1]. The "Mind Games" group, for example, achieved international recognition for its work on EEG based mind-computer interfaces. Research partners included Allied Irish Banks, BT, Ericsson, Intel, and Orange. The lab also cooperated with several Irish universities and the Higher Education Authority. The lab received an honorary mention at the 2004 Prix Ars Electronica for the projects BumpList and Iso-phone.
The lab was also unlucky to have been founded just as the internet bubble collapsed and with it the corporate ability to invest in projects of this sort. There were also internal problems, a management report obtained by the media after the lab closed spoke of poor moral, poor management and claimed that the "inmates were running the asylum". Furthermore, the Lab suffered from a poor relationship with the Irish universities, some in the university sector were jealous of money invested in the Lab. 2004 saw increasing concern about the viability of the project, it encountered a funding crisis: it did not seem likely that the lab would become self-financing in the near future and the government appeared unwilling to provide sufficient further support. On the 14 January 2005 it was announced that the lab would be put into voluntary liquidation and close.
Commenting in the Irish Times (Lillington 2005) Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab, said that the research at MLE was "beyond [his] wildest expectations", he was critical of European companies for their unwillingness to invest in the lab and said
- "Many visitors to MLE thought the work in Dublin was more edgy than at MIT. In this regard, Ireland received what it asked for in spades. the failing was economic and the financial model was freakishly untimely"
However, it was also reported in the media (see for example Weckler 2005) that a number of internal and government reports commissioned when the lab first reported financial difficulties came to damning conclusions about management and morale and noted that the number of patents produced by the lab were very small. It was also reported (Smith 2005) that the Irish government would have provided further limited funding, but only if MIT had agreed to governance changes and to award MIT Masters degrees to students at the lab. The Irish Government now plans to fund a digital media centre at the same location, but this will have a more applied focus.
MLE was not the only attempt to franchise the MIT Media Lab, Media Lab Asia was founded by MIT and the Indian government in 2001 but all links between it and MIT were broken in 2003.
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