Andreu Mas-Colell or the ‘big bang’ of Catalan research

The Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) was founded in 2001. He aimed to establish centres brimming with international talent in order to compete at the highest calibre of research. To date, the ICREA has attracted 250 of the best researchers from Spain and across the world to work in Catalonia.

© Frederic Camallonga / ICREA archive

The date is 7 April 1999. A man enters an office on the seventh floor of 33 Via Laietana, very near Barcelona Cathedral, for the first time. The unostentatious yet spacious office is presided over by the Catalan flag. The man is fifty-four years old, with a brilliant academic career behind him. The decisions to be taken in that office over the next four years will mark a watershed in Catalan research.

President Jordi Pujol appoints Andreu Mas-Colell to take over from Joan Albaigés as the Commissioner for Universities and Research. The university rectors have challenged Albaigés and won the hand. Individual negotiations can be managed fairly well, but the collective power of the rectors is tremendous. Mas-Colell is well aware of this and will have the chance to experience it first-hand. He is therefore content when the Commission becomes a Department in 2000 – he hasn’t come to waste time or to pursue personal ambitions – he wants to serve his country by exercising the power the post affords him. In order to do so, he knows that it is better to be a minister than a commissioner.

Although not a politician by nature (indeed, back then he wasn’t even a member of the Catalan liberal nationalist party, Convergència), Mas-Colell is very aware of the rhythms marked by elections. He knows that there will be elections in 2003 and he wants to finish what he has started. He also knows that transforming Catalonia’s universities is a long, onerous task, like changing the course of a transatlantic ocean liner. He has recently returned from the United States and he has learned that a less bureaucratic university system is possible, but he can only achieve it with the complicity of the rectors.

In contrast, he sees the field is wide open in another area about which he is passionate: research. Convinced that progress in Catalonia depends on a change in the R&D&I model, he will spend all his energy and efforts on it. Besides having the trust of the president and the admiration of the academic world, he has another point in his favour: the financial crisis has not yet begun and he can increase resources to a sufficient degree that, if well channelled, they will bear fruit. It is worth noting that, until then, Pujol’s governments had never paid much attention to research.

The Director of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), Joan J. Guinovart, speaks of a triple miracle with respect to Mas-Colell. “The first is that he decided to come back from the States; the second is that Pujol noticed his contribution in establishing Pompeu Fabra University and appointed him minister; and the third is that the task was so unquestionable that the government which followed decided to continue with it.” This has made it possible to maintain a seamless research policy for fifteen years, which in politics is an eternity if we think about the constant reforms in other areas, in the education system for instance. Guinovart adds yet another miracle: “When the financial crisis began, Mas-Colell was Minister for the Economy and protected the sector.”

The image of an absent-minded genius, in the style of Professor Calculus, provoked a certain scepticism. However, it soon became clear that Mas-Colell knew how to make decisions that are both intelligent and feasible, accompanied by an impressive capacity for work as well as good policy management and team leadership.

A commitment to attracting talent

One of these decisions was the foundation of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) in 2001. Mas-Colell never tires of repeating the word excellence. If the new research centres he envisions are to achieve excellence and compete at the highest level, there must be a tool to attract international talent. The ICREA is that tool: a programme offering researchers the financial and professional conditions necessary to lure them to Catalonia instead of the United States or Germany. Alongside the ICREA, the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ) are three more examples of newly created centres with a completely novel dimension.

To date, the ICREA has managed to bring 250 first-class researchers to work in Catalonia – a significant number. Many are Catalan, but approximately two-thirds come from abroad, many of whom have welcomed the chance provided by the ICREA to come back to Europe from the States. The researchers are offered permanent positions, they are assessed every three or five years, and they receive pay rises according to these evaluations. The ICREA’s current director, Jaume Bertranpetit, emphasises the institution’s great virtues: administrative autonomy, agility, efficiency and a rigorous international assessment (the famous and here all-too-scarce accountability).

With public funding and private operation under the supervision of a board of trustees, the ICREA has created a successful new model, which the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) uses as an example in Eastern European countries. “We pay twenty million euros in salaries, but we receive sixty more in grants to carry out research”, explains Bertranpetit. Catalonia’s extraordinary success in the prestigious grants awarded by the European Research Council (ERC) is inexplicable without the ICREA’s existence and the talent it has been able to harness.

Despite acknowledging the ICREA’s success and describing it as an authentic revolution in Catalonia’s research system, Joan J. Guinovart doesn’t hold back in identifying the problem: “The global standard of normal is abnormal in Spain.” He believes that the ICREA and other new research centres fostered by the Catalan Regional Government provide an alternative model to the centres of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), which are “based on bureaucracy, rigid positions and the plans of the Official State Gazette (BOE).” Furthermore, the ICREA proves that if the underlying policies are correct, the money spent on research is not an expense but an investment, and that exceptional results can be achieved with relatively small contributions. The occasional accusations of elitist policies ignore the fact that competing globally at the highest level requires excellence and that a one-size-fits-all policy has devastating effects to this end. Transversal egalitarianism favours equal results over equal opportunities. Catalan research now has the opportunity to compete with the best and, with results like the ERC grants, it has proven that it is capable of winning.