Belgium, Flanders
Does pillarization help or hurt here? I'd have thought that having multiple universities when there might otherwise be just one (University of Leuven being one obvious example), for example, might encourage competition. Or does it just take away potential advantage of scale without compensating benefits?
For research IMEC is huge, the people working their are generally good, mix tungsten with silicon and get better chips due to quantum effects. Non semiconductor stuff is a lot weaker, some stuff bordering on academic fraud. Semantic web this and that, sir Tim Burners Lee saving the internet again. Bureaucrats just love how consensus focused that stuff is, like catnip.
When I have meetings with government officials they are lead by consultants from PwC that talk about the need for more competition. I'm better off working for EY that just gets the contract.