Five cities — in Hungary, Poland, Spain, Slovakia and Austria — have put their municipal hats in the ring in the contest to host the planned European Institute of Innovation and Technology.

Four bids had been received to host the headquarters of the campus-less institute (EIT) as the deadline passed over the weekend, a spokesperson for the EU's Slovenian presidency told AFP on Monday.

The Hungarian capital Budapest, Wroclaw, the main city of Lower Silesia in south-western Poland and Sant Cugat del Valles near Barcelona in Spain all presented their candidacies on time along with a joint bid by the Austrian and Slovakian capitals Vienna and Bratislava, she said.

There was no bid ahead of the Friday midnight deadline from Germany's Munich, which had been mooted as another possible candidate to become the headquarters of the future institute.

The EU's Slovenian presidency expects member states to discuss the competing offers next month with a decision to be taken at an EU summit in June.

The EIT is meant to bridge the innovation gap between the 27-nation EU and its major rivals, the US and Japan.

Work on the project, backed by a budgeted €308.7-million, is due to start in the summer.

The money is supposed to cover the costs of the EIT's governing structure and the costs of coordinating and bringing together people involved in the institute's first two or three research units.

The total cost of establishing the EIT will be much higher, with the rest of the funding sought from national grants and industry investments.

The project has faced frequent criticism from its inception for being another costly research project which does not solve the main problem of European research: a lack of money.

The EIT project, championed by EU Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso, was presented in 2006 as a European answer to the prestigious US Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

However, unlike the MIT campus, the EU version is planned to link up academic and industrial research from around the 27 nation European Union.

The idea is to concentrate on the fields of energy, climate change and information technology with the possibility of broadening the parameters later.

AFP