  Higher education systems featuring intense competition have developed
world-class universities, capable of attracting top professors and students and
considerable public-private funding. This does not occur in non-competitive
systems, where highly-talented faculty and students are dispersed across all
institutions. In such systems, the authors propose the budding of spin-off
universities, staffed by migration of top scientists from the entire public
research system. This work illustrate the proposal through an example: the
spin-off of a new university in Rome-Italy staffed with the best professors
from the three current public city universities. Such a faculty would offer top
national research productivity, a magnet to attract the other critical
ingredients of a world-class university: talented students, abundant resources
and visionary governance.
