The MediaLab Europe seems to be dying because its principal stakeholders - the Irish Government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - have not reached agreement on a new funding model for the organisation. Here is an analysis of why it failed.

Like many interdisciplinary approaches to science, especially when art is involed, MLE's research sometimes lacked scientific rigour, it lacked good evaluation and was too far out of the context of previous research (...) MLE's overheads, that is, their expenditure on each researcher on top of the person's salary, were way over 100 percent, as you can roughly guess by counting researchers and looking at spending figures. A lot of MLE's money went into selling the research, not producing results.