The last sixty years have seen enormous progress in the development of industrial biotechnology for chemical production and today many companies using such processes in an effective way to produce chemicals. Indeed today we can state that it is no longer a new technology but one that is taking a main-stream role in many research and development organizations in industry. Nevertheless education of the next generation of engineers and the continuing education of those already working in industry is also required. In such developments Europe has a particularly strong position and partly this is as a result of supportive funding for research from the EC and partly the result of excellent collaboration between industry and academia. This not only represents an exciting development but also helps all those in university to understand industrial needs and for industry to pick the very latest developments from academia. Such a synergistic relationship has served bioprocessing very well in the past six decades and there is little doubt it will continue to do so in the next six as well.