SCIENCE FOUNDATION IRELAND (SFI) has sunk more than €1 billion into research over the past nine years. Have they anything to show for it? asks DICK AHLSTROM
Yes, definitely, according to a strategy document released yesterday by SFI director general Prof Frank Gannon.
The State and private sector investment in research has helped to build our reputation abroad, has attracted millions in research-intensive foreign direct investment and has fostered company start-ups as scientists attempt to commercialise their discoveries.
Putting State money directly into research is done to educate, to discover, but also for economic reasons. “We are funding science so we can have an economic impact,” Prof Gannon said at the launch yesterday.
The new strategy document placed a new emphasis on wealth and job creation based on successful knowledge transfer. “We are going to have a measurable return on [research] investment,” he added.
The strategy document, Powering the Smart Economy, maps out SFI’s plans for the five-year period 2009-2013. Its take-home message could be summed up by the now familiar political phrase: “A lot done. More to do.”
While the previous five-year plan focused on building up our research capacity, the next five years will see much more commercialisation of research, Gannon says. However, this effort was already underway, he adds. “The future is now.”
Not surprisingly, the new strategy closely tracks the two most recent and important enunciations of Government science policy, the Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation, 2007-2013 and, much more recently, last December’s launch of Building Ireland’s Smart Economy: A Framework for Sustainable Economic Renewal.
The latter in particular placed a new emphasis on encouraging the movement of research discoveries out of the lab and into commercialisation. The clear goal is to take innovation and turn it into wealth-creating companies and high-tech jobs.
The SFI strategy points to this, indicating that its programmes would seek to underpin the Smart Economy “in the areas of greatest strategic value to Ireland’s long-term competitiveness and development”.
Gannon believes that achieving this requires a four-step process. SFI’s investment helps to build locally derived “human capital” and attracts top researchers from abroad who can avail of SFI research support provided the science is done in Irish labs.
This effort must deliver a high quality research output, as seen in the tangible results of credible discovery – peer-reviewed publications, research citations, technology licences and patents. Success in this marks Ireland as a good place to do science and a place where good science is done. The value of establishing such a reputation cannot be over- emphasised, Gannon says.
One is the ability to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), the capacity to convince research-intensive companies that they should either set up operations here or expand their research activities within Ireland. More than 40 per cent of companies who set up operations here in 2008 included a research and development initiative, Gannon says.
Another benefit of having an international reputation is the ability to overcome the ongoing challenge of finding enough top-flight scientists to build our research capacity.
Senior research staff and valuable post- doctoral research fellows are attracted to centres where high-quality work is done and having a reputation for that is invaluable, something that works for the likes of Stanford, Harvard, Princeton and MIT.
SFI’s strategy document presents the metrics to show that this is happening here. Its last strategy document, launched in 2004, set a target of recruiting 50 researchers or research teams. In fact, by 2008 it had convinced 103 senior researchers to move to Ireland.
Knowledge transfer is seen in the number of licences and patents and the number of company start-ups that arise. By the end of 2007 more than 250 patents had been filed by SFI-funded research groups, the document indicates. SFI will attempt to push this to 500 patent filings over the next five years. It also expects to see 1,000 invention disclosures, 40 money-earning technology licences and 30 start-ups based on local research discoveries.
The take-home message in the strategy document could also be translated to “steady as she goes” as Ireland moves closer to a smart economy.