State links research to private sector enterprise

There are mixed views about the direction being taken by State-funded research, with ongoing concerns about the close alignment between academic research and private sector enterprise.

The five research centres announced by the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation yesterday all have the compulsory linkage between companies and scientists.

The approach is designed to maximise the potential for job creation and company formation by ensuring that research undertaken by the third-level sector remains relevant to the needs and interests of enterprise.

The goal, says Science Foundation Ireland chief Mark Ferguson, is to ensure State-funded research delivers "excellence with impact".

It can be social rather than commercial impact, but impact it must have.

Certainly few would complain about the level of funding and the commitment to the policy by Government. These five centres join the seven that were announced in 2013, with the 12 having a combined six-year budget of €545 million.

The State covers two-thirds of this investment while company partners contribute one-third of the total budget. Many of the large multinational companies based here are participants but encouragingly about 30 per cent of the partners in the five centres are small- to medium-sized Irish enterprises.

The funding model is bound tightly to the Government's Action Plan for Jobs, something that clearly illustrates where the State is coming from – yes, we will pay for research but we also expect to see returns on the investment.

Leading research universities in the US all look to see how they can derive revenue from research findings, and jobs and companies are the consequence.

The large US universities are also able, however, to fund research that doesn’t have obvious and immediate potential for returns. This is blue skies research that helps to make discoveries that feed back into applied research.