UNIVERSITY-BASED research needs to involve commercial input from a much earlier point in the process, Irish Software Association (ISA) chairman Seán Baker told a meeting of researchers and software executives this week.
He also warned academic researchers that overvaluing intellectual property inhibited commercialisation.
Dr Baker, a co-founder of Iona Technologies, called for closer collaboration between universities and industry, stressing the need to focus on commercially viable projects rather than “curiosity-based” research. There was a need to show a tangible return on funds invested by the Government in RD to avoid a “knee-jerk reaction in today’s economic climate” that might threaten future funding.
He criticised the State’s current approach to driving innovation. “We don’t have a good handle on a strategy for RD. You can’t point to one place and find someone who owns the strategy.”
Speaking at an event to foster links between university-based emerging technologies and the entrepreneurial resources of industry and business, Dr Baker was critical of the “waterfall model” whereby money is poured into early-stage research in the hope that something commercial will come out downstream. “I just don’t think it works,” he said. “It’s inefficient. For me, to commercialise research, you have to have commercial input from the start.”
One of the biggest barriers to commercialisation, the difficult journey from laboratory to marketplace, centres on the ownership and value of intellectual property (IP), he said. Universities are often over-protective of their ideas and expect too much for them.
“The value of the initial IP in the software world is very small,” said Mr Baker. “The real value doesn’t come from code, it comes from the business. The vision [for a university] should not be to make lots of money from a few commercialisations, but to have many, and take a small amount from each.”
He said the most significant payback for a university would come from collaboration with firms that could grow up around the institution, creating clusters that could feed back into the university in a mutually beneficial relationship.
The main focus of the event was for research teams from DCU Invent, the innovation centre at Dublin City University, to showcase work to the 70 members of the ISA present. DCU Invent chief executive Richard Stokes said the centre has extensive links to multinationals, but needs to engage more with indigenous firms. “We’re here to say we’re open for business.”
The event featured demonstrations of ongoing research projects including tools for searching, analysing and indexing web-based video content, an image processing solution used for early cancer detection, modelling tools for computational science aimed at the healthcare sector, and assistive translation technologies.
The chief executive of Zignals, Pat Brazel, talked about how technology transfer from DCU was helping his business. The company has been exploring sentiment analysis tools that would search the web and the blogosphere for early indicators of potential stock market successes. The firm outsourced the development of the software to the multimedia and web sensor division in DCU.
He said the working relationship took time to come together, but a few false starts were outweighed by the advantages of having access to research. “There are massive capabilities among individuals at DCU that most indigenous companies couldn’t possible amass themselves,” he said. The project is expected to be completed by October.
The DCU research for Zignals was co-funded by Enterprise Ireland, which was on hand to explain a number of schemes businesses can use to finance innovation.
