The Government has earmarked a large amount of money to develop the research base in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) on the recommendations of the Foresight group. If we fail to build up our knowledge capital in this area, a prosperous future may not be in store for us all.
Given the pace of development in the computer industry, Ireland could be abandoned as a favoured location within five years, with multinationals writing off huge investments and moving on.
This ICT research base will be essential to sustain future multinational investment and a strong indigenous software industry. Many multinationals currently have Irish manufacturing operations, call centres, or lower-level software development units. However, few have R&D facilities for advanced software development. As Ireland's labour costs rise we will need to position ourselves in the value-added R&D sector to keep the multinationals here.
Perhaps more importantly, good R&D fundamentals are essential to the expansion of the indigenous software industry.
Ireland currently has a huge amount of talent in the ICT area. In the last 10 years many Irish academics have returned home, establishing a body of researchers who have international reputations in their respective fields.
Much of this talent has been naturally spun off into campus companies which are amongst the leading firms in indigenous technology start-ups. Many other companies have emerged from the talent built up in the industrial sector, a legacy we owe to the multinationals even when they leave.
In the last 20 years, many countries recognised deficits in their ICT knowledge capital and attempted to rectify this. For instance, in the 1980s the UK launched the Alvey Initiative which pumped a huge amount of money into IT research and Japan launched the Fifth Generation Computing initiative to develop its advanced IT.
In these initiatives there is always the choice between building monolithic, stand-alone institutes and funding smaller groups in their third-level institutions. In a previous article in this series Mr Brian Sweeney, the chair of the Foresight group, has pejoratively called the latter course "drip-feeding mini-research projects on a scatter-gun basis".
It is my belief that monolithic institutes very easily turn into white elephants which suck up large amounts of funding. In terms of success, the scatter gun will slay the elephant every time.
The Japanese have tended to opt for monolithic institutes and it has not proved successful. They are not a world power in software development and their research profile in computer science is quite poor.
Two years ago I visited several research institutes in Japan, housed in beautiful, large and expensive buildings. Notwithstanding the wonderful welcome I received, I always left these places thinking, `Nice building, shame about the research.'
In contrast, the scatter-gun approach used in France's INSERM units and the advanced research programmes of the US have been much more successful. This approach works on merit, selecting excellent researchers and funding them substantially to build larger groups which are reviewed every three to five years.
In the review, funding may be discontinued if the group does not continue to deliver the research goods. This strategy has the added benefit of spending more of the money on research than on bricks and mortar.
The stand-alone institute view is also predicated on a false assumption, namely that the indiscriminate tossing of large amounts of money at ICT research will attract leading foreign researchers and buy us the knowledge capital needed. Excellent researchers are more attracted by reputation than financial reward.
A money-fed, stand-alone institute will attract researchers from abroad but they will not be the best researchers. Only second-rate ones will take up posts in an institute with no reputation, because they are the ones without jobs. Reputation, not money, is the magnet.
Ireland's knowledge capital cannot be bought from abroad but must be grown from its current base of students, academics and industrial employees. If we build a reputation, then the other things we want will follow, such as the attraction of excellent foreign researchers and multinational R&D facilities.
Furthermore, such an institute would drain the research blood of the third-level sector, removing quality researchers from the task of educating our youth. There was uproar in the US recently when Microsoft started to buy up leading academics for its private research programme, because of the potential damage it would do to the education system.
Finally, there is a great irony in proposing a stand-alone ICT institute in this digital age when everyone is proposing virtual institutes. The funding of smaller research units could coalesce into a critical mass given a specialised broadband infrastructure, audio-visual facilities and other networking technology to support advanced information sharing.
Indeed, the establishment of such a virtual research institute would be an excellent flagship project to showcase Ireland's IT prowess.
Prof Mark Keane is the chair of the department of computer science at University College Dublin and director of the department's e-commerce research initiative, the Smart Media Institute.