FAILURE TO build Ireland’s reputation abroad as a centre for high- quality scientific research will damage our ability to get high-tech companies to locate here. The ability to do world-class research has a direct impact on our capacity to win these projects, according to research funder Science Foundation Ireland.
The need to enhance this reputation is stressed in a new strategy document from the foundation, published today. The document, Powering the Smart Economy, maps out the foundation’s goals over the period 2009-2013.
The foundation has channelled more than €1 billion into third-level research centres here over the past nine years, and the document highlights the positive impacts of that investment.
It has allowed the country to achieve much greater respect abroad as a centre for world-class research, the document indicates. Maintaining and improving this reputation would in turn help Ireland achieve its goal of becoming a “smart economy”, one driven by innovation and scientific discovery, it says.
This is the latest in a series of strategic reviews undertaken by the foundation since it was established in 2000.
Not surprisingly, it closely tracks the ambitions presented last December in the Government’s research strategy document, Building Ireland’s Smart Economy: a Framework for Sustainable Economic Renewal.
With this in mind, the foundations document makes much of the need to build “an exemplary research, innovation and commercialisation system”, essential to building the smart economy. The document to be released this morning sets out a step-wise process needed to allow this “knowledge transfer” that will see new companies and jobs spin out from laboratory research.
The strategy outlines the need to build “human capital”, the trained students and academics who conduct research that leads to discoveries and provides the people needed to take up jobs in the high-tech sector.
These people must deliver “quality output”, the groundbreaking research discoveries that find their way into peer-reviewed journals and help to cement Ireland’s “global reputation” as a centre for advanced research, the strategy suggests.
Once these three factors are in place then knowledge transfer can take place, bringing research discoveries to market.
“The realisation of these interdependent objectives will deliver the basis for a prosperous and sustainable smart economy,” the strategy states.
Achieving these goals encouraged local company start-ups, but also demonstrated that Ireland had a research capacity attractive to multinationals, something that brought in foreign investment, the document indicated.
The foundation declared its intention to “maintain the momentum of the past five years” and “to firmly establish Ireland as a centre for excellent research”.
The strategy for the coming years “increases the emphasis on linkages between scientific excellence and economic impact”, it states.
