Sir, – I read with some concern Dr Peter Gallagher and Dr Emma Teeling’s letter (July 3rd).
Having spent 30 years as an engineer and executive in the US, the last 20 of which in Silicon Valley, I am afraid the authors have fallen into the trap of correlating basic research in the sciences with commercial spin-outs. If this were true, then the Boston area (home to Harvard and MIT) would surely be leading the world in innovative start-ups, but having lived there for 10 years, I can tell you this is not the case. The reality is that commercial success is far more heavily correlated to applied sciences, such as engineering, rather than “pure” research.
Take Stanford as a case in point. Stanford’s critical role in fuelling Silicon Valley’s growth was planned by Fred Terman (an engineer) in the 1950s when he recognised that successful businesses needed not only new ideas, but also well-educated applied scientists to implement them. Forging a strong bond between academia, well-educated engineering graduates, businesses and venture capitalists created a unique environment that fundamentally changed the way companies were incubated. Suffice it to say that Stanford’s current president (John Hennessy) is himself an engineer and a founder and board member of numerous successful start-ups (MIPS Technologies, Google, Cisco and Atheros).
If I take my own area of specialisation, semiconductors, the gap between pure university research and commercialisation runs to about 15 years. An example is Intel’s most recent process technology, based on “FinFETs”. The technology was originally conceived in Berkeley by Chenming Hu in 1995 and finally reached production this year. This gap is typical, and in many cases there is no guarantee that commercialisation will happen near the source of innovation unless there is a strong engineering infrastructure to implement it. Facebook may have been founded in a Harvard dorm room, but my hometown of Menlo Park, California, rather than Cambridge, Massachusetts, is reaping the employment and taxation benefits of its worldwide headquarters.
To be clear, I am in favour of basic research, and Ireland has a fine history of excellent scholarship. However, given the current economic situation, a weighting of public investment toward the applied sciences is not only warranted but imperative if Ireland wants to create a successful knowledge-based economy. – Yours, etc,