Mobile phone giant Nokia will invest €1 million (£787,564) in mobile technology research at the University of Limerick. The project, announced yesterday, is one of the biggest of its kind involving a multinational and could lead to a dedicated research facility on the campus. It marks the first major presence of the Finnish mobile phone firm in the State.

A Nokia team will work with 15 University of Limerick researchers, drawn from different faculties, on six projects.

Foreign sources account for only 3 per cent of research in third-level institutions, amounting to about £3.6 million annually, far behind other EU states.

Mr Sean Dorgan, chief executive of IDA Ireland, which is backing the project, said it was an example of where the State agency wanted Irish industry to go. "In some ways, we need to do in Ireland what Nokia has done as a corporation. We are going to transform ourselves as a really good production centre to being a knowledge-based, information driven society."

Nokia chose University of Limerick in the face of competition from seven universities in the US and Europe. The university has been in contact with Nokia since May 1999, delivering on one research project in that time.

Dr Roger Downer, the university president, said that although universities were traditionally slow to change, the environment of third-level education was changing dramatically. The college had developed a five-year plan to develop research activities.

Mr Mike Butler, a senior vice-president of Nokia, said customers needed to be able to rely on mobile phones more for communication needs. They had begun as voice communication devices, quickly moved on to text messaging and were now developing WAP services.

The company sold 128 million handsets last year.