Teaching Matters: A key problem Ireland faces is how to bridge the gap between third-level researchers who create new ideas and the entrepreneurs in industry who can develop them as commercial opportunities. Obviously, there is little point in a country investing large sums in third-level research if the fruit of that research just gathers dust on a library shelf.
An aspect of this problem is the sheer diversity of research work now being done at third level. To take the science and technology area alone, we have currently more than 5,000 active researchers spread across the island in our universities and institutes of technology. Leaving aside collaborative efforts, which are of course very important, this still represents an enormous number of individual silos of expertise.
How is a researcher to find an industrialist whose interests may coincide with his? A researcher's job is to do research, not to market his or her work. More to the point: how is an industrialist, particularly one running a small- or medium-size enterprise, to connect with the particular reservoir of academic expertise that could transform or add to the range of his product or processes or to introduce new products? Add the international dimension created by an increasingly globalised society, where a researcher and the potential business partner are often separated by national boundaries, and the size of the challenge becomes clear.
As in so many cases, the internet provides a possible answer. If all the relevant information can be brought together in a database (a task that is neither trivial nor inexpensive), the worldwide web provides anyone, anywhere in the world an easy way of accessing that information .
The first step in addressing the issue would seem to be to do just that. Happily, the first step has already been taken here in Ireland, thanks to a far-sighted collaboration between the Irish Universities' Association (IUA) and the cross-Border trade and business development body InterTrade Ireland. Since 2003 they have been creating a web portal at Expertiseireland.com in an ambitious development programme that is now virtually complete.
This as yet little-known portal is a virtual shop window for the scientific research that takes place in third-level institutions across the island. Without in any way compromising the autonomy of individual researchers or individual institutions, it gives them a single face to present to the outside world. This development is of particular importance to the small- and medium-size enterprises which until now have lacked the wherewithal to scale the walls of academe.
The main focus of the project is science and technology, but not exclusively so. There is also an opportunity here for the humanities (including business) to address their interface with their communities. Not all research in the humanities has possible commercial spin-offs, but some of it certainly does. The expertiseireland portal is an opportunity for a wide range of disciplines to get involved in the search for funding.
Having taken this first gigantic step, our priority now should be to build on it so that its full potential can be realised. It would be a tragedy, for instance, if the current sensitivities applying to cross-Border bodies were allowed to inhibit the future development of this worthy project.
How could it develop? Here are a few suggestions.
The portal, despite its focus on individual researchers, could also be a platform for increased collaboration across institutions. Much inter-university collaboration has been fostered in recent years by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and by the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions (PRTLI). Strengths have been identified and research groups have been financed and grown to large, and therefore viable sizes.
The lessons learned and being practised under SFI and PRTLI, which have been largely confined to areas such as biotechnology and information and computer technology, could usefully be replicated in a wider range of areas even without the financial incentives which these two successful programmes provide. This new portal provides the basis for such collaborations, if university academics were of a mind to do so.
Most important, perhaps, is that the portal lays a foundation to market Irish research expertise abroad in a coherent and co-ordinated way. We have had the example for many years of the success of the Stanford Research Institute - and of the Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina. Because they market the research expertise of academics in a professional way, they have grown large research facilities which are important earners of foreign finance and have also resulted in a build-up of research expertise and international reputation.
Why not establish an Irish Research Institute and pump it with some modest grants for, say, five years; thereafter it would be self-sustaining?
It is past time that the university sector got together to propose to Government the establishment of a world-class national research park on the model of the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. This was built on a collaboration by three major research universities and catapulted what was essentially an agricultural state to become a leading research and hi-tech area in the US. Its GNP rose dramatically as a result of the research park, and it now has one of the highest numbers of PhDs per 1,000 population in the country.
We too must take high-impact initiatives of this kind if we are to achieve leadership in the emerging knowledge-based economy.
Danny O'Hare is a former president of Dublin City University
