The Government must continue to spend on research to develop a knowledge-based economy and make Ireland a global centre for science, writes DICK AHLSTROM.
THE GOVERNMENT must sustain the current level of investment in scientific research if we are to maintain our economic standing. And we must become better at taking the results of research and translating them into commerce, according to the chief executive of Forfás.
Martin Cronin, who heads Ireland's national economic development authority and advisory board, takes an interesting slant on how we can win through to a knowledge-based economy.
It combines sustained State and private sector investment across the entire innovation process from schools through universities and into enterprise, he strongly believes.
And while people look to short-term financial gains from intellectual property and spin-out companies, the most important result of the investment will be the highly skilled people that result from this process.
"We have got to remain committed to investment in research. A start-stop approach will not do," Cronin argues. "It is really important to protect that spending."
It will raise standards right across education and improve the quality of the human capital output. It will also help us to "raise our game" across the entire continuum from school through university and on to post-graduate level. "It is the human capital that delivers the goods," he says.
"You have a lot of critical comment about the investments being made in research but I think they are based on the wrong assumptions. Some people question is it going into the right things, are we getting enough out of it or should we spend the money in other ways."
He has no doubts about this, however, given the spectacular performance of the Irish economy over the past decade and more. "The economy has been very successful over the last 15 years or so."
He puts this down to three factors, the high quality skills base, an attractive tax regime and a business environment that allows companies to react quickly and effectively to changes in the marketplace.
He also sees trouble on the way, however. We have become a high-wage economy, making it more difficult to compete. And there are emerging moderate income economies competing for investment that weren't even in the picture 10 years ago, he says.
Progress depends on sustained spending on the skills base through research and education and by improvements in the research infrastructure.
"The primary benefit of research investment is to produce people with world-class technical skills," he says. This effort also produces benefits such as intellectual property that can be licensed or used directly in spin-out companies, but these are not the most important outcome. "They are desirable but not the primary objective."
He points to the 1990s when the IDA worked hard to get foreign inward investment for research centres. "We had almost no success," says Cronin. He recollects a visit by an IBM executive in the 1990s who got the whole tour, met people, but concluded at the end of the day there was nothing here for him.
There have been significant changes since, largely because of research investments, Cronin says. "Last year, foreign companies committed to investing €400 million in Ireland doing what they wouldn't have even contemplated doing 10 years ago."
Changes are taking place but there is still a long way to go. "We have made a great start but it is only a start."
Greater efforts are required to bring discoveries out of the lab and apply them in business. "We have to build our focus on the translational space," he says.
Research groups including the Tyndall National Laboratory at University College Cork and the National Institute for Cellular Biotechnology at Dublin City University are involved in the translational process.