Teaching Matters/Danny O'Hare: Recently we have made great and very welcome strides in embracing research and development (R&D) activity in Ireland.

Recently we have made great and very welcome strides in embracing research and development (R&D) activity in Ireland. After many years of neglect, we are now playing catch-up in this vital area with unprecedented amounts of Government funding being poured into research in universities, particularly in the areas we have highlighted as being most critical to our future - biotechnology and information and computer technologies (ICT).

All this is essential, and we need to do much more of it. But we would be very wrong to think that this top-of-the-market, focused research is all our third-level institutions need to do. Our economic future will not depend only on a few headline industrial sectors; neither will it depend only on large companies or new start-ups.

To judge from the rhetoric that is flying around, we seem to have accepted that, in the future, research and development must be for everybody. Yet we have not yet shown ourselves ready to think this through, and to support the kind of research activity that small and medium-size enterprises need and can afford to get involved in.

By doing this we ignore a large part of our industrial base, especially that section of it that is indigenous. If we are serious about applying the recommendations of the Enterprise Strategy Group, we must broaden our approach.

How are the owners of a typical Irish-owned SME to react to the issue of R&D? As they hear the mantra that R&D is vital to their survival, their main concern is more likely to be that their resources are already overstretched by immediate day-to-day concerns. They may feel they are simply not big enough to afford a research director and support staff.

They are strengthened in this feeling, perhaps, if they are not within the two priority areas for R&D funding - ICT and biotechnology - and so they cannot readily obtain State support for their research needs.

In particular, they probably feel the kind of research third-level institutions tend to focus on has little to offer smaller, poorer companies. Instead, what they need are ideas that can be turned into competitive advantage in the marketplace within a comparatively short time.

The reality is that what these companies need is technology transfer. There is a vast amount of research results available internationally in the public domain. This resource could be developed to the benefit of Irish SMEs but instead it just lies there, unexploited.

The amount of available knowledge of this kind is growing all the time. Recent examples include:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US now require researchers funded by them to publish their research outcomes on the NIH website. They have done this so individuals and small companies who find it expensive to subscribe to learned journals can still access the research and benefit from it.

In January, IBM released 500 patents for use by open source programmers.

Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems has released more than 1,600 patents for open source exploitation as well as its Solaris 10 operating system.

I suggest we set out to develop the capability - or rather the processes - whereby the huge amount of research published and freely available to the public internationally is trawled and harvested and made available to our smaller companies.

In playing a part in such a process, our third-level institutions would be truly serving the needs of the small and medium-size companies that are largely bypassed by the way we currently approach research.

In Ireland, as elsewhere, the institutions concentrate - indeed they are fixated - on being involved in research programmes. They are too little focused on how to transfer new research ideas to companies for their benefit. (Let me stress that I am not suggesting active researchers themselves must undertake that task, though their advice would be important.)

What I envisage is that the higher education institutions should meet regionally and look at each company in the region, particularly SMEs, to identify the research areas which are of most relevance to those companies.

The results could be amalgamated into a database. Then, each distinct research area should be assigned to one institution which would be responsible for technology transfer to those companies in relation to that technology.

Such a programme could constitute a core responsibility for the institutes of technology, given their geographical spread and their closeness to local industries.

A scenario of this kind is fully consistent with the kind of restructuring at third-level recommended by the OECD. The universities would concentrate mainly on basic and applied research, the institutes of technology on applied research and technology transfer.

However, the system I am proposing would be unique internationally and as such would give Ireland a competitive edge. But, more fundamentally, it would give very many neglected companies, particularly those in the SME sector, the R&D capability they so desperately need to survive and develop.

Danny O'Hare is a former president of DCU