Irish universities attracting little cash from big business

Irish academics attracted the smallest amounts of money from companies for carrying out research in a league of 30 countries, according to a study published today.

The "innovation index" showed that university-based researchers in the top-ranked country, South Korea, attracted on average €77,700 each from private sector investors. This was more than 10 times the amount of research funding brought in by researchers here, who on average attracted €6,600.

The study was carried out by London-based Times Higher Education (THE) magazine head of its World Academic Summit in October, which will discuss the relationship between big business and universities.

The Government has placed a huge emphasis on building links between companies and academic researchers. All of the new research centres being announced this year by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation must have a major participation by companies who act as research partners.

The top five countries were Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, South Africa and Belgium. The bottom five were the UK, Austria, Norway, Portugal and Ireland, in that order.

The survey used data on research funding from the world’s top 400 universities as assessed by the THE World University Rankings, said the publisher’s rankings editor, Phil Baty.

The survey did not include all universities in any given country, just a representative sample of the most successful institutions. It measured total research income from industrial and commercial sources and divided this among academic research staff, he said.

Strong links

The most successful countries all tended to have strong links between academic and private sector researchers, associated with major manufacturing activity such as automobile manufacture or other large manufacturing activity, Mr Baty said. “These universities were set up to respond to industry’s needs,” and tended to be highly focused on forging these links, he added.

For this reason countries such as China and India were found in the top 10, while apparently strongly innovative countries such as the US (14th) and Japan (16th) languished in the second tier. Others such as Germany (21st), Switzerland (22nd) and the UK (26th) only made the 21 to 30 bracket, the survey showed.

THE magazine said universities were increasingly looking to business for money to survive in an age of austerity.

The study measured the research income that hundreds of world-class institutions across the globe are receiving from industry. But it threw up differences when compared to THE’s list of the world’s best universities.

While India ranked the fifth most valuable country for attracting research money, its three universities don’t even make the top 200 in the overall world university rankings.

The survey applied a very simple method for calculating the apparent success of a country in attracting industrial research investment, and did not attempt to dissect the research categories. For this reason it is a relatively crude measure and can be of only limited value in assessing a country’s engagement between business and academia.

Success in the survey is more a function of having a large manufacturing base available which would generate activity, or else good research activity in a “near-to-market” research sector such as healthcare, the IT sector and similar areas.

None of the world’s leading research universities such as Cambridge, Oxford, MIT or Stanford are found in the top 20 most successful universities, as found by the survey.

The number one slot is held by Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland, US). The second is the Pohang University of Science and Technology (Pohang, South Korea).