OPINION:Greater emphasis needs to be placed on research projects' relevance to industry, writes JOHN KELLY
A hard-hitting review of engineering research in Irish universities and its potential for making a contribution to economic development was recently published by the Irish Academy of Engineering. The figures show that in the four years from 2005 to 2009, the last government spent €1.35 billion of public funds on research in our universities, with 85 per cent allocated to the disciplines in sciences, 8 per cent to engineering and 7 per cent to other, mostly arts, disciplines.
If this level and pattern of expenditure is to be continued, it is surely necessary, in the current economic climate, that it is critically evaluated by Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn with regard to its contribution to the national economy. In particular, it is important to look at the output we would expect to get from such expenditure of taxpayers’ money.
The output from university-based research is largely threefold: First, there is the actual new knowledge it generates, which may lead to industrial innovation. In the case of basic scientific research, this is a slow burner, and on the very rare occasion when this happens, it takes many years to get to the stage where it appears in a new development. University research of any importance in the sciences and engineering is published in the international academic journals so that the output from such research in our universities is contributing to the international body of knowledge rather than specifically to the Irish domain.
Second, there is the contribution of research to the teaching in the university, which is the university’s most important function. Professors and lecturers in a university must be actively engaged in research in their disciplines if they are to be effective teachers.
While this of course applies to all disciplines, not just the sciences and engineering, it is of critical importance in these disciplines if students are to be inspired and are thereby enabled to be innovators in their employment after graduation.
Third, there are the researchers themselves who graduate with their PhDs or other higher degree and who have the potential to become a vital high-level force in the intellectual capital of the national industrial marketplace.
While the research output and the citations it gives rise to in international academic journals are important to the status of both the researcher and the university, the quality of the graduate output across all disciplines is far more important to the social and economic development of our country.
With the economic downturn of recent years, a key strategy of most countries to meet their struggling economies has been the promotion of industrial innovation, with the result that the focus of governments has turned to research in the university sector to deliver this innovation. For many years now, Irish universities and institutes of technology, like those in most other countries, have established incubator centres where enterprise start-ups arising from research are assisted to the stage where they can survive in the outside marketplace.
While these have been quite successful in our universities, with a small number of very successful enterprises, there has been no study here or elsewhere involving a cost-benefit analysis, which has quantified the effectiveness of the expenditure on research in generating enterprise development. Expenditure on university research is like the proverbial motherhood and apple tart; it is by definition a good thing and you don’t dare query it. Nevertheless, any evaluation of the research expenditure in the science and technology disciplines should consider primarily its effectiveness in turning out graduates who will be innovators in the industrial marketplace.
The availability of highly trained engineers in the Irish industrial marketplace is essential for the future economic development of the country, and research at both undergraduate and graduate levels is a vital component in their training. Craig Barrett, former chief executive and chairman of Intel, said at a recent lecture at the Royal Irish Academy that Ireland needs a system of education that values research and that encourages industrial spin-outs from that research, and that allows universities to be “wealth-creation centres”. Irish universities, he said, will have to change their ethos and practices in order to meet this challenge. His call has been echoed by others in the multinational and national industries in Ireland.
Engineers and scientists are potential key players in the business of wealth creation and enterprise development, but they are different people. Whereas scientists are concerned with the study of the universe and the discovery of how it works, engineers are involved in putting things together to make new things. Engineers are primarily innovators and scientists are discoverers and while scientists may sometimes make new things and engineers may discover how things work, these are not the prime roles of their disciplines.
Despite the overlap and confusion in terminology, engineering and science are quite distinct human endeavours. Research and development, it is sometimes said, is just another term for science and engineering.
There is need for changes in the structures and procedures of our universities and in the national funding agencies if the full potential of the engineering research in economic development is to be realised. In the schools of engineering, there should be greater interaction with industry in both education and research with the appointment of adjunct professors from industry and the establishment of an industrial liaison board in each engineering school.
Engineering research platforms should be established for a small number of national engineering priorities such as energy, nanotechnology, national physical infrastructure and environmental technology, so as to share the intellectual and physical resources across all Irish universities towards enterprise development in these selected engineering areas.
In the student undergraduate and graduate research projects, greater emphasis should be placed on their relevance to industry. With some four separate agencies providing public funds for research in science and technology, there would seem to be a case for their rationalisation into one agency.
The statutes of Science Foundation Ireland proscribe that it: “promote, develop and assist the carrying out of oriented basic research on strategic areas of scientific endeavour”, with the result that engineering research, which is generally applied, has been relegated to being a poor cousin of basic scientific research and has received little funding from the SFI.
This must be changed immediately so that applied research in either science or engineering will be supported. Maybe even its name should be changed to Science and Engineering Foundation Ireland?
Prof John Kelly is former dean of engineering and registrar emeritus at UCD