Tánaiste announces €56m for industry-led research

TÁNAISTE Mary Coughlan has announced a €56 million investment in industry-led research with the launch of nine Competence Centres.

A mix of multinationals and small and medium-sized indigenous firms will be directly involved in nine centres designed to bridge the difficult gap between the laboratory and the market place.

Five of the centres are already under way, specialising in bioenergy and biorefining, IT innovation, applied nanotechnology, composite materials and microelectronics. Centres are also planned for manufacturing productivity, energy efficiency, financial services and e-learning.

Each centre will be based in one of the State’s universities, supported by higher education institutes.

Ms Coughlan said the new programme was about converting RD into new products and services, “where the net gain will be more and better jobs”.

The Tánaiste talked of a “departure from the traditional approach to RD in favour of a collaborative system” where competing companies pool resources to share knowledge, risk and rewards.

Typical of the new approach is collaboration between Xilinx, Irish firm S3 in the microelectronics competence centre located in the Tyndall Institute, University College Cork.

Coming together to work on composite materials in University College Dublin are aircraft manufacturer Bombardier and Irish SME ÉireComposites.

The investment will be delivered in two waves, with €32 million allocated to the first five and a further €24 million over the next five years across all nine. Successful participants were consortiums which responded to an advert inviting proposals.

Similar models have been running for decades in other European countries like Austria, Denmark and Sweden. “We had to adapt it to Ireland because we are unusual in the number of multinationals we have working alongside the indigenous sector,” said Martin Lyes, divisional manager, research and innovation, Enterprise Ireland.

The original plan was to run the centres as autonomous units with their own chief executives, but budget cuts mean they will now be located within the universities.

The competence centre programme is jointly run by Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland, a sign of things to come as the Innovation Task Force report – published today – is expected to recommend some consolidation among State agencies involved in research, including Science Foundation Ireland.

Targets have been set for the centres which are expected within five years to have produced at least 80 pieces of commercially viable intellectual property, to have more than 60 engineers and scientists directly employed and working on industrially relevant research and to have achieved active collaboration with a wider community of 180 companies.