Industry driving new breed of research centre

By cementing closer ties between industry and academia, the State can sketch a roadmap to the much-heralded innovation economy

TWO YEARS ago Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland set the wheels in motion to foster industry-led research programmes that could bridge the gap between the laboratory and market, increasing the chance of turning good ideas into commercial opportunity.

Five of nine competence centres were launched last year, bringing academics and industry together to work on applied research projects. Two more have just been announced, confirming the new Government is as committed to the strategy as the last, although a paragraph in the programme for government effectively served notice on a name change – they are now called research centres rather than competence centres.

A further six are being considered, highlighting how the programme has assumed a key role in turning the beleaguered State into a hub for innovation, where commercialised research can hopefully play a part in dragging Ireland out of the economic mire.

An ambitious programme, it has inevitably run into cultural and financial challenges – cultural, because it is a new way of working for academic researchers; financial, because it needs investment and the State is broke.

The plan was to run the centres as autonomous units with their own chief executives but budget cuts meant that the first wave were located in the universities. However, the two new ones, focused on advanced manufacturing, revert to the original model. The Irish Centre for Manufacturing Research is based in Intel’s Dublin facility and the Innovation for Ireland’s Energy Efficiency Research Centre is in the DePuy Innovation Centre in Cork.

On secondment from Intel, Barry Kennedy is chief executive of both. He said research into advanced manufacturing only makes sense if it is conducted at the coalface.

“As an industrial group, it wasn’t going to work in a university. The kind of skillsets we require aren’t housed in any one institution in Ireland. Some capabilities are not here at all,” he said. “And we wanted to embed the research on the factory floor with technical experts who know what the challenges are. We wanted to do it closer to where the end product would find its use.”

The Intel and DePuy centres are test beds for research into improving energy efficiency on the factory floor. With the promise of huge cost savings, a number of blue-chip companies have already expressed interest in getting involved alongside Intel and DePuy.

“This is unique,” said Kennedy. “We’re leveraging the strategic advantages in Ireland of having so many world-leading companies in their fields, bringing them together to solve common challenges.”

Even his own role, moving between research centres owned by two different multinationals, suggests a remarkably open approach to tackling shared problems.

On the academic side, all Ireland’s universities will have some degree of involvement, but Kennedy leaves no doubt that industry is in charge. “Working in laboratories alone will not deliver what is needed. We recognised fairly early on that the academics really didn’t understand our challenges. They came back with some fantastic ideas but unfortunately they were solutions looking for a problem.”

Eyebrows were raised when it was suggested that they should come down to the factory floor, but, a year on, they are starting to see the benefits. “We are able to marry their expertise with our problems and jointly work together in driving a solution,” said Kennedy.

Jim Lawler, director for industrial technologies commercialisation in Enterprise Ireland, said it was not just the academics who were struggling with the model. In other centres, the companies at the helm have also found it difficult.

“They have to learn to assume the lead and make sure the research meets their business needs. They don’t always believe the academics will let them,” he said. “The biggest challenge is a culture change on both sides.”

Enterprise Ireland has been trying to improve the research synergy between academia and industry for many years, and has discovered a few pitfalls along the way. The need for ongoing dialogue is essential.

“At first, industry defined the area of research, threw it over the wall to the academics and waited for them to come back. Very quickly we learned that it was a recipe for disaster,” said Lawler. “They would meet after three months and discover they had gone off in totally different directions. By the time they got to the end of it they were talking totally different languages.”

The new centres have weekly conference calls and monthly on-site meetings. There is a more cohesive board structure with an appointed technology leader making sure the research is always aligned to the commercial need.

Lawler believes the model represents a significant breakthrough and expects the first commercialised outcomes to appear in a year. The composite material centre in the University of Limerick and the microelectronics centre at NUI Maynooth will be the first to deliver. Such has been the success of the programme that applicants for other funding schemes, like the commercialisation fund support for third level, are having to prove their worth.

“We are sending out a very strong message to academics that unless they have identified an industrial route to market, we are probably not going to fund them. It has to make sense for Ireland,” said Lawler.