When it comes to research, never mind the width - feel the quality

Comment: Ireland is at a critical phase of its economic and social development. We placed some shrewd bets as a nation several decades ago and these have paid off handsomely in terms of economic growth.

We now have to do it again and get it right in order to create and sustain the kind of future society most of us would wish to see.

In spite of our current success, there is a sense of unease in the air - Ireland has become a very expensive country and the recent series of announcements of closures and redundancies in what we consider "new" industries have had an unsettling effect.

There is, of course, no need for panic as closures and failures are part of life in many high-technology sectors, but it is also perhaps a timely warning to take stock and to think very carefully about what we are doing as a country. A standard response is that we need to invest more in research and development to increase the qualifications of our workforce and enhance the added-value of activities carried out here. This is very true, but maybe not as simple as it seems.

To its credit, the Government has recognised the importance of investing in research and has allocated large funding for this purpose within the previous and new national development plans, beginning to reverse years of under-investment in our research and innovation system.

Again, this is all good, but there seems to be a dangerous assumption in some political and policy circles that simply spending money on research is enough: terms like developing or having achieved "world-class" research are used liberally but it is not at all clear that those using them really understand what they mean. We have to be much more clever than simply spending money because the simple truth is that it is quite easy to waste money in research - to spend a lot and to see very little in return.

The question is how do we ensure that we get real value and return from our research-based investment in building the knowledge economy?

There are many parts to this but a good start is to appreciate the nature and scale of the challenge. We must do research that is right for Ireland's future in the broadest sense (whether in humanities, social studies, engineering or sciences) and we must ensure that as much as possible of this research is at a serious, competitive international level.

Research at this level is global in scale and fiercely competitive. Increasingly it is recognised that it is best done in a university setting. For example, traditional large corporate research centres are more and more giving way to strategic alliances between these industries and carefully chosen top-level universities.

Resources such as laboratories and facilities are important but research is fundamentally about people - scarce, highly creative people. In some disciplines the best researchers work in a rather solitary way but are nevertheless highly influential (for example in the policy arena), whereas in other areas such as in science and engineering they tend to become research leaders who build up teams of research students, transfer new knowledge outside through PhD graduates as well as stimulating start-up companies and achieving world-level recognition for the quality of their work.

How many of these people do we have in Ireland? How good are they? What is their standing inter-nationally? What areas do they work in? What is their age/career profile? What disciplines are strong/weak and where?

There are good grounds for believing that we really do not know this basic information in any kind of organised way. It is actually not easy to assess good quality research but, unfortunately, it is often too easy to dress up poor quality research and "sell" it to the uninformed, which should be recognised as a potentially dangerous situation if our national future really depends on research.

Nevertheless an objective assessment of research quality, while perhaps never perfect, can be done - serious researchers recognise and appreciate each others' work and will contribute to a proper process for quality evaluation. For example, the establishment of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) was a real breakthrough in strengthening the research quality culture in Ireland and shows how this can be achieved at the level of assessing proposals in the specific sectors addressed by SFI. However, we now need to go much beyond this.

It is time to set up a serious independent national system, such as a Research Quality Agency, to measure research quality in Ireland, at the level of the individual or disciplinary unit, taking due account of resources and the historical under-investment as well as different career phases in the case of individuals. Not just universities but any organisation in which research plays an important role in its mission could be assessed.

The process must be fully independent of university administrations or government agencies, and operate in a thorough, objective and fair way to the highest international standards involving a significant element of peer review at the subject or discipline level. It will not be cheap, but on the scale of what we are about to spend on research, a well-organised process of this kind will turn out to be a very good investment.

It may also be unpopular and resisted by some in the academic sector. Indeed, it is important that the process should be well-designed and operated to gain the confidence of those performing well within the research community. The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the UK is an obvious example close to hand, but it had some recognised flaws. While the RAE will not be continued, it has perhaps served its initial purpose and has had a powerful effect in calibrating and focusing the research landscape in the UK.

We should therefore learn from best practice internationally and devise and implement a system of research quality assessment suited to Irish needs. This will provide a firm foundation on which to plan and build, and will more strongly embed a culture of international-level excellence into our research system.

It is urgent that we find the will to do this now to underpin the continuation of our recent success as a country, the fruits of those good bets placed all those years ago.

Tom Brazil is professor of electronic engineering at UCD.