IRELAND IS more than capable of building a smart economy, but it will need two things - people and patience, the president of Stanford University has told a Dublin audience.
Dr John Hennessy said that Ireland must foster creativity and innovation among third-level researchers, but also have the patience to wait for the benefits to come.
Universities do not create innovation, they create the capacity for it to happen, said Dr Hennessy during an address yesterday to an audience at the US ambassador's residence in the Phoenix Park.
But once a discovery was made the host institution must allow the researcher the freedom to develop any commercial potential, he said.
"You do not transfer technology, you transfer people. It is people, people, people," he said yesterday during a talk that was hosted jointly by the Higher Education Authority and the embassy of the United States.
Governments and also the public at large had come to assume that the third-level sector would deliver discoveries and innovation, he said.
"This view of the university as a source of innovation . . . has grown significantly, in fact it is almost an expectation."
The view was not displaced because these institutions allowed researchers the time and resources to think "outside the box", he said. "They are adept at doing that, they have a long-term focus."
The best approach was to find "the best and the brightest", give them the means for conducting research in some new area and then "see where they take it".
While it could not be aimless research, attempting to plan it out too carefully would break down the "innovation environment", Dr Hennessy said.
Stanford graduates were behind two of the most successful start-up companies of recent times - Google and Cisco. When Google was being developed there were already successful companies in place ahead of them, but it succeeded because of its founders' "young, innocent spirit to try to go out and do it better . . ." Universities often had difficulties allowing those who make discoveries to take time away to commercialise their ideas, said Dr Hennessy.
And yet, as had been seen companies such as Google and Cisco, giving researchers this freedom could pay significant dividends, he told an audience which included university heads, senior education agency staff and civil servants.
Those funding the research also had to recognise that it could take time to bring a research discovery through to a commercial product, he stressed.
"The timeframe is five to 10 years between the beginning of a research project and a commercial result," he said. "You do need to have that kind of patience."
Other things needed are to complete the innovation "ecosystem", including the early research funding, good facilities and equipment to make the discoveries and then commercialisation support services.