Research and Innovation: A Middle Ground

I largely agreed with Donnelly (except his sweeping “excellent” for current research).

I would argue, though, that
1. This is not the time to start new research funding. (Note that the major new SFI initiative is in energy, i.e., my specialisation.) These times call for consolidation rather than expansion.
2. It is wrong to cut research funding of successful programmes, because that would quickly destroy what was painstakingly build up and ruin our reputation as a destination for talented researchers.
3. It is right to cut the research funding of unsuccessful programmes.

I would be surprised if we could not cut 20% of public R&D while improving the average quality of research. Unfortunately, this cannot be done quickly as the lack of monitoring implies that we do not know who is excellent (apart from ourselves, of course) and who is not.

“No matter in what form the State supports innovation it is doomed to failure if the target companies have little interest in innovation. ”

Presumably, this is also true for the public sector…
And the construction industry, housing standards etc..
And.. the banking sector too…

Al

I agree with Declan Jordan’s comments. It is indeed encouraging to see that somone engaged in scientific research is able to put so much in perspective.

Too many of those involved in research continue the mythology that the main basis on which Ireland will become a wealthy economy is through funding in basic research.

Pof Donnelly correctly makes the point that basic research is only in rare cases a driver of innovation. Others pushing the research agenda miss this important point.

Prof Donnelly also correctly identifies the crucial fact that unless we have enough companies wiht the ambition and capability to manage innovation we will not achieve what we want.

In this context, the comment about indigenous industry is correct. Despite significant state spending since 1995 on R&D and other programmes, the export performance of our indigenous companies has been very poor.

We badly need a new approach to innovation policy. The signs are that the thinking in Government is wedded to the erroneous notion that more spending on basic research will do the business.

Indigenous industry is not good at innovation as Prof Donnelly says.

The question is can we do anything about this?

I believe we can and the first port of call is to deal with the grant mentality where many SMEs put more effort into learning how to work the system than in being strategic about the future. A problem with grant systems is that the agencies who disburse them set themselves targets for the number issued and a common result is that the quality of the R&D projects falls.

We do need a more company centred approach where SMEs that have the ambition and leadership to become competent at identifying, evaluating and developing world class products or services are helped to become very good at managing innovation.

Where this has been done, SMEs have developed world class products and with this capability, they are much more likely to approach colleges to help with technology development or technology integration where this is necessary to get the end result customers want.

Finally, we must improve the innovation performance of the cohort of indigenous firms that have the ambition and leadership to be world class, simply because many of our FDI companies are operations arms of foreign corporates who do not have the strategic permission to do any more than improve operations productivity (process innovation).