Ireland Looks to Academe to Re-Ignite Its Economy

By Goldie Blumenstyk

Dublin

In an audio-research lab strewn with guitars, Dan Barry and his colleagues at the Dublin Institute of Technology fiddle with a computerized tool that can comb the Irish Traditional Music Archive and locate a jig by its tempo or other traits. An Irish company has already licensed the technology, and the researchers are hoping other companies will follow suit.

Across town, on University College Dublin's sprawling campus, Emmeline Hill, a rising-star geneticist, devotes one day a week to her own commercial venture, a year-old university start-up company called Equinome. It sells a blood test to locate the "speed gene" in thoroughbreds.

Now that the Celtic Tiger of the 1990s has been knocked on its back by the government's debt burden, and Ireland's national budget is in crisis, Irish universities are working harder than ever to produce dividends from their research.

Aided by 12 years of government investments, researchers like Mr. Barry and Ms. Hill are part of a movement to make Ireland a serious contributor to the world of international science and to shore up the foundation of the country's "smart economy."

As Europe considers whether Ireland's economic situation is precarious enough to require a bailout, the government and the public here—already waiting for returns on those investments—are eager for new companies, new employment opportunities, and new wealth, the faster the better.

The urgency is pervasive, prompting established academics at University College Dublin to huddle weekly in classes with venture capitalists and newly minted Ph.D.'s to strategize about start-ups and chase product-development grants and investors.

At the Dublin Institute of Technology, even the walls in the loo are plastered with posters encouraging faculty and students to become entrepreneurs with their ideas.

"There is pressure to create jobs. There is pressure to sign deals," says Pat Frain, director of NovaUCD, the technology-transfer center and incubator for spinoffs at University College Dublin that helped to create Equinome.

As a university employee in technology transfer, Mr. Frain was once a rarity in Ireland. No more. In 2007, Enterprise Ireland, the government's business-and-trade agency, pledged 30 million euros (about $41-million at current rates) to a five-year Technology Transfer Strengthening Initiative. It allowed his university, the technology institute, and eight other institutions to collectively add dozens of personnel to identify inventions for patenting and licensing, and to form new companies based on academic research.

Many of the research grants coming from the country's Higher Education Authority and from Science Foundation Ireland, the 10-year-old agency modeled on the U.S. National Science Foundation, now also favor projects designed to spur commercialization and university-industry partnerships.

"We're all becoming more commercially aware," says Noel E. O'Connor, an associate professor of electronic engineering at Dublin City University, a research-focused campus on the outskirts of the city where he helps to run a foundation-financed venture in computer science.

Useful Inventions

Among other ventures, an audio-research group at the Dublin Institute of Technology has created a technology to de-noise recordings. Hear the before and after:

Audio Before De-Noising Process

Audio After Techniques Used

Even venerable Trinity College Dublin, founded in 1592, is looking to build up its commercial activity, offering favorable terms on intellectual-property rights to faculty members who form start-up companies and instituting special classes on entrepreneurship for its Ph.D. candidates.

Universities recognize that they can't afford to have patentable ideas "sitting on a shelf like the Book of Kells," says James Callaghan, associate director of Trinity Research & Innovation, referring to the precious illuminated manuscript on display in Trinity's library.

A Rising Player

Ireland's push into tech transfer, like its rising profile as a player in international research, is a recent development.

Since 1998 the nation's public spending on academic research and facilities has grown twice as fast as the economy as a whole has, rising from about 400 million euros a year to about one billion euros, or about $1.4-billion, in 2008. (That was right before the budget crunch forced a cut of 15 percent, followed by a 4 percent cut the year after.)

The increased spending is noteworthy. But in relative terms, Ireland's universities are still hardly research giants. Consider that in 2008, the latest year for which figures were available, the research budgets of the country's seven biggest universities together with those of its 14 institutes of technology amounted to the equivalent of about $610-million, less than what the Johns Hopkins University or each of 15 other American research universities spent on research that year.

Size aside, says Patrick Cunningham, chief science adviser to the government and a professor of animal genetics at Trinity, Ireland's commitment to research spending, 65 percent of which passes through its universities and institutes, has produced results not only in the number of highly cited publications by Irish academics and in other traditional measures of scientific output, but also in the numbers of licenses and new spinoff companies that the universities report each year.

By the end of 2009, three years into the Enterprise Ireland tech-transfer program, participating institutions had more than doubled the number of inventions identified per year, more than tripled the number of licenses and options executed, and more than quadrupled the number of start-up companies formed on the basis of institutions' intellectual property. Relative to their levels of research support, in terms of those metrics Irish universities are comparable to their counterparts in the United States and the rest of Europe.

Enterprise Ireland deliberately does not track revenue from tech-transfer deals. Its intent for the technology-transfer program is not necessarily to raise funds for universities but to develop new Irish companies. So there is an emphasis here on getting deals done rather than extracting the most revenue from them.

New companies and invention ideas made a healthy showing last month at Enterprise Ireland's second annual Big Ideas Showcase, an all-day mixer for business people seeking research collaborators and academics seeking business partners.

Mr. Cunningham was among the hundreds attending the event. "If you had one 10 years ago, you would have had difficulty putting five companies together" to exhibit, he said, surveying the buzzing exhibit hall.

Still, for all the focus, money, and activity, government and university leaders here face some formidable challenges as they look to academe to ignite the economy.

One major obstacle is typical for small countries: Products and start-up companies need to be good enough to compete internationally, because Ireland alone, with a population of just 4.5 million, isn't a big enough market to keep them viable. Many companies and products now emerging from Irish universities don't meet that bar, says Ray Naughton, a co-founder of 4th Level Ventures, in Dublin, which invests in university start-ups. "That type of rigor is a big challenge for the universities that are under pressure from the government to produce jobs."

And even though Ireland's commercialization push is "still in its infancy," as Trinity's Mr. Callaghan puts it, some hurdles here aren't all that different from the ones that bedevil even the most established players in tech transfer in the United States, Britain, and Canada: finding venture capitalists to back early-stage ideas that come out of academic labs and, more fundamentally, satisfying short-term expectations with a long-term economic strategy.

On top of all that, Ireland's dire budget situation will require even steeper cuts in government spending for at least four more years, which could pose a test for higher education and the entire "smart economy" strategy.

Paying Dividends

From one of the sleek glass-and-steel buildings at Dublin City University, Mr. O'Connor, the computer scientist, says he is living proof that Ireland's approach is paying dividends in a way that an impatient public, "even my own parents," can understand.

He directs Dublin City's arm of a major computer-research institute known as Clarity, which comprises more than 100 researchers from several universities and disciplines plus representatives from corporations including Disney and IBM. Clarity is one of several well-supported Centers for Science Engineering and Technology that Science Foundation Ireland began establishing five years ago as the agency broadened its focus beyond basic research.

Clarity's computer scientists and chemists work side by side on cutting-edge problems of what's known as the "sensor web," analyzing information collected from devices that measure pictures, sound, or chemical properties.

Clarity has been more than a rich source of knowledge. Two years ago it also became a sort of R&D division for a Dublin City spinoff called Fairview Analytics. The company is developing an automated system for tracking cargo containers as they're trucked into and out of ports, adding information from images captured by remote cameras into a database. A prototype is being tested at a port in the south of Ireland.

Fairview's founder, Pat Flynn, happened upon Clarity while attending an earlier Big Ideas event in search of expertise. He engaged its researchers to develop the prototype with the aid of an "Innovation Partnership" grant from Enterprise Ireland, which pays for research collaborations between companies and universities.

Turning to a university for help is "not instinctive" for many people in business, says Mr. Flynn, but that's changing as they realize that the expertise is available. "Especially in Ireland today," he says "we can't afford to pay thousands of academics to do nonproductive work."

Ms. Hill's Equinome, at University College Dublin, is another example of a company aided by Ireland's years of research investments and other government programs.

Indeed, although horse racing was in her blood—her grandmother Charmian Hill was a legendary breeder and jockey—Ms. Hill credits many of the genomics breakthroughs that are the basis of her horse-blood testing to the support she received from Science Foundation Ireland. An introduction made via NovaUCD, the university incubator, also helped connect her with the business partner who is now managing director of her company.

Dublin Institute of Technology's Hothouse, an entrepreneurship and tech-transfer center, carries out some of the same kinds of spinoff and business-training programs that University College Dublin does. Hothouse lacks the plush amenities and deep pockets of NovaUCD, but Tom Flanagan, its CEO, says it has had commercial success—per dollar of research, it leads its peers in numbers of disclosures, licenses, and spinoffs—because it has the government's investments to exploit.

At the technology institute, Enterprise Ireland helped finance some of the audio-research group's work, which has been licensed to a company called Trezur. Same for the work of a materials lab that has produced technology for sound-dampening paint, which was licensed to an Irish company.

The Stokes Professorship programs of Science Foundation Ireland, which has helped Irish institutions recruit dozens of big-name academics over the past decade, has also done well for the Dublin institute. One of its Stokes professors created a technology for screening pictures of skin moles for signs of melanoma and another for evaluating the volatility of stocks. (Both innovations are based on digital-signal processing.) The institute has licensed them as well.

"Three years ago, there was nothing" being commercialized, says Mr. Flanagan.

Tough Times Ahead

Those investments, however, will take Ireland only so far. And along with concerns about things like the lack of venture capital, tech-transfer officials now worry that Ireland's shaky economic position puts them at a disadvantage in negotiating licensing terms and research contracts.

Some companies, particularly multinational corporations with operations employing tens of thousands of Irish workers, make demands for intellectual-property rights that they'd never try in the United States. "They say, Give us all the IP and in return we'll stay here," says Trinity's Mr. Callaghan, voicing a commonly heard complaint.

The government's focus on licenses and start-ups may also give short shrift to some important university-industry partnerships that won't result in a new product or a new company, such as the oil-industry-financed work on geological faults that is under way at University College Dublin, academics and tech-transfer officials say. Those relationships could lead to alternative sources of research revenue at a time when government funds are expected to be cut.

The potential for government cuts could affect not only the research but also the commercialization program.

Enterprise Ireland officials say they hope to renew the financing for the tech-transfer program at the end of its five years. But some university officials here worry, particularly in the current economic climate, that that's hardly guaranteed.

Still, institutions were cheered this fall when Enterprise Ireland pledged up to 250 million euros toward an investment fund that could create a new source of financing for academic start-ups.

The eventual size of this Innovation Fund Ireland won't be known until the end of November, the deadline for the venture-capital firms from around the globe to announce their commitments. News about the cuts in the overall government budget isn't expected until December.

Some universities are pursuing their own plans. In September, Dublin City, in collaboration with Arizona State University, held a meeting with 16 potential investors from the American Southwest, copying a model that Arizona State has used for several years. Trinity has made contact with alumni who live around Philadelphia and work in finance, and is hoping to tap into that network as a possible source of investment money for its spinoffs.

"When there was lots of research money floating around, no one was worrying about commercialization," says Mr. Callahan. Now, it seems, it's a rare academic official who isn't.