Engineering Research in Irish Economic Development
SUMMARY & KEY RECOMMENDATIONS
IRISH ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING
1. SUMMARY & KEY RECOMMENDATIONS
Context
The primary objectives of the Irish Academy of Engineering in producing this paper are to:
■ Facilitate more effective commercialisation of Engineering Research with a view to job creation.
■ Highlight the importance of Applied Engineering Research to the Irish economy.
■ Promote the idea that academically based Engineering Research should be directly linked to the development aims of industry in Ireland.
■ Encourage stronger links between Irish Schools of Engineering, with a view to avoiding duplication and fragmentation of research programmes, and to developing critical mass in key research areas.
■ Focus on the need to modify and develop engineering education and research to reflect the current and future needs of the economy, by fostering a more innovative and entrepreneurial culture among high-calibre, wellqualified engineers.
Key recommendations
Engineering Research
■ Engineering Research in Irish universities should be directly related to innovation in industry in Ireland.
■ The structures and procedures governing Engineering Research should foster greater collaboration between universities, research institutes and institutes of technology, through the establishment of Engineering Research Platforms in selected topics of national importance, with a focus on industrial innovation.
■ Universities should work together in reviewing intellectual property procedures, in order to optimise collaboration with industry and to facilitate start-ups from research.
■ Universities should expand the role of their innovation centres so that they reach inwards into undergraduate and postgraduate research laboratories, providing encouragement and business advice to potential entrepreneurs, and reach outwards to secure support from high-tech personnel in Irish industry.
■ Each university should establish an Entrepreneur-inResidence position in its engineering school; this adjunct appointee would have a broad responsibility in stimulating and supporting the development of an entrepreneurial spirit across the university.
■ Irish universities should pool intellectual capital to achieve the critical mass required both for enterprise development and to attract venture capital.
Engineering Education
■ Engineering Schools should take responsibility for the education of wealth-creating graduates, through the development and inclusion of taught modules in entrepreneurship in both undergraduate and PhD curricula, as well as industry-related projects for undergraduate students.
■ Engineers from industry should be involved in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and research supervision, and appointed to adjunct positions within the Engineering Schools.
■ An engineering doctorate (DEng) should be established for engineering researchers employed in industry.
■ The engineering undergraduate curricula should be modified to encourage and support students taking a professional experience year for a supervised industrial placement, with academic recognition.
■ Engineering Schools should continue to seek to attract more high-calibre foreign students to their masters and PhD programmes.
Research Funding Agencies
■ A single national agency for the funding of science and Engineering Research should be established.
■ The statutes of SFI should be modified to include an applied research component in its funding mandate.
■ Greater recognition in funding criteria and assessment procedures should be given to Engineering Research projects with direct industrial relevance.
Irish Industry
■ Arrangements should be made for industries from related sectors to support university-based Engineering Research with advice and funding that is eligible for tax relief.
■ An ethos of greater industrial involvement with university Engineering Schools should be developed in teaching and research, through membership of industry boards in Engineering Schools/Departments, and through the employment of students as engineering interns.
IRISH ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING
2. INTRODUCTION
The current global recession is the most severe since the ‘Great Depression’ of the 1930s, with the world’s leading economies facing years of adjustment to reduce public debt. The International Monetary Fund estimates that debt adjustment in Europe could take up to 15 years, which will make economic recovery slow and painful. In Ireland, the recession has been exacerbated by the collapse of an enormous property bubble requiring a rescue of the banking sector, which has further increased public indebtedness.
Over the past two decades, the success of the Irish economy has depended on annual exports of approximately 80% of GDP. These exports, mainly to the US and Europe, came principally from high-tech, multinational companies who had invested here: for example, chemicals including medical and pharmaceutical products accounted for 51% of exports in 2008.
The future, however, is likely to be different and certainly far more challenging. At a time when we appear to have lost our competitive edge, our previously successful economic model of low corporate tax rates, coupled with an educated workforce, is being replicated by many emerging economies. In developing a national strategy to support our recovery from the current recession, the Academy believes that there is no alternative to growth based on industrial enterprise, and that this can be best achieved through innovative and advanced technologies. Ireland has certainly been successful in attracting hightech industries. However, with a few exceptions, their main activities have been in manufacturing rather than in research, which is primarily retained in the multinational company’s home country. Manufacturing industry is always vulnerable to relocation to lower-cost countries. Furthermore, with only 8% of Irish exports coming from indigenous Irish industries, this vulnerability must be the compelling impetus for research-based industrial innovation. High-tech manufacturing is an essential element of recovery from the current recession and, for this reason, the Academy believes that the wealth-
creating potential of Applied Engineering Research, undertaken in the Irish universities and institutes of technology, and in active collaboration with Irish industry, must be given a higher priority than it is currently accorded.
The Academy proposes that the overriding criterion for the Government’s research funding should be the impact of the research on the economy, in the short to medium term. It believes, too, that investment in high-quality, basic scientific research is important and must be maintained, while acknowledging that the associated outcomes, in terms of impact on the economy, are unpredictable and may not be realised for many years. Accordingly, the Academy proposes that there is now a compelling case for a national strategy for greater investment in Engineering Research, where that research is directly or indirectly relevant to industry, and that this strategy would complement, but not diminish, State support for basic scientific research.
Improved funding of Engineering Research will require urgent development of appropriate metrics for the evaluation of associated research proposals and subsequent research outputs. The UK Royal Academy of Engineering recently criticised the Office of the Director General, Science & Research for “its single-minded use of metrics, especially citation analyses, to determine the relative performance of UK research across the disciplines ”, saying that “engineering and technology are far too important to the economy to be compared with basic sciences in an inappropriate way ”. This Academy believes that this criticism applies equally well to the Irish situation. A similar view was expressed in the report of the Innovation Task Force,1 which called for more meaningful metrics to measure the performance of research in our universities. It is increasingly evident that future economic success in Ireland will be dependent on our ability to grow indigenous sectors of the economy, such as high-value food exports, biomedical products or even education services which are currently Australia’s third biggest
export earner. Within the high-tech sector, it is now generally accepted that in order to continue to attract foreign investment, to facilitate indigenous start-ups and to retain and expand existing high-tech manufacturing, the emphasis must shift to research and developmentbased manufacturing.
The views in this paper strongly echo many of those expressed in the recent report of the Innovation Task Force, in particular those relating to the need to change our education system, so that entrepreneurial skills are actively fostered at second, third and fourth levels. If we are to continue to produce engineers of the highest international standards, then the much-publicised problems with maths education in our schools must also be urgently addressed. The Academy was recently informed that the Irish operations of a major high-tech multinational company lost out to Romania in a bid for a new research laboratory with 400 jobs, because of better availability there of high-calibre engineers; another indigenous engineering company was forced to recruit its last eight engineers from overseas.
At a recent lecture to the Royal Irish Academy, Craig Barrett, former Intel CEO and Chairman, said that Ireland needs a system of education that values research, that encourages spin-outs from that research, and that allows universities to be “ wealth-creation centres ”. “Ireland’s universities”, he says, “will have to change their ethos and practices in order to meet this challenge”
In a recent Irish Times article, Martin Murphy, CEO of Hewlett Packard (Ireland), referred to the highly-skilled graduates who drove the economy in the 1980s and 1990s, but reported that “...what we are not now seeing is an emerging workforce that is fit for purpose, whose talents have been honed, primed for innovation and creativity, and that has the necessary language and technical skills to drive this economy into the 2020s”
At the OECD 2010 Conference in Paris, it was emphasised that higher education can play a critical role in helping countries to recover from the global recession. “Higher
IRISH ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING
education must think more creatively,” said Dr Jamil Salmi, World Bank Post-Secondary Co-ordinator. “It’s not about doing more with less, it’s about doing it differently and innovatively.”
In this paper, the Irish Academy of Engineering seeks to address these issues. In particular, it explores how Applied Engineering Research could play a much more significant role in contributing to Irish economic development than it has in the past. This paper identifies and considers the three principal sectors that control the performance of Engineering Research:
■ the universities,
■ the research funding agencies; and, ■ Irish industry.
The paper examines how strategic changes in the structures and procedures in each of these sectors, and across the spectrum as a whole, would enable Engineering Research to make a greater contribution to Ireland’s economy. While the discussion relates principally to the university sector, much of it applies equally well to the institutes of technology.
higher postgraduate degree and/or primarily on the basis of criteria developed for the basic sciences (e.g., refereed publications, citations, funding track record) will undoubtedly continue, but it should no longer be the norm. Schools of engineering should be encouraged and supported in recruiting highly qualified engineers from industry. It is further recommended that each school of engineering should appoint senior persons from industry as adjunct professors, with specific, appropriate responsibilities in both teaching and research. As an introduction to the engineering profession, first-year students should have a lecture programme given by practising engineers from industry.
■ A professional experience year, which allows engineering students to take a full year away from university to pursue a professional internship in industry, has been seen elsewhere to have had substantial developmental benefits for engineering students. The Academy recommends that the Engineering Schools should consider introducing this option for students before their final year, and that this period should be properly resourced and structured, and receive academic recognition. Tax breaks should be provided to support companies in hiring such students.
■ Engineering Schoolsshould be further encouraged to attract high-calibre foreign students to their masters and PhD programmes. These students should be seen not just as a source of revenue but also as potential future entrepreneurs in Ireland.
3.4 Engineering Schools: links to industry
The Engineering Schools have a unique and extensive source of potential support in the professional engineering and industrial domains in Ireland, and this fertile area should be developed to yield greater interaction and collaboration than currently exists. Ireland is the envy of other European countries in that it hosts a cluster of the world’s leading engineering companies, offering the Engineering Schoolsa valuable, but largely underexploited, opportunity for interactive research and industrial innovation. The Academy has no doubt that the active involvement of senior engineers from high-tech Irish and multinational industries in teaching and research within Engineering Schools, at under- and postgraduate levels, will effect a vital change in the professional education of our students. The Academy believes that the rapidly evolving technological world demands a new breed of engineer and that the engineering
THE UNIVERSITIES
IRISH ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING
curricula and research ethos in Irish universities should reflect this new and evolving situation. Increased involvement of the engineering profession in the Engineering Schools will play a crucial role in the education of the entrepreneurial engineers required for industrial innovation and technological leadership in Irish industry. This new breed of engineer will also provide the internal entrepreneurship essential for high-tech companies in securing ongoing parent company investment in their Irish operations. The following innovations are proposed:
■ The Academy recommends that Engineering Schools should establish industrial liaison boards to provide advice on curriculum development and research philosophy and strategies. The practice of appointing industrialists as adjunct professors has been introduced in Irish universities in recent years and this should be systematically extended to each of the departments in the Engineering Schools.
■ A professional engineering doctorate –a DEng as distinct from a PhD –whereby the student undertakes the relevant research in an industrial engineering setting supported by university specialist laboratories and expertise, while under the joint supervision of industrial and academic staff members, is an interesting development, successfully introduced elsewhere, which should be established in Irish Engineering Schools. The rigorous academic criteria of scientific analyses, experimentation and discovery which apply to PhD programmes, apply equally to DEng studies, but the research typically has a stronger industrial flavour. The Academy believes that the major engineering companies would support this development and should be invited to participate in a pilot DEng programme.
■ The SFI-sponsored Centres for Science and Engineering Technology (CSETs, Section 3.2) are an encouraging development, through which more than 100 Irishbased companies are currently co-operating with university research teams. It is suggested that such cooperation should not be confined to Irish-based industries. In particular, it is recommended that greater efforts be made to establish research linkages with European and US engineering industries, following the model whereby the French company Airbus is currently supporting PhD students through a scheme funded by IRCSET.
THE RESEARCH FUNDING AGENCIES
IRISH ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING
4. THE RESEARCH FUNDING AGENCIES
As previously noted (Section 3.1), relative to the sciences, the Irish funding agencies receive proportionately smaller numbers of research applications from academic staff within the university Engineering Schools. The following observations and suggestions are made with a view to improving this situation:
■ Since its inception, and in accordance with its statutes, Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) has not been supportive of applied research in engineering. In its statutes, SFI is mandated to provide funding for “… oriented basic research in strategic areas of scientific endeavour that concerns the future development and competitiveness of industry and enterprise in the State”. Accordingly, the awarding criteria and grant assessment panels, as well as membership of the SFI Board and senior management, are all largely focused on supporting basic scientific research. It is recommended that the statutes of SFI be modified to include an applied research componentin its funding mandate.
■ In discussions for this paper, rationalisation of the number of Irish agencies funding research undertaken within the higher education sector has been widely and repeatedly proposed. Government support for research through the various existing agencies provides funds for a range of different, but related, research activities, principally including the remuneration of PhD students, the running costs of their research projects, and the engineering laboratory facilities and buildings in the university campuses. The Academy believes that for a more effective national programme for research in engineering and the sciences, these different funds should be managed by a single agency.
■ All research funding, whether classified as basic or applied, should be subject to rigorous assessment and evaluation, measuring the contributions of each funded project, based on the following outputs:
4 Publications
4 Actual or potential economic impact
4 Creation of intellectual capital
4 Collaboration with industry and other universities
4 Delivered outputs
The Academy further recommends that the detailed assessment and evaluation results, under these headings, for all successful applications for government funding should be made public on the agencies’ websites and publications.
IRISH ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING
5. INDUSTRY
Ireland lags behind other countries in the commercialisation of university research. The Academy believes that the creation of stronger links between Irish industry and the higher education sector is the essential and vital step in the commercialisation of the Engineering Research undertaken within our universities. The following proposals to improve this situation are suggested:
■ It is acknowledged that starting one’s own business from one’s research or ‘eureka’ idea is a very difficult and challenging process, with more failures than successes. National structures should be enhanced to provide both support and financial assistance to researchers who believe that their research has a real possibility for industrial innovation.
■ Successful foreign entrepreneurs should be attracted to Ireland by the IDA to assist in changing the current national negative mindset on research-based innovation.
■ There is a need to provide a new strategy to encourage engineering researchers to participate in start-ups, allowing them to forego temporarily the relative security of academic life for the uncertainties of an industrial venture. One model suggested is to provide tax incentives for researchers to spin out technology. In such activities, the Academy recommends that pathways be established to allow these researchers to re-enter the university world, thereby encouraging them to leave, set up a company, and subsequently return to university research.
■ The traffic in graduates and research outputs from our higher education institutes to the world outside has, for the most part, been one way, with the industrial sector playing no substantive role in determining the philosophy and practices that control the nature and qualities of these outputs. As previously outlined (Sections 3.2-3.4), the Academy believes that industry, and society generally, should have a much more interactive role in Irish higher education, and that robust procedures for accountability for research expenditure should be established. Without doubt, academic freedom must be maintained in the educational roles of our universities, but in Governmentfunded research, controls on both finance and the selection of priority topics should fall within nationally established boundaries.
■ Existing IDA and Enterprise Ireland programmes supporting industry clusters have been very successful. Industrial innovation within these clusters could be enhanced by improved collaboration with universitybased Engineering Research. This collaboration could take the form of competition between university consortia for industry-funded research projects. The Academy believes that this type of partnership would encourage student interaction with industry, increase the visibility and economic relevance of high-tech research, and provide a mechanism for highly-skilled researchers to participate productively with industry, while simultaneously maintaining their research and teaching activities.
■ Industry should be further encouraged, with tax incentives, to support university-based research. Additionally, a proportion of government grants to industry should be ring-fenced for collaboration with university research.