Irish universities fail to exploit research options: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2006/12/10 > Irish universities fail to exploit research options

Irish universities fail to exploit research options
Sunday, December 10, 2006 - By Ken Griffin
The admission comes after a Sunday Business Post survey found that Irish universities had obtained just 163 patents in major world markets since 1996. By comparison, the University of Bristol, a British institution with 13,000 students, filed 134 patents, while world research leader MIT secured 1,104 in that time, according to the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s patent database.

Patents are a key form of intellectual property, which confer on their holders the exclusive right commercially to exploit and license an invention for up to 20 years.

State funding for university research projects rose from €27 million in 1997 to €430 million in 2003, but, according to Conor O’Carroll, assistant director for research policy at the IUA, little of this funding was spent on commercialising the outcome of that research. ‘‘The resourcing of technology transfer [commercialising] in universities has been minuscule,” he said.

O’Carroll said that universities and organisations such as Enterprise Ireland were only now receiving adequate funding for the commercial exploitation.

‘‘Our record hasn’t been brilliant but, five years ago, you could have said our research record wasn’t brilliant either,” he said.

‘‘There’s been a big difference in the last six months in this field in all the universities. New people have been recruited and new technology transfer groups have been formed.”

However, Jim Lawler, director of industrial technologies commercialisation at Enterprise Ireland, said that, although the situation was improving, the number of inventions being commercialised was still lower than his organisation would like.

‘‘We need to get a better return on publicly-funded research,” he said. Lawler said that many academics and researchers were still unaware of the commercial value of their work.

‘‘In a lot of cases, they don’t know the market well enough to commercialise it, which takes a lot of time and effort. So Enterprise Ireland needs to help them to do it.”

However, NUI Galway’s director of technology transfer, Daniel O’Mahony, said that universities were becoming more aware of the commercial benefits of their work.

He said the university planned to file 30 patents in the near future. ‘‘We’re certainly making progress. In terms of patents, for every €1 million spent on research, we are now comparable to the leading universities in Britain and Europe,” he said.