The next frontier in inward investment: corporate R&D

Frank Gannon: back in Ireland, and looking to capture the corporate dollar.

Over the next five years, 12 university-based research groups will share just over €60 million, while one group, based at Dublin City University, has scooped almost €17 million to work on next generation software localisation technologies, based on machine translation.

The structure of the groups receiving support and the research themes they are pursuing, all reflect the strongly applied bent that has been at the core of SFI’s strategy since its inception.

Established in the wake of a technology foresight exercise, the agency is pumping around €150 million a year into university-based research in Ireland, particularly into the disciplines underpinning IT and biotechnology, and it has encouraged the participation of large numbers of Irish and multinational firms operating in these areas.

IBM, Microsoft, Pfizer, Genzyme, Warwick Effect Polymers, Boston Scientific, Medtronic, Eli Lilly, Merck Sharpe & Dohme, Intel, Alcatel-Lucent, GlaxoSmithKline, and Roche are among the overseas firms collaborating in the newly funded research projects, which are exploring areas ranging from digital signal processing, nanotechnology, photonics, and materials science to biomaterials, drug delivery, solid state pharmaceuticals research, reproductive biology and immunology.

Capturing the corporate research dollar

Many of them already have a manufacturing presence in Ireland but, for the most part, their involvement in research has been limited to process development, rather than the kind of work that leads to genuine innovation. Capturing more corporate research dollars is now at the heart of Ireland’s foreign direct investment strategy, and SFI is seeding the ground by encouraging early interaction between their clients and industry.

The agency’s core mandate will shortly expand to include environmental and energy research, a change the Green party negotiated as part of its agreement to enter Fianna Fail’s coalition government last summer.

But its overarching mission, to contribute to Ireland's economic development, is unaltered. And its modus operandi, to subject all proposals to international peer review, is similarly set in stone.

Choosing on the basis of excellence

The new director general, Frank Gannon, took up his post in July, but had actually been involved in advisory capacity in the formation of the agency. The grant-giving system that has been put in place at SFI is “fantastically robust”, he says. “It shouldn't be underestimated how difficult it is to create a selection process, a peer review process, a way of dealing with all the applications such that you're only choosing on the basis of excellence. Small countries have great difficulties in this traditionally, it's not just Ireland,” he said in an interview with Science|Business.

Gannon returned to Ireland after more than a dozen years in Heidelberg, Germany, where he doubled up as executive director of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the body established in 1964 to promote molecular biology in Europe, and as a senior scientist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).

His research team, which focused on the role of estrogen receptor signalling in breast cancer, is now winding down its activity, but its work has contributed to the formation of an EMBL spinout, Elara Pharmaceuticals, which is developing drugs in several cancer indications.

Even for a scientist, Sligo-born Gannon's career has been more peripatetic than most. After studying biochemistry at the National University of Ireland, Galway, he completed a PhD in enzymology at Leicester University in the UK and did a postdoctoral stint at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the US before landing a “permanent and pensionable” post at the Inserm medical research institute in Strasbourg, France.

He returned to NUI Galway in 1981, which he says, “career wise an unorthodox move, let me put it that way, because there was nothing happening there”. He spent more than a decade in the west of Ireland – where his heart lies – before departing for Heidelberg.

Now 60, Gannon says his commitment to Ireland – and his inability to see himself growing old in Germany – have motivated his return home. So while his current brief is focused on developing the science base in Ireland, the vision informing that task is strongly international.

It’s not the number of papers

Although Europe's research funding continues to lag that of the US and Japan, quality is more significant a problem than quantity, he suggests. “It's not the number of papers, it’s the quality of the papers. There are huge numbers of papers that are literally not very worthwhile reports – and Europe tends to do more of those.”

US researchers, in contrast, publish a greater amount of high-impact papers. That is why the US is better positioned to capture the economic value arising from research than Europe. “They are at the edge of more things than the Europeans,” Gannon believes. Europe's research culture has to take some of the blame. “I think a lot of European research has been carried out in a pretty cosy manner,” he says.

Encouraging scientific entrepreneurs is also something that Europe falls down on. “Some people are entrepreneurs and others aren’t – that’s just the way we all are. Those who are will inevitably be entrepreneurial in whatever mode they are in.”

What we have to do, and what we haven't done well enough yet, is to give enough models such that those who are tempted to behave in an entrepreneurial way will do it."

Gannon claims that the tide is beginning to turn and the quality of research being carried out in Ireland is beginning to be reflected in international rankings. He cites a recent analysis published in the German publication Lab Times that ranks Ireland second in Europe, behind Switzerland, in citations per paper in immunology. Overall, he says, Ireland has a mid-table ranking in the European research league.

For Gannon, Switzerland, an “incredibly efficient economy” with “excellent science and excellent business”, is the obvious role model.

Even to begin to start emulating it, Ireland will have to ramp up the scale of its research activity significantly. The government’s science strategy calls for a doubling of PhDs between 2005 and 2013, and the creation of an additional 350 research groups, 240 of which will be funded by SFI. “I really believe that more of what we're doing is going in the right direction,” says Gannon.