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Science Foundation Ireland
SFI builds Ireland’s research base
Scientific research is not only central to economic development; it can also have an impact beyond commerce. We met Professor Mark Ferguson, Director General of Science Foundation Ireland and Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government of Ireland, at his Dublin office to discuss the SFI’s investment strategy and the wider importance of scientific research
The roots of commercial development can be found in research, with scientists developing the new ideas and knowledge that could drive future growth. Scientific researchers hold vast expertise and technical knowledge, which the commercial sector is keen to tap into as they work to develop new products and services.
The value of research is not measured purely in terms of the products it leads to though, and of course the results are by their very nature unforeseeable. While governments and funding agencies want to fund research that will have an impact, scientists still want the freedom to investigate fundamental questions.
As David Mitchell once memorably put it; ‘if all academic endeavour had been vetted in advance for practicality we wouldn’t have the aeroplane or the iPhone, just a better mammoth trap’. A mammoth trap may have been useful at one point, but fundamental research is behind much of the material prosperity we enjoy today.
As the Director General of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), Professor Mark Ferguson has long experience in both academia and commerce, which he’s now using to help build Ireland’s research infrastructure. We met Professor Ferguson at his Dublin office to discuss the SFIs investment strategy, and how scientific research supports economic growth.
Scientific research
EU Researcher: What types of research does SFI fund?
Professor Mark Ferguson: SFI is the major Government funding agency for science in Ireland, our budget is about €150 million per annum. We fund predominantly in three sectors; life sciences - otherwise known as biotechnology - ICT and energy. Those are the three main areas that we fund.
EUR: How did you identify those three areas? Are they areas where research can have the greatest commercial impact?
MF: When SFI was established around 2000 it was with a view to supporting areas of science that would be of maximum economic and societal benefit to Ireland, and those three areas were identified. We’re interested in funding excellent research with potential impact, and linking it up with companies.
There are a very large number of pharmaceutical companies in Ireland. Nearly all of them are in manufacturing, either biologics or small molecules.
We have a research centre called the Solid State Pharmaceutical
Centre (SSPC) which relates to that part of the industry. It’s really about questions in chemistry like how you crystallise molecules, how you can get continuous flow synthesis, how you can formulate different ingredients. It’s about research into the manufacturing of either biological materials or small molecules. That’s very important for the industry in Ireland.
Equally we have academic groups that are doing basic discovery about disease mechanisms and so on that could be of relevance to the research and development element of pharmaceutical companies. We are strongly encouraging those groups to win some of the outsourced projects that are coming from the pharmaceutical industry now, as it’s outsourcing more and more of its R & D.
EUR: Is this part of efforts to encourage closer links between academia and the commercial sector?
MF: We are keen to build good associations with industry, and we’re taking a multi-faceted approach to that.
Part of it is about joint research funding. So we announced recently that seven research centres would be established in Ireland, with funding of about €200 million from SFI and €100 million from industry, with about 150 industry partners involved. These seven centres relate to particular areas of excellence – Pharmaceutical Manufacture, Marine Energy, Materials Science and Nanotechnology, Photonics, Big Data Analytics, Pharmabiotics, Perinatal Health.
Another level of industry engagement is licensing, where people maybe have a patented technology and they license it to a company.
Another level of industry engagement is spin-off companies. There are spin-off companies in Ireland in the pharmaceutical, the ICT sector and the energy sectors. So it’s a question as to whether the technology is best exploited by an exchange, by a license, or by a spin-off company. All of those we encourage.
EUR: The Fraunhofer research institute recently announced that they will establish a branch in the UK. Is that something you would like to see in Ireland?
MF: We’re always open to partnerships. There are very few independent research institutes in Ireland. Currently the vast majority of research goes through the university sector.
I believe strongly in partnerships where people essentially share risk and reward, so if we were contemplating any kind of institute it would be in a partnership mode.
Research funding
EUR: How do you award funding and research grants? What are the key criteria?
MF: We award all our research grants through a competitive process. People write a grant application and it goes out for international peer review, both for scientific excellence and for potential impact. We define impact broadly as the employability of the researchers and whether the research is likely to lead to something that could be commercially useful.
Clearly you cannot precisely predict the results of research, but you can know something about the area and the international competition. We use only international reviewers which avoids any bias issues in a small country and keeps the standards high.
It’s very, very competitive, and funding success rates are of the order of about 15 per cent. That’s pretty much what they should be. Interestingly, in many countries they’ve dropped below that, in fact the US is much lower.
EUR: How does the Government react to those kinds of figures?
MF: The Irish Government have kept faith with science, despite the economic crisis.
There have been quite serious cuts in public services, but science has been spared the worst. Of course we’ve had some cuts, but not nearly like the order of cuts elsewhere.
That’s because the Government is convinced that funding science is important for economic prosperity, for high-value jobs, and for attracting and retaining industry.
You always have to explain the relevance of science, which is many-fold. It’s about producing trained people, linkages with companies, attracting them to Ireland and keeping them here, general educational awareness, it’s all those things.
It’s a little less direct than the more immediate things of attracting a company who will employ a certain number of people. But it is an important part of the economic eco-system, and so far the Government have been receptive to that message.
EUR: What is the role of public funding bodies in general then? Is it to fund exploratory research that maybe is struggling to attract private investment?
MF: My view is that public funding is not a substitute for private funding. Therefore all public funders should be prepared to take bigger risks than the private sector. Our remit is to fund cuttingedge stuff, potentially high-risk research, because if we don’t who else is? It’s also our remit to partner with various companies, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the research is either shortterm or very applied or in some way second rate.
A really good sweet spot for us is where a leading company knows that it needs to be associated with a particular cutting edge area of research that is quite high risk and that may or may not work. That company cannot justify spending 100 per cent of its shareholders money on that research, but it could justify spending a certain proportion, and we can make up the remainder. That’s a really interesting sweet-spot for academic-industrial collaboration, because it’s absolutely where the academics want to be, at the cutting edge.
EUR: What are the main goals set out in Agenda 2020?
MF: Agenda 2020 is our new strategy which we published in November 2012.
One of the first things I did when I got the job here was to put together a new strategy for SFI, and that evolved through discussions with the board then widespread consultation with the academic and industrial community, as well as with politicians and the general public.
Agenda 2020 has four basic aims. The first is that SFI will be the best science funding agency in the world at creating impact from excellent science. We’re not a big science funding agency – we only spend €150 million a year – but we can get the biggest bang for our buck.
There are many metrics that you can use to measure performance, such as academic metrics like citation indices. Ireland is currently rated number 20 for citations in all areas of science which is pretty good – we’re ranked number one in genomics, two in probiotics, and eight in materials sciences.
The science journal Nature do a global publishing index, and they talk about the countries that publish the most scientific papers that are likely to have an impact. They highlight five countries to watch, and Ireland is one of them.
Ireland has a population of only 4.5 million people and SFI has a limited budget, so we cannot do all areas of science well. Our research prioritisation strategy identifies approximately 14 areas – they’re quite broadly defined – where we will focus our investment. It doesn’t mean we won’t fund anything elsewhere, but the scale of the investment will be much lower. So those are some of the academic metrics.
EUR: What about the economic metrics?
MF: So, on the flipside of that, you can look at metrics which are more related to the wider economy. So for example, two-thirds of all the jobs that were created last year by our sister agency the IDA (Industrial Development Agency) in attracting multinational companies to Ireland had a prior linkage with an SFIfunded research group.
When a company is deciding where to locate they look at lots of factors. They look at what language people speak, what is their attitude to the European Union, what’s the tax rate, what’s the availability of land?
But they also look at whether there are trained people, can we have a good research interaction and so on. So we’re part of that eco-system, and we do have significant industrial participation in some of our programmes.
So it’s about having, good academic metrics and also good wider societal metrics. That’s the first part of agenda 2020 – excellence with impact.
The second part is partnership. We’re a small country and we want to build partnerships – for example we’ve established a partnership with the Wellcome trust to fund biomedical research in Ireland under their schemes on a 50-50 basis.
The third part is outreach which is about educating the public, so that they are comfortable both as users and producers of science.
Then the last is to be a very efficient public service organisation. So we’re staffed in a lean and mean way, with very efficient turnaround and processing.
EUR: Is Agenda 2020 quite a big shift away from SFIs earlier strategy?
MF: I would say it’s an evolution. My predecessors did a spectacularly good job in taking science in Ireland from a very low base to a very credible base. That was about building capacity within the system.
Now we’re about strategic alignment. Having built some capacity, we now want to make sure that we can align that capacity, and maximise and supplement it where appropriate.
There are some differences though, the first is the thematic funding. So previously all funding was open call – people just put in their proposals and they were assessed. We still have open calls, but we also focus on themes which allow us to develop certain areas of scientific research.
The second difference is a focus on impact, as people have to justify the spend out of the public purse.
Then the third difference is bigger scale investments, like these research centres. You can only do that when you’ve got a critical mass, and we didn’t have that twelve years ago.
EUR: How important is it to attract students into science? Are science graduates seen as being very employable?
MF: We’re interested in having a highly skilled, flexible workforce. If you’ve got general ICT skills, have some scientific training and can speak a foreign language then you can be fairly flexible about your employment. The world is changing and I don’t think there are any more jobs for life – people will change what they do at various times, and equipping them to handle that is very important.
There are very good, high-end jobs across the science sector in Ireland, but people often don’t realise that a qualification in science can equip you to do a lot of things. You can work for a
pharmaceutical company, an ICT company, a medical device company, while betting companies are big employers of computing and maths graduates.
EUR: Are you prioritising certain areas of science?
MF: The Government set up a research prioritisation group, with representatives from academia and industry, as well as policymakers, to identify areas in which Ireland should focus its science investment.
They’re typically areas where we have already some strength in the country and where we could capture benefit to the country economically. About 14 priority areas were distilled out of that. So the research funds for really large centres, or very significant projects, will be focused on those 14 areas or other emerging areas of economic importance.
That doesn’t mean that we won’t do any other things, it’ll just be through a different kind of funding, such as enabling people to collaborate for example.
EUR: That could be through European research programmes?
MF: Yes, so it’s about leverage, and that’s a very important principle for SFI.
We spend Irish taxpayers money, and we want to encourage the scientific community to leverage that money to go and win in other programmes, whether they be European programmes or collaborative programmes with industry or charity.
Last year we spent €150 million, and the research groups we funded leveraged an additional €156 million. So that’s part of our partnership strategy, enabling people to participate in European or philanthropic programmes. EUR: The challenge really is to fund research in a way that combines academic freedom with commercial impact? MF: Sir Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society, has a wonderful description of how science should be funded, which I completely concur with.
Effectively he likens funding scientific research to going back a few hundred years or so when people were exploring the world. If you were sitting in the Royal Geographical Society and you were going to launch an expedition, the first thing you need to know is where you’re going; are you going to the Amazon, the Arctic, the Antarctic? Then the second thing is you would find the best explorer, and fund that individual. Thirdly you would equip them with the best team of people, equipment and supplies. What you would not do is tell them how to get there. You wouldn’t tell them they have to go through this tributary or round that glacier - that’s why you chose the best explorer. I like that, because it’s what we’re doing. With research prioritisation we’re saying; ‘here are areas that are important. Focus on having really good investigators, they’ll explore it.’ Then we focus on funding mechanisms which are about supporting young people, centres of excellence, infrastructure and projects.
It’s an intelligent mix between scientists choosing what to research and being told where they should be looking.
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