Innovation: Ireland’s ‘smart economy’ strategy, universities and free-lunch entrepreneurship

“… In a thought-provoking book, Innovation, Profit and the Common Good in Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), John Harpur, a lecturer in the Computer Science Department, National University of Ireland Maynooth, explores the current commercialization and innovation policies in higher education; the role of universities in guaranteeing economic prosperity; conflicts of interest and the questionable evidence in support of current policies …” (more)

[Michael Hennigan, Finfacts, 30 December]

This entry was posted on 30 December 2010 at 11:09 am and is filed under research with tags innovation, NUIM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Innovation: Ireland’s ‘smart economy’ strategy, universities and free-lunch entrepreneurship”

Ronan Says:
31 December 2010 at 10:30 am

I think that government ministers do a disservice to the research community by aggregating the numbers to 5 year totals. This year’s budget for SFI is about 160M€. I’m not sure, but perhaps there’s another 100M in the system somewhere. We’re talking 0.1% of GDP, it’s a tiny figure but only looks good when aggregated over a decade.

So why beat up on the universities when the figures are so low. The educational side is high, but the research side is pretty lean. The researchers in universities have several roles
– a resource centre – staying at the leading edge of research so to pull in best practice to ireland (doesn’t even require ground-breaking research just competitive)
– source of new ideas
– source of skilled graduates and postgrads.

So yes, lots of flaws in the system, but it’s not a “big money” mess up

Ninth Level Ireland