Ireland could become an important centre for new drugs, diagnostics, devices, digital health and advanced therapies, writes Terence Cosgrave
Ireland has always had a complicated relationship with invention and innovation. We are very fond of innovation, particularly when the innovation is already done and the owner of can be persuaded to build a factory making it in Cork.
For several decades Ireland has performed what might be called the Great Economic Party Trick: persuading many of the cleverest companies on Earth to establish important operations here.
Pharmaceuticals, medical devices, software, semiconductors and all the other things nobody entirely understands (but which apparently keep civilisation going) have become central to the Irish economy.
Terence Cosgrave and pup
The question now is whether Ireland can do something harder: become not merely a place where innovation happens, but a country that produces much more of of that innovation itself.
The first annual report from Research Ireland gives some reason for optimism.
Research Ireland is the national agency created by combining Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council, thereby following the traditional Irish method of administrative reform: put two organisations in a room together and wait until one comes out.
In its first full year, Research Ireland committed almost €300 million to more than 1,000 projects. It supported thousands of PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and investigators. Irish researchers also attracted substantial European funding and worked with colleagues in more than 100 countries.
The point is that Ireland now has a research system of genuine international significance.
Ireland produces respected work in pharmaceuticals, medical technology, biotechnology, artificial intelligence and several fields whose names sound as though they were devised during an ambitious episode of Star Trek.
If a National Centre for Applied Quantum Therapeutic Nano-Resilience were announced tomorrow, most of us would nod gravely and assume it was already somewhere near Sandyford.
International comparisons support much of the optimism. Ireland is among Europe’s stronger innovation economies. We have a highly educated population, excellent scientific links overseas and an extraordinary concentration of major technology, pharmaceutical and medical-device companies.
Irish researchers work with overseas colleagues at a striking rate. This partly reflects necessity. There are only so many specialist physicists in Mullingar at any one time.
Modern science is international. The age of the lone genius shouting ‘Eureka!’ in a garden shed has mostly vanished, although in Ireland the shed would probably still be awaiting planning permission.
Most research spending by businesses in Ireland comes from foreign-owned companies, and a large proportion comes from a small number of very large corporations.
The difficulty is contained in the word multinational. They have several nations to choose from.
Their laboratories, factories and investments depend on decisions made in headquarters in Boston, California or Switzerland, where the office chairs cost more than an Irish starter home.
Ireland has therefore become exceptionally good at attracting innovation without becoming quite as good at creating large innovative companies of its own.
There are excellent Irish technology, pharmaceutical and medical-device firms. But the gap between the multinational sector and the domestic economy remains considerable.
Economists have been pointing this out for years, usually with charts.
Ireland effectively contains two economies. One consists of enormously productive multinational companies manufacturing medicines, software and technology of dazzling sophistication. The other consists of the rest of us trying to get someone to answer the telephone.
The OECD has repeatedly drawn attention to this divide. Irish-owned companies generally invest less in research and achieve lower productivity than the multinational sector.
Closing that gap may be the most important innovation challenge of the next decade.
Ireland talks enthusiastically about becoming a great research economy, but public investment remains modest beside many countries already occupying that territory.
Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Israel and South Korea devote enormous resources to research. Ireland spends respectable amounts, but respectable is not generally how scientific revolutions begin.
Nobody has ever announced: ‘We intend to make a world-leading breakthrough in cancer treatment, subject to the existing departmental allocation.’
Basic research often takes years before producing anything useful. Governments find this troubling because they prefer projects that can be photographed before the next election. A motorway has the immense political advantage that ministers can stand beside it wearing hard hats.
A breakthrough in molecular biology may require fifteen years before anyone knows whether it worked.
Yet transformative technologies such as modern medicines, the internet, semiconductors, vaccines and artificial intelligence all emerged from work whose commercial value was not obvious at the beginning.
Ireland must therefore resist demanding that every researcher immediately invent something exportable. Sometimes science produces knowledge first. The money arrives later.
Another challenge is turning university research into companies.
Ireland has good universities and excellent researchers, but Europe has often struggled with the next step: taking an idea out of a laboratory, building a company around it and growing it internationally.
Americans are unusually good at this. Someone at Stanford discovers something interesting on Tuesday and by Thursday there is a startup, three venture capitalists and a man explaining the business model on television.
Europe establishes a committee.
Ireland sits somewhere between the two.
That may be changing. New programmes are focusing on artificial intelligence, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, semiconductors and quantum technology — sensible choices because Ireland already has strong industrial clusters in many of them.
Healthcare may offer the clearest opportunity. Ireland already hosts many of the world’s largest pharmaceutical and medical-device companies, alongside medical schools, hospitals, scientists and clinicians.
Connect those assets properly and Ireland could become an important centre for new drugs, diagnostics, devices, digital health and advanced therapies.
Scientists require somewhere to live.
Governments announce plans to attract the finest researchers in the world and then discover that the finest researchers have looked at Daft.ie.
A brilliant molecular biologist may admire Ireland’s research ecosystem but be less enthusiastic about paying a formidable monthly rent for an apartment overlooking a dual carriageway.
Housing, electricity, transport and laboratory space are therefore research policy, whether anyone likes it or not.
Ireland nevertheless has advantages few countries of its size possess. We are English-speaking, inside the European Union, closely connected to the United States and already home to remarkable concentrations of pharmaceutical, technological and medical expertise.
Countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland show that small nations can become disproportionately important centres of science and technology.
The economic achievement of the past 30 years was persuading some of the world’s most innovative companies to come here.
The achievement of the next 30 may be ensuring that considerably more of the innovation starts here.
That will require money, patience, universities, scientists, entrepreneurs, houses, electricity, laboratories and, inevitably, committees.
The committees, at least, we know we can confidently provide.
If they’re not there already, we’ll invent them. 