In early October 2006, I was invited to a meeting in Brussels as an "expert" to participate in a workshop on how to improve the design, the monitoring and support and the follow-up of programmes and projects in one of the domains of the upcoming FPVII programme. A group of consultants had drafted a report, which a group of some 20 experts were to comment upon.
The word "improve" is important as it concerns how projects from this DGs can better lead to innovation and technology transfer. Should a subset of projects be reserved so more SMEs can be involved? Does it help projects to have end users onboard? How about industry associations or the many "clusters" (publicly induced)- will a research result better reach the market place if they are research partners? Can diligent review of socio-economic aspects or use of non-technical experts increase the "business-readiness" of a project?
These are concerns, then, which a group of researchers must consider to successfully bid for funds in this programme if it is up to this experienced group of international consultants.
I think the Commission may have gotten it wrong. My basic position is that the first and foremost criterion for market-oriented research is high quality of results. In other words, that genuinely new knowledge is created (patent language: it is "novel"). I don't see how an SME, an industrial association or a non-technical expert can contribute anything to the resolution of this question.
But politicians and the Commission as well, then, want to see more research results reach the market. What should they do?
Let me first say that I find the initiatives in many DGs outside the Research DGs have many good innovation support measures, especially the Technology Platforms and similar Foresight instruments to give overall guidance to research in a given area.
Secondly, I can see that many funded "R&D" projects do not deserve that title. Too often researchers state that a certain problem is unsolved or interesting, but most often there already exists a body of knowledge and research, which has answered the key questions of the "R&D project. The provocative statement probably is based on a criticism of the peer review process. Too many funding agencies and directors of research centres grant money to projects, which are not based on diligent studies of "prior art". OK, so we can solve that. And DG research should help do that by granting pre-proposal funds for literature studies, which also could contain an element of studies of the perceived needs of relevant industries.
Then my second position is that we should leave the researchers alone to do their research, but demand -and fund- that they spend some time on structured dialogue with industry representatives, associations, non-technical experts. The outcome of this dialogue should be used to feed back to the researchers what the "outside" world believes, but still we should leave the researchers at what they are best at (they may adapt and include the feedback into their work or not). But the outside experts could/should be organised as what is called an "accompanying measure" in Brussels: the outside dialogue partners could get funds to think creatively about what they learnt through the dialogues and then try to find potential industrial partners to the research project and on its behalf. The accompanying measure partners could easily be a consortium of experts who were retained for the length of the programme to support all projects during the project cycle from application to commercialisation. Such consortia would gain a lot from adapting the lessons of good practice in commercialisation reported elsewhere and on this site.
Why not let a whole sub programme's commercialisation, for instance in fuel cells, be managed by an outside consortium in the same way as eg. the IP Group for UK universities or how Cambridge University Enterprise manages IP coming out of its university? These IP management groups have continuity, commitment , expertise and - funding to follow up on promising research results. And do so with a commercial perspective. Give the group funding to help do the initial peer review both technically and with regard to nmon-technical aspects. Give full funding of the support to projects as they are ongoing -and give some funding for the final phases (in order to ensure that the best prospects get selected for future funding).
Give please. Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.
I am from Iran and now teach English, tell me whether I wrote the following sentence: "Citing your references when you write your bibliography, list all of your references."
Thanks ;-). Ceasar.
Posted by: Ceasar | January 15, 2009 at 03:34 PM