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further afield. In 2008, for instance, the Russell Group of leading UK
universities examined the financial returns of their research, an exercise
that encompassed 125 commercialisation case studies from 17
institutions. The results were clear-cut: it found that ‘the vast majority of
the value returned over time originated from more fundamental, basic
research’. The implications of such evidence have begun to shift, amongst
other things, business-investor behaviour. As if to underline this point,
Dr. Alison Campbell, Director of Knowledge Transfer Ireland (KTI), an
entity jointly supported by Irish Universities Association and Enterprise
Ireland, recalls hosting a KTI commercialisation forum in October 2014
focused on spin-out companies. ‘What investors were saying is that they
were not looking for solutions to current problems’, Campbell says. ‘What
they were looking for were disruptive ideas and disruptive technology.’
Perhaps none of this should come as a surprise. Campbell, who has
worked for two decades at the academic-industry interface, doesn’t like
the forced divide between ‘basic’ and ‘applied’. She observes that much
of the research that transitions from the academic into the commercial
sphere may at some stage have had roots in research that might be
considered as basic or fundamental in character. Indeed, it is not often
clear, she says, where Discovery or Curiosity Research ends and when it
becomes applied. ‘Sometimes when you look at it in hindsight, it appears
obvious that research has an application. It’s not always the case.
Increasingly, when people are involved in Discovery Research they are
doing so in full awareness of possible wider industry interest and
potential applications, but does that mean it is applied research?’
By way of example, Campbell cites the case of OxyMem, an Irish company
that spun out of University College Dublin with a technology to bring
process-efficiency and reduced energy-use to the wastewater treatment
sector. Energy-intensive and costly, the aeration process at the core of
wastewater treatment had remained effectively unchanged for a century
and that’s what made the technology developed in the UCD laboratory
of Professor Eoin Casey so ‘disruptive’. OxyMem devised the world’s first
commercially available membrane-aerated biofilm reactor (MABR)
technology, the effect of which is to dramatically reduce the operating
costs for wastewater aeration. This is clearly a wonderful success story,
yet it is not, Campbell insists, a straightforward lesson in the virtue of
commercially focused or applied academic research. ‘These were
scientists at UCD who had been working for years at waste-water
treatment, but they didn’t do so with a view to having it applied. They
were interested in biofilms, which then had application in water
treatment. The other key point is that they were doing their research for
years before they realised the potential of it.’ Indeed they were: the reality
is that the story of OxyMem began long before its establishment as a
company in 2013, its origins being more accurately rooted in the
pioneering research undertaken by Eoin Casey in UCD, which began in
the 1990s. Casey himself acknowledges that the research that ultimately
led to OxyMem’s breakthrough technology was, at source, ‘curiositydriven’.
Yes, he may have been thinking about application, but this was
‘at the back’ of his mind. ‘I was engaged in engineering research that was
driven by fundamental and blue sky thinking’, Casey remarks. ‘It doesn’t
mean that all research is like that, but mine was.’
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