EUROPE: Poor links with industry restrict innovation

The European Union will have to achieve much greater progress in bridging the gap between research and industry if it is to make a success of the Lisbon strategy for making the EU the world's most competitive economy by 2010, a conference in Brussels on Innovating for Competitiveness in ICT was told late last month.

This has been a familiar charge for much of the past five years but little seems to have changed over that time and a mood of rising impatience is becoming obvious.

There were no formal conclusions by representatives of industry, research or the EU institutions at the meeting organised by the French Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA). But delegates agreed the rapid rise of new countries such as China, India and Brazil in the ICT sector made the EU's Lisbon agenda of increasing importance.

Clearly a good deal of progress could be made if working conditions and career prospects for researchers were improved by bringing the sector into a European rather than a national context. European Commission officials accepted the need for this: Pierre Vigier, acting head of a unit concerned with innovation policy at the Directorate General for Enterprise in Brussels, said the European Commission aimed to help remedy this by eliminating barriers against free movement of researchers.

Brussels also planned to establish a university-industry knowledge transfer forum "to give public authorities, universities and other public research organisations and industry a place to meet and coordinate their actions", Vigier said.

European researchers have traditionally set themselves further apart from industry than their counterparts in the US and Japan, and this was seen as a problem to be overcome by many. Vigier called for "a change of mindset in public research organisations and universities", arguing that time spent with industry should be "at the core of their activities."

Magnus Madfors, director of R&D at the Swedish hi-tech firm Ericsson, said the best way of ensuring successful technology transfer was for each side to understand the other's needs. Researchers in academia and the universities "should understand the future needs of industry in order to do research on the right sector", Madfors said.

At the same time, industry should accept "the knowledge and the needs of academia" so it could identify where potential research and practical exploitation came together.

Laurent Kott, CEO of INRIA-Transfert, which has been set up to commercialise INRIA's research, said there were two major concerns: the coming to maturity of ideas in research laboratories and the difficulty of finding seed funding. There was a need to develop a business approach before the research results came out of the laboratory, Kott said.

German liberal Free Democrat party MEP, Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, agreed that lack of venture capital was a problem, along with an "unsatisfactory" EU patent system. But he noted that French President Sarkozy had promised to "open the door for a community patent" and he hoped this would lead to concrete results during the French EU presidency in the second half of the year.

alan.osborn@uw-news.com