From European research to value for Europe

This article discusses ways in which Europe could extract more value from the scientific research that it funds. The author suggests Europe needs better measures, especially of the efficiency with which it converts science into societal value, and better feedback from current outputs to future policymaking. He also suggests Europe should find a way to accelerate the uptake of new approaches to research, and greater support for the kind of entrepreneurship that extracts value from its result. He concludes by arguing that Europe has an opportunity to use research to forge a lead on the path to a more sustainable future.

Martin Curley is director of Intel Labs Europe and a senior principal engineer and global director of IT innovation at Intel, managing a network of IT innovation centres catalysing worldwide IT innovation. He has held a number of senior IT management positions for Intel, and held management and research positions at General Electric and Philips. Curley has a degree in electronic engineering, a Masters in business studies from University College Dublin, Ireland, a PhD in information systems from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth and has been a visiting scholar at MIT.

Curley is author of “Managing Information Technology for Business Value” published by Intel Press, January 04, co-author of “Managing IT Innovation for Business Value” published in 2007 by Intel Press, and co-author of “Knowledge Driven Entrepreneurship” published by Springer in Winter 2009.

He is also professor of technology and business innovation at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth and co-director of the Innovation Value Institute, helping lead a unique industry-academic open innovation consortium to advance IT management and innovation. Curley is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers of Ireland and the British Computer Society

eIQ Action Points – Turning European research into European value

Investing in research is an investment in future value creation, but this can only be achieved if we have good connections between our research and our innovation policy and processes. There is a saying that research turns money into knowledge, and that innovation turns knowledge into money. In Europe we need better integration between our macroscale research efforts and our innovation processes, and better accountability from the research community for value creation.

We also need to do a better job of linking policies, incentives and instruments that connect education, research, innovation and entrepreneurship. Macro measures of research spending are useful, but far from sufficient. One of the worst measures for R&D effectiveness is what you spend on it, and Michael Schrage at MIT has said that the poster child [key example] for this approach is General Motors. Instead we should be measuring how efficiently the money we spend on research is converted into value: until we have such measures, the conversion rate will be poor. Andy Grove, one of the founders of Intel, was often quoted as saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, and I think this is particularly true in research. While output measures such as research recognition, citations, and patents are useful, the most important measure of output value is often neglected. If Europe’s research leads in terms of publications and citations, but lags in every other aspect of the innovation process, then all we’re doing is paying to enable our competitors.

Conversion efficiency

Europe needs these new measures for conversion efficiency, and the research ecosystem needs to feel individually and collectively responsible for delivering value. For example, we could ask researchers to define ‘value paths’, that is, the likely ways in which their research could be exploited, early in the project. And we could make proving the value delivered by a research project a key part of defining it successfully.

In effect what I am suggesting is that the European Research Area should evolve into a European Research System or even a European Innovation System, in which we look at the relationship between the money put in and the value we get out, and feed that information back into the next round of decision-making. It means managing European research more like a business.

Changing approaches

In research we also need to pay attention to innovations in research philosophy. In my field of information systems, the dominant research philosophy for the past few decades has been behavioural science, but the emergence of ‘design science’, an alternate IT research strategy, promises to deliver much greater value to its practitioners. Despite this, the behavioural-science approach continues to dominate. We need mechanisms that systematically recognise these paradigm shifts in research and then help them to propagate more quickly. This would help achieve a better balance between the supply and demand sides of research and innovation.

The accelerated adoption of open innovation also needs to be considered carefully. We are seeing the emergence of a new form of open innovation, perhaps to be known as Open Innovation 2.0, which involves all the actors in the innovation ecosystem - companies, suppliers, academics and even end users – coming together to share experience, information and best practice, and to build strategic alliances and cross-disciplinary collaboration. The Open Innovation and Strategy Policy Group argues that Europe needs to do a more systematic job of capturing the potential of simultaneous societal and technical innovation. Creating a pan-European innovation ecosystem with directed actions for building innovation capacity, amplifying research and innovation inputs and aligning spending with key priorities is critically important to get the best from European research.

Entrepreneurship

Another key enabler of extracting value from research is an entrepreneurial culture that can see an opportunity and isn’t afraid to take it. Martin Schuurmans, chairman of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, has said that entrepreneurship is the glue that holds the ‘knowledge triangle’, of education, research and innovation, together. I agree - entrepreneurship shifts resources from low-value activities to high-value activities. I think Europe needs to be much more positive about entrepreneurship education, about lowering the barriers to risk taking and about stimulating high-expectation entrepreneurship. One particular weakness in Europe is the small proportion of public procurement that is spent on innovative and new solutions. This must be a key focus for future policy makers.

The 2006 Aho report on an Innovative Europe included recommendations on public procurement and other important ways to stimulate innovation that need our continued support. It is crucial to create innovation-friendly markets, increase structural mobility and foster a European culture of innovation. We should also recognise the enormous value of the Framework Programs as a vehicle for open innovation – it's one thing that American and Asian colleagues think that Europe is doing right in research.

A new model?

On a different level the world may need a new socio-economic model, one that does not depend on expectations of continued growth in a world of finite resources. European researchers are taking the lead in areas such as low-carbon technologies and there’s plenty of evidence that we are moving towards a knowledge economy, but it still seems to consume lots of finite resources. The European Community needs to lead a global transition to a more sustainable basis, perhaps to an equilibrium model as described in “The Limits to Growth”, the report by Meadows et al published in 1972.

The Lund declaration, that Europe must focus on Grand Challenges, is a major step in moving Europe’s research agenda from a rigid thematic approach to one focused on solving problems that affect us all, such as energy, ageing and congestion. As the majority of innovative solutions come from a stated need, we need to create a better balance in Europe’s research portfolio between curiosity-driven work and tackling the Grand Challenges. Eco-innovation must be pushed to the fore so that solving environmental problems can create commercial opportunities that lead to a virtuous cycle of research/commercialisation funding.

ICT, the area in which I work, enables frictionless commerce. Can the European Research Area, or even a European Research System, enable frictionless innovation? Can we establish a pan-European infrastructure that enables much faster innovation and exploitation of results? Can we create an ‘intellectual supercollider’ that enables the rapid interaction of people, ideas, opportunities and cultures to create new solutions quickly? I think we can. We just have to decide to do so.

Prof Martin Curley

Global director, IT innovation, director, Intel Labs Europe

Vice-chair, Open Innovation and Strategy Policy Group

martin.g.curley@intel.com

eIQ Action Points

Measure research output and conversion efficiency, not inputs
Ask researchers, as individuals and collectively, to take greater responsibility for extracting value from their research
Ask researchers to define routes to exploitation earlier in their projects
Make proving the value of a research project a key part of defining it as a success
Evolve the European Research Area into a European Research System that analyses the relationship between the money we put in and the value we get out, and uses that as the basis of the next round of decision-making
Develop ways to accelerate the uptake of new research approaches
Take a more directed approach to using open innovation to deliver societal value
Support entrepreneurship
Support the measures suggested in the Aho Report to build a more innovative Europe
Consider the idea that Europe could take a lead in shifting to a more sustainable socio-economic model