It is an honour and a pleasure for me and my colleagues to be invited to address this Oireachtas Joint Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Innovation. I am the chief executive officer of the Tyndall National Institute. I spent 18 years in the electronic industry in the UK and 11 years as the Royal Academy of Engineering Professor at Cranfield University. I was part of a successful start-up. Dr. Alastair Glass is the chairman of the Tyndall National Institute. He spent more than 30 years at Bell Laboratories in the US and was responsible for a number of key innovations that led to Bell Laboratories leadership in high bit-rate fibre optics communication. I am grateful that he has flown from New Jersey to give evidence to this committee. He has a fantastic record in innovation. Under his leadership, Lucent Technologies founded a number of successful business ventures. He also spent two years as Deputy Minister of Research and Innovation in the state of Ontario, Canada. Dr. Cian Ó Mathúna has been a researcher at the Tyndall National Institute since the early days of the National Microelectronics Research Centre. He now heads our central microsystems centre and has extensive experience working in the EU. He is particularly keen on working with Irish industry and using our innovations for job creation in Ireland. He has had a number of successes in taking SMEs into Europe and he is a member of the innovation task force implementation group.
Like SFI, we looked at the topic as an exam question. My wife rapped me over the knuckles this morning for saying that innovatio comes from the Greek. It does not, it comes from Latin and she should know because she is a Classics scholar. It means renewal and in the context of this report we regard innovation as a renewal of the Irish economy by transforming Irish ideas, discovery and inventiveness into the exploitation of new market opportunities. We are talking about renewal and it requires a number of precursors. Discovery, new knowledge and knowledge transfer is very important. Science Foundation Ireland has played a stellar role in what it has achieved here in the past ten years. Ireland has developed well in the past decade but technology and product development are also required. There is room for improvement, especially in new areas. Venture capital is a limiting factor to business acceleration and investment. Expertise in the investment community is very important. Customer and market development is critically important. Within each of those areas a variety of expertise is needed in science, engineering and business, and talent development.
In the past decade Irish investment in research infrastructure, PRTLI, in research programmes in ICT and biotechnology, SFI, and in health research, HRB, has resulted in world-class research and a world-class research environment. That has been particularly successful in attracting skilled researchers to Ireland from around the world and developing our indigenous expertise. The work of Enterprise Ireland to support business and academic partnerships and intellectual property, IP, creation has made considerable progress towards knowledge transfer. However, the creation of wealth and jobs by exploiting IP requires the development of creative entrepreneurs, sophisticated investors, management expertise and market awareness.
The Tyndall National Institutewas created in 2004 by the then Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and UCC to be the national institute to support industry and academia in Ireland, helping to translate innovation and new knowledge into applications and jobs and to be a centre of excellence in ICT research and development. We are working collaboratively with other research bodies and industry to extract the maximum value from research investment. We now employ approximately 400 people and have a turnover of approximately €30 million. The majority, 82%, of the income comes from a wide range of competitively-won sources. Much of it comes from outside of this country.
We will highlight a few areas to show how we extract value from research. The first area is the development of human capital. The majority of the 135 postgraduate students at the Tyndall institute are PhD students. Approximately 60 PhD students have graduated in the past four years. We have many examples of those graduates going into Irish industry. Intune Networks cannot get graduates out of us quickly enough. We supplied five or six graduates to it in the past 18 months. The national access programme supports 230 individual projects involving 400 named researchers from around the country. That has produced a number of patents and a spin-out company.
We work very closely with the IDA and help it develop its client base. This year, United Technologies Research Corporation, UTRC, from Connecticut established its new European research centre in Cork, currently based in the Tyndall institute, because of the way we work closely with industry and other university groups. Recently Applied Materials, which is one of the world's leading manufacturers of semiconductor processing equipment, announced it will place a major research programme in the Tyndall institute, with people and equipment worth approximately €2 million.
We conduct research and development partnerships with industry. Since 2006, industry has contributed approximately €7.5 million to the Tyndall institute for research and technology development activities. We have collaborations with more than 200 companies, of which 80 involve financial exchange. A very good example of the way we work with industry is a new invention that emerged from the Tyndall institute this year, namely, a new transistor which we think will revolutionise silicon and keep us on the map. Companies such as Intel will keep pushing the technology forward. It is a "junctionless" transistor. It has allowed us to develop our relationship with Intel which announced a $1.5 million three-year research programme with the institute which will roll forwards beyond the three years, as it is intended to roll forwards on a year-by-year basis. We have two very good quotes in our report, one from Analog Devices which points out that if it had not been for the work done at the Tyndall institute by our design and technology evaluation group, the transfer of its processes from 6 in. to 8 in. would have been much more difficult. An Irish SME, Biancamed, pointed out that the work we provided to it in terms of translating some technology into a way it could use it was "world class".
We generate licences to industry. We have had 45 patents since 2006, 11 of which have already been licensed. We do a great job in leveraging EU funds. We were awarded €18.2 million in research funding since 2007. That accounts for 8.5% of Irish income drawdown from Framework 7.
We have been instrumental in creating six start-up companies. There was a very good story in today's edition of The Irish Times about Firecomms, which is a Tyndall institute spin-out. It has recently been acquired by a Chinese company, ZJF. That will involve the company injecting €5 million into our research funds and increasing the number of high-end jobs in Cork from 18 to 30.
Academic excellence is vital. Everything we do is based on excellence. We are now recognised as a major European centre in academic excellence. In 2009 we produced more than 200 journal papers, 50% of which were in the top 20% of their field. In 2009 SFI held an exhaustive review of the Tyndall institute. It commented that the Tyndall institute is an indispensable national resource and that the research there is first rate.
Although we are satisfied with the progress made at the Tyndall institute, we do not think it has gone far enough. We feel we can do better in terms of development and demonstrating the commercial potential of what we do. To that end, two new competence centres from Enterprise Ireland have been based at the institute. They will bring industry and academia together. We are hosting the competence centre in applied nanotechnology and the microsystems competence centre for Ireland.
We would like to respectfully offer some recommendations to further accelerate how ideas can be driven to the marketplace. It is vital that the investment in creative people is continued. The most creative scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs are highly mobile and are attracted to those environments with the best facilities and support for innovation. This country needs to continue the support it has had in the past decade to continue the presence of those people in the country. We need to place more emphasis on driving ideas to the marketplace. Since 2000, research funding in the natural sciences in Ireland has grown more rapidly than engineering and technology research funding. We feel that balance should be reconsidered.
In terms of strategic objectives and national challenges,the Government, together with funding agencies and stakeholder input, should identify major challenges where Ireland can become a global leader and fund partnerships to deliver on those challenges. That is now taking place under the prioritisation task force. The support provided by Enterprise Ireland for intellectual property management is vital. That needs to be continued and to be streamlined in the future.
I thank committee members for their attention.