Mr. Brian Ogilvie:

We sometimes forget that the technological university will be a completely different organisation. It will be a new organisation. There will be no such thing as the Institute of Technology, Carlow or Waterford Institute of Technology - there will be a single integrated institute. That addresses the problem regarding the overlap in courses.

The Chairman also asked how companies use innovation vouchers. This is one of the challenges we face in the research area. It is no coincidence that the majority of companies that engage with Science Foundation Ireland are huge multinational organisations with their own research laboratories. They are able to take research output in the rawest form and integrate it into their products. If one is running a company with four or five employees, one will not have the luxury of being able to allocate one of those people to engage at the research level. We transfer the highly specialist knowledge we have created through our research and innovation to companies by means of product development, for example. The document we furnished to the joint committee mentions a local indigenous company, EirGen Pharma, which operates in the area of biopharmaceutics. It is working with the Pharmaceutical and Molecular Biotechnology Research Centre, which is our biopharmaceutics research group, on an innovation voucher. The centre isolated and identified three impurities in a tablet product that was being developed by EirGen. The project allowed EirGen to file the product with the European Medicines Agency and it was approved in 2010.

This example gives us a clear view of how deeply the main research can be translated into something a company can use. This helps the development of the company. We do that over and over again. I believe this demonstrates the difference between a technological university and a traditional university. A traditional university is like a thoroughbred. Its focus is on its independence. Our focus will be on our responsiveness as a technological university. We will take the results of our research and customise it to the needs of companies. We will engage with them on a continual basis to ensure we understand their needs. I think I have answered all the questions.