Mr. Sean O'Sullivan:

The Senator is pointing to one of the central problems in terms of return on investment. We have invested billions of euro in our research institutions, which have created great scientists and students who have gone on to get their Masters degrees and Ph.Ds and have often left the country or returned to their home countries without commercialising the benefits of this massive investment. We need to have a much higher expectation of what we should get from the technology transfer offices. It should not be a case of licensing technology, which often holds it back but of liberating the technology they create. They should not be measured by royalty income as they are now, and on which they are doing abysmally. They spend three times as much on the administration of the offices for technology licensing as on the licences granted, or on the royalties received from those offices. Rather than measure those statistics we should measure the effectiveness of these organisations by numbers of jobs created. Let the university participate in a job creation scheme and be paid for every job that is created from a technology that is licensed rather than on a royalty basis.

In many ways there is a fear that if all these taxpayer dollars go into all this research work, we cannot let it out but if we do not let it out it will end up being squandered, as to a great degree, unfortunately, it has been. It is too difficult to work a licensing agreement with a university in Ireland and I would advise that we liberate our technology through technology liberation offices rather than technology licensing offices.