Bringing R& D into the mainstream of Institute of Technology activities - accessible funding programmes play a key role

2000

YEAR BOOK

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Bringing R& D into the mainstream of Institute of Technology activities - accessible funding programmes play a key role

Institute of Technology Tallaght

Eamon Tuffy

It was not until the Regional Technical Colleges Act (1992) came into operation on 1 January 1993 that Research and Development became an 'official' activity in the RTC sector of higher education. The Act more or less coincided with the opening of the Institute of Technology Tallaght as RTC Tallaght in September 1992. Eight years later, we have learned a number of lessons about establishing R&D as a mainstream activity in an institution where, like in all ITs, the core function of teaching full-time students largely determines the resources - staff, accommodation, equipment - provided to it by its main funder, the Department of Education and Science.

At the outset, it would have been na_ to think that a legislative base would automatically result in the emergence of R&D as a mainstream activity. In IT Tallaght, we committed ourselves at the beginning to making R&D a significant part of our work, and to achieve this by encouraging academic staff to get involved, by sourcing funding from funding agencies, by developing collaborative links with industrial and other partners.

By 1996, we could claim that we had, in IT Tallaght, a small but very active group of lecturer researchers. The Applied Research Programme operated by Enterprise Ireland proved to be the most accessible, and most of our research work up to 1996 was supported by ARP, with the balance funded by the Health Research Board. An added bonus of the ARP scheme is that, in requiring the Institute to have an industrial partner in any proposed research project, it helped us in building up partnerships with a number of Irish and international companies.

A big boost to research in IT Tallaght came in 1996 with the three year Graduate Training Programme, an ESF funded programme which provided funding for the supervision of research work by postgraduate students leading to the award of MSc degrees. In its first three years, the Institute was awarded 19 GTP grants from a competitive bidding process. And in the new Postgraduate Skills Training Programme, launched this year to replace the GTP, IT Tallaght has been awarded seven of the 35 grants available to the whole of the IT sector.

So accessible funding programmes have enabled the Institute to go some way to establishing research as a mainstream activity. However, one major difficulty remains for the Institute: the funding programmes which we have been able to avail of do not provide for any substantial items of equipment, nor do they facilitate the Institute in building up what I would call a research infrastructure, including the hiring of technical support staff or the release of talented researchers from significant amounts of teaching duties. Our experience with the Higher Education Authority Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions (HEA PRTLI) suggests that the evaluation process does not take account of the fact that Department of Education and Science financial allocation to Institutes of Technology does not yet provide core funding for R&D. However, the recent Strand 3 of the funding being put in place to complement the Postgraduate Skills Training Programme may go some way to meeting the deficit, and lead to the Institute building up a critical mass of research activities in prioritised research areas.

Contact: Eamon Tuffy, Development Office,
Institute of Technololgy, Tallaght, Dublin 24;
E-mail: eamon.tuffy@it-tallaght.ie