The Irish Government, in partnership with Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), will be offering an additional €480,000 to the Industry Fellowship Programme for seven new industry-academia partnerships.
The programme is one of the first ports of call for either commercial operations or academia, or vice versa, and will bring the total funding as part of the programme to more than €2.2m on top of the €1.7m already set aside earlier this year.
The seven companies included in this round of funding are Bell Labs Alcatel-Lucent, Medtronic, DiaSorin, Idiro Technologies, M-Solv Ltd, Transpharmation Ltd and ADA-Security.
Speaking to reporters during the week, Alcatel-Lucent’s CTO Marcus Weldon had emphasised the company’s strategy of developing further links with its R&D.
“We are upping the game. We have challenged our researchers to come up with one game changer per business line every year in a way that is absorbable by the business line. We have repartitioned Bell Labs and every research has to solve a problem 10X, and they are focused on bandwidth latency, scalability, network efficiency and cost.”
As part of this funding, the seven companies will focus their development on the analysis of large data sets to predict and understand human behaviour, new testing techniques to enable the early detection of prostate cancer, and developing research to help in the manufacture of thin flexible glass to create gadgets of the future.
Prof Mark Ferguson, director-general of SFI, said the SFI Industry Fellowship Programme offers a unique opportunity for participating researchers and companies to exchange people and insights and ultimately deliver results that far outstrip what each party would deliver by working separately.
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