Valuing Research as an Intangible Asset - Frank Gannon

Reposted from Frank Gannon's Blog http://frankgannon.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/valuing-research-as-an-intangible-asset/
Once the economy took an overt turn for the worst in 2008, voices that had been mute for almost a decade came forward to question the wisdom of Ireland investing in Research and Development (R&D). As Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) had been established in 2000 as the vehicle to provide the expertise to deliver the funding to “make Ireland a world leader in research” it was inevitable that attention would increasingly focus on its activities and view them as a cost rather than an investment. Various commentators sniffed at the phrase the “Knowledge Economy” and have not been enthusiastic when the Government launched the “Smart Economy” as the way forward for Ireland “after the crisis”. Having had numerous discussions and debates on the topic, where I and other colleagues showed the beneficial consequences of the SFI activities, I cannot say that the debate has yet been won by us. I wrote an extensive blog on the problem of trying to convince ‘non-believers’ that investment in R&D is essential for Ireland’s enterprise http://frankgannon.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/belief-and-science-policy and the concept of belief and faith is perhaps appropriate, as arguing for investment in science with a skeptic must be similar to an ardent Christian arguing their cause with a convinced atheist.

Formal para-official endorsement of the science skeptics came in the report of An Bord Snip Nua (McCarthy report). This report recommended a 15% cut back in the Science Technology and Innovation (STI) budget. There remains a lot of work to get ‘System’ to understand that the academics that SFI funds today are quite different to the caricatures that are presented as the basis of the disbelief in giving money to labs as the best way of under-pinning the Smart Economy. I won’t repeat the litany of facts that support our contention that the SFI programmes are already, and ahead of schedule, providing very positive inputs to the enterprise economy. Suffice to say that the opinion of two external independent reviews support this - a Value for Money Review of Science Foundation Ireland Prepared for Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment By Indecon International Economic Consultants and Science Foundation Ireland – the First Five Years 2000-2005 Prepared by An International Evaluation Panel, both reports are available on the SFI website – www.sfi.ie

Over the plum-pudding days of Christmas the concern for the future of Ireland “after the crisis” came back to disturb me too frequently to ignore. What, I wondered, would not have happened if SFI had not been established? OK, there would be fewer publications and fewer research groups, and maybe the impressive moves up the world ranking by Irish Universities would not have taken place…..but who in the enterprise sphere really cares about that?. Would business expenditure on R&D have doubled? Would 50% of the new deals entered into by the IDA have been in the area of R&D? Would very large numbers (almost 800) of Irish companies have invested in the development of new products to help them become more competitive? Would we be able to dream of developing and attracting a greatly expanded Green/Clean industrial sector with a projection of 80,000 jobs created? I really think the answer to allthose and other practical questions is NO, or at least to do so without the extra highly trained 4th level graduates and the reputation gain from the country by having top-class research groups here would have been extremely difficult and unprecedented world-wide.

Then one day, the pfennig (I was in Germany) dropped. The problem is that SFI and research generally delivers Intangible Assets and those with an antagonistic view are only putting value on Tangible Assets. As I am not an economist, I will not give my version of what the difference between tangible and intangible assets are, although the understanding of the English words is straight-forward. Instead, I add at the bottom of this blog the Wikipedia entry on the topic. I find, in that definition, confirmation of my diagnosis. Both the legal intangibles and the competitive intangibles described there are the primary outcomes from the investments made by SFI. This is what is to be expected and matches the rational for the establishment of SFI. But this is systematically missed by those that see research as a cost rather than an investment. Perhaps they have not reflected on this essential difference. Instead the critical analysts constantly look for tangible assets such as spin-off companies, jobs created and the conversion of the intangible intellectual property to the tangible license cash income. Calls for support only of research that is of direct value to Industry have the same tangible outcome as their basis No wonder there is a miss-match in the discussions. I think it would be good, therefore, to re-engage the debate with this insight in mind.

Time was, when intangible assets had no perceived value. Today, that is completely changed and even the rigours of accounting demand that these are treated and managed like other assets. Many companies invest more in pursuit of Intangible Assets than they do in the more readily measured Tangible Assets. I hope that Irish decision makers and commentators will integrate this into their thinking. Already the SFI budget has drifted away from the multi-annual plan of the Strategy for Science Technology and Innovation (SSTI). Continuation of that trend will certainly make the intangible assets drain away and with that the tangible assets will also be lost.

“Intangible assets are defined as identifiable non-monetary assets that cannot be seen, touched or physically measured, which are created through time and/or effort and that are identifiable as a separate asset. There are two primary forms of intangibles – legal intangibles (such as trade secrets (e.g., customer lists), copyrights, patents, trademarks, and goodwill) and competitive intangibles (such as knowledge activities (know-how, knowledge), collaboration activities, leverage activities, and structural activities). Legal intangibles are known under the generic term intellectual property and generate legal property rights defensible in a court of law. Competitive intangibles, whilst legally non-ownable, directly impact effectiveness, productivity, wastage, and opportunity costs within an organization – and therefore costs, revenues, customer service, satisfaction, market value, and share price. Human capital is the primary source of competitive intangibles for organizations today. Competitive intangibles are the source from which competitive advantage flows, or is destroyed. The area of finance that deals with intangible assets is known as Intangible Asset Finance.”-from Wikipedia 9.1.2010


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A Review of Research Assessment

Below are two interesting reports which look at the research assessment process and the role the Library can play. Interestingly the pros and cons of a national assessment process can be seen in comparison between the UK and Ireland.

A Comparative Review of Research Assessment Regimes in Five Countries and the Role of Libraries in the Research Assessment Process:
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2009/2009-09.pdf

Research Assessment and the Role of the Library
A companion report to A Comparative Review of Research Assessment Regimes in Five Countries and the Role of Libraries in the Research Assessment Process
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-01.pdf

One size won’t fit all in information policy and provision

The British Library and the Research Information Network have published a report Patterns of Information Use and Exchange: case studies of researchers in the life sciences.

The key conclusion of the report, “that the policies and strategies of research funders and information service providers must be informed by an understanding of the exigencies and practices of different research communities” is no surprise, but it is worth going to the report to read some of what led to that conclusion.

For example, even within what might be categorised a discipline, there can be marked differences in the patterns of information use and exchange, as evidenced by the seven case studies in the report. An Information Flow map is produced for each of the case studies, each map made up of activities or concepts joined by links. Librarians will be interested in the vast array of information or data sources listed. In the Botanical curation study, for example, scientific papers and monographs are just two of the eighty-two named activities or concepts.

Academic libraries have long worked to understand the needs of their different communities, as is evidenced by the faculty librarian or subject support model in place in most libraries, increasingly complemented today by the role of research support librarian. It is interesting to see in this report, however, the recommendation that researchers should ‘reconnect’ with information professionals. The model that has worked for so long needs to be updated and made stronger.

Academic libraries need to provide more than strong disciplinary support in the provision of and access to information. There is a need for concerted efforts to be made to understand how information is produced within individual disciplines, in order to support and develop new relationships and functions, particularly regarding data curation and information sharing.

PhDs and Web 2.0 tools

Zoë Corbyn from Times Higher Education has just written that researchers aged between 21 and 27 aren't using Web 2.0 tools like RSS and social bookmarking in their work.

In my work as a research support librarian, I have been promoting Web 2.0 tools to researchers. An increasing number of researchers are using them but its very far from reaching a critical mass - they're far from being an essential part of everyone's work. I believe this is because:

1. RSS feeds from databases and journal publishers are difficult to set up. Publishers often expect users to create personal accounts and click through numerous screens before they get to an RSS icon. Every publisher does things differently - some only allow table of contents alerts, some automatically stop your feed after a year.
   
2. Social networking/bookmarking. There's a lot of startup services for researchers and academics - I've come across about ten of them - but no single one has taken off yet. Some of them, like Academia.edu, look great, but they're all stuck in a situation where no one is signing up because none of their friends/colleagues have signed up first.
3. None of these services talk to each other. I can set up a Web of Science feed on my Google Reader, but Google can't easily transfer the references to RefWorks and its just an tricky sending them on again from RefWorks to my citeulike account. The future may be with Zotero, which is trying to do all this in one service.
   

The fact is that the volume and complexity of information researchers need is on a different scale from the general public and can't be simply automated with Web 2.0 tools. That's why a good working relationship between researchers and librarians is so important. Librarians can offer hands-on help with all these technologies, and advise and train researchers on the best ways to find / manage / share / publish their information.

Open Access 101

Open Access 101, from SPARC from Karen Rustad on Vimeo.

To deposit your research in an Institutional Repository in an Irish university (or in DIT, WIT, RCSI or HSE) go to the IREL-Open website and scroll down to find your institution's repository.

Open Access for the Humanities?

This is International Open Access week (19-23 October 2009) with many events taking place to raise awareness of this mode of scholarly communication. However, to date, Open Access has achieved most success in the science and technology fields where the dissemination of written knowledge has traditionally taken place via journal articles and conference proceedings.

If you are interested in finding out how this model of publishing can be applied to the Humanities, where the monograph is the preferred method of scholarly communication, take a look at the OAPEN project. A new resources page has recently been added covering the latest new in Open Access book publishing.

Problems with Online Research

The act of finding and reading published research has changed so much in the last 10-20 years. Ask any old-timer - anyone over 30 ;) - and they'll tell you how literature searches used to involve looking up abstracts in hardback paper indexes and CD-ROMs; trying to find missing print journal issues from library shelves and waiting weeks for interlibrary loans from the British Library.

Now you can do everything from your desktop in your office or at home. We can search online databases, read tens of thousand of journal online and save papers to our own personal digital libraries in EndNote or RefWorks, which also automate our citing and referencing.

But things are far from perfect. Endnote, RefWorks and many databases arent intuitive and don't work as smoothly as we'd like. Advanced tools like RSS search alerts can be difficult to set up and manage. For even the most organised, technophile researcher its difficult to find all the important papers in your field and still have time for your own work.

A recent paper, Defrosting the Digital Library, offers a good, accesible review of this and looks to a future where our digital libraries will be more personal, sociable, integrated, and accessible places.

Hull, D., Pettifer, S.R. & Kell, D.B., 2008. Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web. PLoS Computational Biology, 4(10).