Deriving income from know-how and developing technology to meet business needs is of increasing importance to balance the budgets of UK universities and this understanding influences research priorities. Promoting rapid technological innovation is best achieved through commercial markets that offer incentives for entrepreneurs and inventors. As such, universities look to create spin-out companies and licence patents which encourage early investment in new findings and can translate them into products and services for public benefit.

Lucrative markets
A range of technologies can be applied to help monitor and protect biodiversity. At the University of Surrey, we can point to how our GBP 70m spin-out Modern Water tackles some of the sustainable water issues that impact upon biodiversity or how DMC International Imaging Ltd has won a European Space Agency award to provide satellite imagery that will be used to monitor Europe’s environment and land use, including natural resources such as forestry. But the underlying technology might not have been developed had other, more lucrative, markets not provided the initial incentive.

Where technology is being developed which could be utilised for biodiversity management, universities assess the market demand for the certification / assurance which the technology would provide. It is difficult to gain adoption unless there is a perceived market demand by consumers. For this reason, there is a need for close cooperation between business and academia to identify the research that universities can provide and, more importantly, the requirements, opportunities or impacts of industry that need to be addressed.

Existing know-how
Although collaboration is required between universities and business to identify new technological applications, it is also evident that the application of existing research and know-how needs to be improved. Too much university research remains unused on library shelves or tied up in unutilised patents. Tourism, one of the world’s largest economic sectors, provides one example.

Tourism places direct and indirect pressures on species and habitats and thereby threatens their conservation. An estimated 50 percent of international travellers visit protected areas during their holidays and the industry is therefore a major stakeholder, benefiting from the maintenance of healthy environments.

The Corporate Responsibility Manager of Thomson, one of the UK’s largest tour operators, wrote in the travel trade press earlier this year, expressing surprise and concern at the volume of university generated research in the field of sustainable tourism that is not reaching, or being adopted by, the travel industry.

Even in a well established business sector, strong networks are required to benefit from current academic research. The need for better networks has increasing importance in developing countries.

Networks
Academic staff in the UK are required to achieve ‘Full Economic Costing’ when entering into research contracts. The quality of their work is assessed by the Research Assessment Exercise which measures the quality of research conducted against international standards of excellence. This enables the funding bodies to distribute public funds on the basis of quality. Neither of these considerations are seen by my colleagues as obstacles to transferring technical know-how or collaborating with companies and researchers in developing countries. This fits with arguments that the single most important factor is not the need for adequate funding for relevant research and development.

A PhD student returning to Botswana advised me that for multi-national companies operating in Africa with headquarters in Europe and America, accessing technical know-how is not a challenge. For smaller local or even regional companies, it is different; there is no established culture of private industry seeking technical know-how from local universities, or the universities volunteering technical know-how to private industry. Where local universities work with their European and American counterparts, most of the collaborations are created by personal networks, and so the ease or difficulty of establishing the relationships is based on who knows who and how influential these people are.

There is a role for business in building and facilitating these networks. Their lack means that many able and competent scientists in developing countries do not have the channels of communication to talk to major companies to help commercialise their findings. This is particularly evident in the use of indigenous plants for drug development where scientists have isolated and identified compounds with medicinal properties but been unable to commercialise this knowledge.

Natural products have provided many major new drugs. Their use has been perhaps the single most successful strategy in the discovery of modern medicines. Many drugs from natural products would be inaccessible by standard ‘medicinal chemistry’ and a recent statistical study of over 200,000 medicinal compounds, suggested that over 40% of the natural products are not represented by synthetic compounds. Academics at the University of Surrey have suffered the disappointment of returning to the field to find that forest clearance has destroyed rare plants and their habitat. To protect biodiversity the key issues, as they see them, include the need for business to ensure that all communities protecting rare plants benefit from their commercial exploitation.

Charity models
A disproportional burden of transferring technology to protect biodiversity is carried by charitable organisations. Their work can provide a useful model for others. Activities often focus upon strengthening networks and acknowledge that small-scale locally replicable technology is likely to diffuse faster and have greater benefits to biodiversity protection and poverty alleviation than the importation of large-scale sophisticated technology. Earthwatch offers a Capacity Building Programme which aims to bring together conservationists, scientists and research staff to share ideas, best practise and to learn by examples. The Technologies for Conservation & Development project (t4cd) aims to deliver clear biodiversity and livelihoods gains by promoting (and implementing) the appropriate application of certain technologies to conservation and development issues. Their website is a large component of the initiative.

Even within industrial sectors such as pharmaceuticals, biotechnology or telecommunications, where technological innovation is essential, university researchers and their industrial counterparts often find difficulty in identifying each others interests and matching available technology with business needs. Working internationally and in less established markets, such as technology for the monitoring and protection of biodiversity, the issues are compounded.

There is no doubt that the application of existing and new technologies developed for other markets could be adapted to enhance the management of biodiversity. To benefit there is a need for business to engage in the creation of stronger international networks that match technical know-how with practical needs. To do so will have benefits for all parties.

Jonathan Hodrien ([email protected]) is Technology Transfer Manager, University of Surrey.