What is the significance of the Fraunhofer Society's
investment in Glasgow, announced earlier this week?
This is the first investment in the
UK by the German institute "zur Förderung der angewandten
Forschung" - for the advancement of applied research - and it means
that the new photonics research centre will also become the
Society's HQ in the UK.
What is the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft?
The Fraunhofer Society is a not-for-profit
organisation which develops and runs institutes which are each
focused on a specific applied science. For example, Polymer
Research, Digital Media, Factory Automation, Industrial
Mathematics, Integrated Circuits, and so on. There are more than
sixty of these institutes around the world although the majority
are in Germany where the Society was founded in 1949. Since 1973
the Society has operated the famous "Fraunhofer Model" whereby
around 30% of its funding comes from the State and the remainder
from research and commercialisation contracts with the private
sector. The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft is effectively Europe's biggest
contract research organisation and its model has proved hugely
successful in many industrial and scientific contexts; not least as
a crucial element of the success of the German economic model along
with the recently much-vaunted mittelstand population of
prudently managed industrial SME's.
Why has Fraunhofer invested in Scotland?
A number of factors must have influenced the decision
to locate the first Fraunhofer Institute on UK soil in Glasgow. A
spokesperson for the Institute has stated that the reputation of
Strathclyde University is important. Strathclyde has a long track
record of excellence in teaching and research in photonics and has
a world-class Institute of Photonics for postgraduate research.
Since 1996 the IoP has been turning out MSc's and PhD's who have
been snapped up by the world's leading optics and photonics
businesses. Also relevant must be the support and funding from
Scottish Enterprise, the Scottish Government and the Higher
Education Funding Council.
Critical dependence on initial conditions: Glasgow
has been a leading location in photonics for more than one hundred
years.
All of this has a very significant historical
context. The West of Scotland has been a world beating location for
photonics research and business for more than a century. During the
First World War local firm, Barr and Stroud, came to prominence as
a supplier of optical equipment such as direction and range finders
to the Royal Navy. Barr and Stroud, a true pioneer in the
optoelectronics industry, was acquired by Pilkington in 1977 and
subsequently became part of French defence and electronics giant,
Thales, which still has a large presence in the city and a
manufacturing centre in Govan that produces modern range finders
and periscopes a century after the Battle of Jutland. The presence
of Barr and Stroud in Glasgow through the twentieth century
undoubtedly exerted a powerful influence on academia to produce
generations of engineers to work in the local optoelectronics
industry and who in recent decades have been instrumental in
founding and leading a new generation of photonics
businesses.
This rich history and tradition is vividly evident at
M Squared Lasers: our two founders, Gareth Maker and Graeme
Malcolm, studied and carried out research at Strathclyde University
and many of our staff won their PhD's at the Institute of
Photonics. Scottish universities produce a relatively large number
of graduates in relevant disciplines and are well-funded for
research in photonics. When you add to this milieux the large
number of successful companies registered with the Scottish
Optoelectronics Association (the list includes Optos, Coherent,
Thales, Raytheon, Selex and, of course, M Squared) you begin to see
a rich, well-established industrial and academic community: the
perfect substrate in which to plant the seed of a new research
institute.
This is a great moment for the Scottish photonics
community, both industrial and academic, as well as for the people
of Scotland and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft in the UK. And it is a
great moment too, especially, for Glasgow - the Laser
City.