Lucent’s Bell Labs research arm and the Irish government are
establishing a new R&D center in Dublin as part of a public-private
partnership that will focus on telecom and supply-chain technologies.
As part of the announcement, Lucent has also partnered with nine Irish
universities and institutes for a joint research program to be run out of
Trinity College in Dublin. The structure of the agreement with Trinity College and other schools is
similar to Bell Labs’ partnership with Rutgers University, which seeks
advances in nanotechnology.
Together, the center and college efforts could support up to 120 engineers
and scientists. The total backing by Lucent and government economic
development agencies is about $84 million.
“[Ireland’s] goals and initiatives, both in-country and as part of the
European Union, are to advance state-of-the-art R&D,” Lucent spokesman
Rich Teplitsky said.
Echoing this sentiment is William C. Harris, director general of the
Science Foundation Ireland. “This investment will act both to attract additional industrial research
initiatives into Ireland and as a catalyst for the creation of future
technology startups in Ireland,” he said in a statement.
In the last decade, Ireland has been building a knowledge economy. With its
highly educated, English-speaking workforce, many U.S. IT companies have
chosen to use the country as a launching pad into the larger European market.
Among those with a significant presence in Ireland include storage leader EMC
, chipmaker Intel
and software leader
Microsoft .
Lucent already has about 500 employees on the island nation and about 5,000
throughout Europe. But adding Bell Labs signals a further commitment to the
country.
Bell Labs has earned more than 30,000 patents since 1925 and has had a hand
in the development of transistors, lasers and fiber optics, digital networking, signal
processing and cellular technologies, among others.