Feature: When the Going gets Tough, where's the Funding?

In recent years, money for public joint ventures between industry and academia has become scarcer. Gone are most of the lavish deals that saw key technology players supporting blue-sky research for the prestige value. Now the likelihood for most research establishments, certainly in Europe, is some sponsorship in kind and a bit of co-supervision for a PhD student. The flow has not only slowed, it has even partially changed direction, with schemes like the Knowledge Transfer Partnership seeing money from the UK Government making its way through grants into small British businesses who are prepared to learn from university-based consultants.

While research councils have been encouraging academic bids to come accompanied by promises of interest and collaboration from industry partners, the technology market has been going through the kind of retrenching that sees every penny labelled and accounted for. Whether the dotcom crash at the start of the decade was the reason - or merely the excuse - for a tightening of belts, the last few years have seen a period of consolidation where big gestures are out and canny fostering of confidential business research is the new agenda.

This has been partly motivated by a crisis in identity. Sales of some existing products have slowed in industrialised countries: the markets are maturing and upgrading seems less pressing. Many of the new developments in computing are behind the scenes; their longer term impact still unknown; and it will take a few years for the world outside the R&D lab to catch up. Educating people into new practices – such as using networked environments - has taken over as a priority, to make new developments meaningful in financial terms.

Yes, the recent ESRC-funded e-Society dissemination event in London became the "Trust and Triviality: Where is the Internet Going?" conference with collaboration from Yahoo! UK and Fru Hazlitt, its managing director, contributed a great deal on the day (see UN story: What do we Trust on the Internet, asks eSociety Event). But this is not the long-term investment of time and resources that makes for real partnership.

Nonetheless, one group of technology companies is still innovating rapidly and feeding a seemingly insatiable consumer appetite. Life still looks good for mobile phone manufacturers and their network providers. Perhaps we should look here for benefactors...

And it is in Hungary, with a long history of cultural leadership curtailed by the post-war Iron Curtain, that we find an excellent example of the kind of enlightened self-interest that could be the keystone of major companies' sponsorship activities. Hungary is neither wholly "Western" in its economy, nor newly industrialising like much of the Pacific Rim and India. It might be argued that some catching up is needed. T-Mobile Hungary is going one better – it's setting an example.

The fifth international conference within the framework of the "Communications in the 21st Century" project takes place this April. This joint interdisciplinary social science project is coordinated by T-Mobile Hungary (formerly Westel Mobile Telecommunications) and the Institute for Philosophical Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, under the management of philosopher Kristóf Nyíri, the institute's director. It was launched in January 2001 by Westel Mobile, just at the time when everyone else was closing their chequebooks. Why? Why not just sponsor a chair in the department or couple of conferences and get all the kudos with little of the commitment?

'Before we approached Dr. Nyíri with the idea of a joint research project in a field where we were traditionally not active at all, there indeed was some internal debate and hard thinking,' says T-Mobile Hungary's Chief Development Officer, Deputy General Manager István Maradi. 'We have recognised in the last few years that innovation has its own price. A corporation like ours must take responsibility for its actions towards society. Our developments, our actions, and our communications are not always accepted in the way we anticipate. Why are certain services well received, while others are hardly accepted? Why are some people against mobile developments, while others strive to participate and enjoy them to the utmost?

'Answers to these and many other questions are important for us, but they are not available to our eyes and ears. We see the issue too much from the inside, and sometimes this makes it difficult to recognise simple things, motives, and arguments. This is why we were more than happy when Kristóf accepted the invitation to do a joint analysis of the society around us, so that we could understand more together. This is of great value to us, and it is not available via normal sponsorship.'

'The Institute was selected,' says Nyíri, 'because it had acquired a reputation, on the one hand, of being interested in the history of communication technologies from a philosophical point of view, indeed of regarding communication as the paramount philosophical problem, and, on the other hand, of rejecting facile techno-pessimism.'

But both sides of the organisation stress that it was very much the company's idea. 'Kristóf and his team are great on their own hunting grounds,' continues Maradi. 'But they did not know as much about mobile telephony when we signed the deal to co-operate.'

This knowledge gap led to an exchange of skills. The phone company provided an environment where the philosophers were able to use and learn about everything the company offered. They were trained in the latest technology. In turn, the philosophers cast a characteristically analytic eye over the business: 'It was amazing to see how fast they caught up,' says Maradi. 'We were under heavy pressure to answer questions, set up systems, and explain bugs in handsets and services. Thanks to them, we were even able to improve some of our services after feedback from team members. We got a lot out of the project even during the consultancy periods. For us, many questions and answers were opening up regarding previously unknown aspects of our approaches towards the mobile market.'

And then there have been the conferences and the volumes of conference proceedings... Surely sharing research that one has substantially sponsored is against the spirit of competitiveness currently pervading the technology industry?

Nyíri credits his partners with more vision: 'They had an idea that mobile telephony was probably more than just the next major step in the technology of telecommunications; that it was a humane technology, capable of making the world a better place.'

Has there been no tension, then, between, on the one hand, publishing research ideas and findings and, on the other, keeping one's learning from the public domain where other companies can use it?

Maradi, aware that such tensions do exist, is nonetheless clear where the company stands on the matter. 'The results are important for the whole Hungarian mobile community. Our joint research has not delivered specific solutions, rather it provides a view of the mobile society. This is why we were happy to see that more and more forums have used the results, and quoted from it. Anything really confidential stays within the organisation, but whatever could be used for further public development is published. And I am pleased to say that most of the data have been published – to jointly help us, our service development partners, the media around us, and of course our customers, to better understand the mobile environment.'

The conferences are attended by a widening international community of researchers interested in the concept of mobility. The latest event: "Seeing, Understanding, Learning in the Mobile Age" taking place in Budapest in late April, will feature talks by communication theorists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, economists, linguists, and political and educational theorists on subjects as diverse as the epistemology of the mobile phone; visual communication and pictorial meaning; collective thinking and the network individual; and ubiquitous learning and the transformation of education.

Maradi points to the benefits for the company: 'We have attended the series of conferences the team organised, and we were able to see the results of their investigations. Simple things were brought to our attention, like difficulties as regards MMS usage: we were able to recognize that the tariffing formula of our darling MMS service is too complex. Usage behaviours indicated that this may be a solid blocking factor to achieving better penetration. As a consequence, we have made changes. Simply understanding user behaviour from another angle and perspective may contribute a lot to our future actions and developments.'

Nyíri notes that the collaboration across domains has been smoother than one might expect, with no real conflict between the technologically-minded approach of the telecommunications engineer, and the philosophically-minded approach of the humanities scholar. But, Nyíri stresses, the success of the collaboration owes a great deal to the personal make-up of T-Mobile Hungary's management – above all to CEO András Sugár's interest, guidance, and empathy, he says.

So what has made the difference? Perhaps the consistent vision, within the company, that learning fuels innovation... and that this remains crucial to sharpening the competitive edge?

The company is aware that this kind of joint research has not been done before, says Maradi. But, he continues: 'This is our nature: innovation in all areas. And, if it has an additional value for us, why not? As long as we see that everybody can gain from such co-operation, we will continue.'

And the institute? Not only has it presided over four years of dream-like collaboration, but, in the process, it has started to produce work to demonstrate the thesis which inspired Nyíri and his colleagues – that mobile telephony alleviates, rather than enhances, the alienation modern communications technologies gave rise to – is vindicated. Nyíri is in an enviable position.

So, whether mobile telephony is really such a blessing to humankind may remain the subject of research, both within and outside the institute's walls. What is undisputed is the value that the mobile phone company has delivered, with its committed support of these questions.

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