Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education - Research

Research

Although some of the founding members of its faculty were prominent researchers (first rector León Ávalos y Vez had formed a National Commission on Science and served as director-general of the School of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering of the National Polytechnic Institute) formal research activities at the Tech did not start until 1951, when its Institute of Industrial Research was founded in close collaboration with the Southwest Research Institute of San Antonio, Texas —one of the oldest and largest independent, nonprofit, applied research and development organizations in the United States.

Notwithstanding some reputable achievements, throughout most of the 20th century its research activities —normally financed independently or under private sponsorship— were rather scarce in comparison to public universities such as the National Autonomous University of Mexico or the National Polytechnic Institute, whose budgets make up to 30% of the federal spending in higher education and, as such, are heavily financed by the government through the federal budget.

Despite its inherent difficulties to secure research funds in a developing country where private sponsorship barely accounts for 1.1% of the national spending on science, a new institutional mission in 2005 made social and scientific research in Mexico's strategic areas one of its top priorities for the next decade. As a result, new corporate endowments and funds were committed, new research programs were created (including the first research program financed by Google in Latin America) and important labs and infrastructure have been built, such as the US$ 43 million Femsa Biotechnology Center, the Water Center for Latin America and the Caribbean (financed by the Inter-American Development Bank and the Femsa Foundation), the Motorola Research and Development Center on Home & Networks Mobility, its MXN $24 million Center for Advanced Design at the Guadalajara Campus and, in association with the Mainz Institute of Microtechnology of Germany (IMM), the first center of chemical micro process engineering in Latin America.

Additionally, the Institute developed a researcher-friendly patent scheme that aims to attract talented researchers and reduce the national brain drain. The scheme, in which the researcher may receive up to 30% of the patent licencing income, works in combination with its internal MXN$ 100,000 Rómulo Garza Prize and its national MXN$ 200,000 Luis Elizondo Prize and has allowed it to became the leading patent applicant among Mexican universities since 2006.