RETHINKING INNOVATION POLICY IN IRELAND: A CRITICAL CRITIQUE
2010
Prior to the current economic recession, the Irish government has been championing an innovation agenda. However, national and European reports and metrics paint a mixed picture about Ireland’s engagement in and outputs derived from innovation activities. Therefore, a critique of Irish innovation policy is timely and relevant given the renewed emphasis and restricted budgetary support afforded to create new enterprises, markets, export opportunities and employment growth. In short, where innovation policy traditionally focused on funding future opportunities and capacities, micro and macroeconomic forces now requires innovation policy to be responsive to current enterprise difficulties. Through incorporating innovation policy priorities, funding streams and key policy stakeholders we find that there is an imbalance in Irish innovation policy with a legacy of prioritising and funding ‘hard’ science and technology based innovations while ignoring ‘softer’ aspects of innovation i.e. service products, business models and customer/delivery interfaces at a similar level which can be implemented at all enterprise levels, incur less costs and operationalised in a more timely manner. This policy disparity has serious consequences for our progressive innovation ambitions around entrepreneurship, scaling indigenous enterprises, creating and sustaining SME’s. The paper identifies that there is a paramount need to rethink innovation policy in order to reap the rewards of our previous and on-going investments towards achieving our national innovation goals and ambitions. To conclude we provide a roadmap for rethinking this policy around widening innovation concepts, improving SMEs capacity to innovative and addressing the academic-industry applied research and collaboration gaps.
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