Burton Lee's interest in Europe, technology and entrepreneurship has landed him with a pro-bono role on the Innovation Taskforce, writes Karlin Lillington

BURTON LEE is not a man to be confined to a single job title. Talking to him, you get the sense that job titles are a minor inconvenience and certainly a shallow reflection of what one actually does.

In his case, he’s a member of the Government’s Innovation Taskforce and the only non-Irish “outsider” (well, discounting some Donegal heritage).

His business card from Stanford University in California has him down as director of the cross-disciplinary programme in European Entrepreneurship and Innovation within the mechanical engineering department, but he has various involvements from venture investment to strategy and policy work for large organisations and governments and a very long CV.

Among other interests, he is also an angel investor in the space industry (and worked towards becoming an astronaut in the 1980s, although he eventually abandoned those aspirations).

He co-founded the world’s first commercial “spaceport” in New Mexico, now used by Virgin Galactic for its test commercial space flights. He has worked in mainstream technology for companies ranging from HP to Daimler.

However, there are a few things he doesn’t do. The East Germans once tried to recruit him as a spy, he says with amusement, but then student Lee just wanted to explore Eastern Europe, not convert.

His inexhaustible interest in Europe, technology, business and entrepreneurship has, somewhat to his surprise, landed him into the pro-bono role of taskforce member, a job others say he throws himself into with great energy.

In Ireland last week for the second meeting of the taskforce, he is already forming some strong opinions, positive and negative, of Ireland and where we stand in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship.

“Ireland has done a great job building out business contacts in the [Silicon] Valley and Europe,” he says, as a general overview. “Not so though in Asia and Africa. Ireland is also weak in science and technology in the Valley. You don’t find many Irish PhDs in those areas or leading Valley COOs [chief operating officer] or CIOs [chief information officer]. Typically, Irish people in senior roles are business guys and not techies.”

Whether Ireland should be focusing on producing PhD students in science and technology is one area of government policy that has been questioned of late. Does it really matter?

“If Ireland is ever going to be a serious generator of IP [intellectual property], yes,” Lee says, but he adds that universities are not the only source of innovation.

“You need to look at a wider definition of innovation, look to the multinationals and the Irish research and business community.” His idea of a PhD is someone with business training and acumen too – not pure academic researchers.

Some now argue, though, that Ireland should instead focus on building products and services from others’ IP rather than trying to develop frontline technologies here, an attitude he dismisses with exasperation.

“Tell that to Finland. Tell that to Israel. It’s so defeatist.”

As it stands, we aren’t that great at developing products – our medium- to large-sized companies are less effective at doing so than similarly sized companies in other countries, he says, and we lack the kind of product development courses that are the norm in competitor countries.

We also have too many small companies and not enough medium to large indigenous firms. “The innovation agenda needs to be positioned away from small start-ups,” he says firmly.

Not only that: Lee wants companies to fail. “To recycle management talent,” he explains. “The idea is, it’s not about entrepreneurship, its about serial entrepreneurship.”

Ireland should focus on creating an innovation funnel that gradually filters out the non-runner companies so that a few larger, stronger companies go on to success. That’s a hard shift for governments focused on short-term job strategies because failures mean job losses, but talent gets recycled and longer-term, larger, healthier companies create a greater number of better jobs.

Now we have a system in which too many companies remain small and carry on for years at that small size, locking in management and investors so that fewer new companies are formed, he says. A healthier model is for faster “exits” where small companies either fail, are acquired or grow to the next stage.

“Ireland is not unique in this, though. I call that sector ‘frozen SMEs’. If you have that, you don’t get serial entrepreneurs, that talent never gets recycled. It’s a trap. Neither the management nor the investors exit and frozen SMEs are a greater burden on the economy.”

Figuring out how to thaw out that system is a major challenge. In part, that’s an interest of Lee’s Stanford programme, to look at what he calls “innovation systems” – the puzzle pieces that make up the whole innovation landscape.

To gain international visibility, Ireland also will require a flagship project, one that won’t be dropped by the wayside after some initial publicity – possibly the TCD/UCD “innovation alliance”.

What about a “Nokia of Ireland”- type project that has been mentioned by Government Ministers recently? “A Skype may be more the size for Ireland. I do think it’s worth going for a Skype-sized company, but if it’s going to go global, it’s going to be tough.” However, Ireland has many opportunities for global branding, he notes, forging a close identity with specific areas of technology expertise.

“That’s tough to do in energy and the environment” because projects are so large and long-term. “It still has to be in ICT. It could be consumer, it could be enterprise focused, it could be the semantic web, though that area is still very fragmented, but consolidation is coming and Ireland needs to be there at the right time.

“It could be about green IT, about cloud computing and data centres, software for centre management, smart grids and smart meters. It could be sensors or the ‘internet of things’ – lots of small devices out on the net,” Lee says.

“Ireland really has the opportunity to distinguish itself among European countries as having a robust innovation environment,” he argues. “No one else is stepping up to the plate.”