Intel conference address Ireland's economic future

DUBLIN:HOW CAN the European Union - and Ireland - remain competitive in research, innovation and high value manufacturing?

A broad panel at Intel's recent European Research and Innovation conference at their Irish headquarters in Leixliip gamely tackled those issues.

First up was Intel's Irish managing director, Jim O'Hara, who considered Ireland's position.

He recalled that "Intel chose Ireland for a number of reasons" including its pro-business policies, its workforce, EU membership, that it was an English speaking country and "it was a low cost location, in those days".

What's changed, he said, is that because of our own success we've lost our cost advantage.

This is something that can be addressed by reaching for "a higher level of capability", he said, and one of Ireland's advantages may well be its small size and flexibility.

"It's not the big that eat the small," he said, "it's the fast that eat the slow."

Georg Kelm, head of sector at Nanoelectronics at the European Commission said that while he believed market politics and tax policy had a role in attracting investment, he believed Ireland had some other quality that made the country so attractive to inward investment. Perhaps it was a special mentality, he said, "a readiness to make business, to take a risk and make solutions rather that running away."

"Setting up the environment is not enough if the entrepreneur is not there to take advantage," he said.

Lother Pfizner of the Frauenhofer Institute said that two things would help encourage research and innovation - encouraging collaboration with small-end medium enterprises and not just very large companies, "and we strongly have to encourage students to go into industries".

"Research is a tool and it's only going to be useful if it fits in the overall business strategy of a company. You really have to pick the tool that fits the overall objective," said Jim Lawlor of Enterprise Ireland.

He said answers for companies "don't always need to be so complicated" and that national strategic research models often have the answers that will suit a company best.

Finally, Martin Curley, director of IT Innovation at Intel Information Technology, Ireland, cautioned against measuring innovation simply on the basis of research and development expenditure. "The worst measurement is how much a company or country spends on research," he said.