The Business Innovation Programme is a new programme designed to help build in-company innovation capability and find high-quality jobs for unemployed graduates and professionals, to help industries and individuals with redundant skills.
The crash in the housing market and subsequent credit crunch has hit many countries hard. It has also created a generation of unemployed white-collar professionals in areas such as architecture, engineering and the legal profession. Many of these professionals had illustrious careers before the Great Recession, running their own firms and employing thousands of people across the world. In countries like Ireland the unemployment rate among the architecture profession is over 70%, while higher education produces new ones each year. After 5, 10 or 20 years in construction engineering or architecture what was a person to do? Very late for a major change in career, and how many of these could be turned into ‘smart economy’ software engineers? And worst of all, most of these people had good innovation potential – a history of innovative design, project management, cost control, planning, creative solutions - all elements needed for Innovation and new produce development.
At the same time Western countries are looking increasingly to their small and medium-sized business (SME) sector to be a catalyst for growth and job creation, yet these companies often lack the resources or in-house knowledge to drive innovation and new product development. In the European Union’s Innovation Index, Ireland in particular suffers from low innovation levels in its SME sector.
The Ryan Academy for Entrepreneurship in Dublin has come up with an innovative way to potentially solve these two problems at once. The first piece of the solution came from one of the Academy’s Advisory Board members, Michael Foley, who recommended that the Academy develop a programme to support Irish businesses in innovation and new product development. The result was a programme where participants get comprehensive training in innovation practices, processes and techniques. The second idea was a little closer to home.
“I had a close friend who was an engineer, who had spent a decade designing waste and water treatment facilities for all the new housing being built in Ireland,” said Gordon McConnell, Deputy-CEO of the Ryan Academy. “It was frustrating to watch him spend a year unemployed. He had a good design mind and a lot of skills that should have been applicable to other industries. That really helped to formulate what became the other key part of the Business Innovation Programme.”
The Business Innovation Programme, or BIP for short, was developed in early 2010 in the Academy, and accredited as a degree-level short course in the summer of that year. Originally planned for 60 students, the Irish government department who funded it suggested doubling that number to 120. “We weren’t sure we would get enough of the right people to apply, as our window for filling the course was tight. The whole Academy put in serious hours to get the application process finished and potential applicants went through several screening processes to make sure they would suit this intensive course.”
At the end of October 120 students, ranging from their late twenties to early fifties, started the BIP, with an emphasis on innovation, new product development and project management. These core modules have been supplemented with key master classes in everything from personal professional development to creativity to intellectual property identification and protection.
The really innovative part of the programme is that as well as the three full days a week of “pracademic’ course modules and team-based projects, the participants have also been through a selection process with Dublin-based companies, both Irish and international. These companies are now getting over 40 innovation teams of 2-3 participants each from the programme. These innovation teams will work on a variety of projects from new product development to market entry strategies to repositioning of product lines and service offerings. The companies get these resources for free, and the participants can keep any social welfare payments they are entitled to during the programme.
“The Ryan Academy team has put together a compelling programme of modules that give participants a really good layer of innovation thinking on top of their own experience and skills,” said McConnell.
The result? A recent survey of the group said that almost half were now thinking of setting up their own companies afterwards, though one of the aims of the BIP is that these people will be sought after either by the companies who took them on during the programme or by others. Just as companies often have to ‘pivot’ their business model to get out of a losing market or proposition, so too can more senior professionals faced with uncertainty in their own discipline.
This programme could be very easily applied in other countries, to help deal with the large layoffs from the construction industry in general. It could help create a new generation of experienced people with significant knowledge of not only the theory of innovation and new product development but also practical experience of doing it.
The Ryan Academy website is here: www.ryanacademy.ie
Details of the programme are here: http://www.dcu.ie/ryanacademy/bip.shtml
A blog about the BIP by one of the participants is here:
