Within a few hours of the launch of the report of the Innovation Taskforce I was sharing a platform with one of its members, Chris Horn, at a small public meeting in Rathfarnham. The topic was science and education, and both of us were able to use the report in making some of our key points. It seems to me that the territory covered by the Taskforce report is one that has begun to interest the public, with at least a vague realisation dawning that we cannot return to old-style employment creation in labour-intensive industries. The game has changed, and we must adapt. What this report is really about, therefore, is how we go about doing that.
So how do we go about it? Well, in 60 different ways, if you use the list of recommendations in the report as your point of departure. Probably rather more, actually, as some of these recommendations are really clusters of related proposals. These range from the high level and visionary, via the large-scale operational, to rather more minor ones. Some are practical and easily capable of implementation, some are highly aspirational, some are fairly intangible. If you were to do what perhaps some will do, and open the report immediately at chapter 14 with its list of recommendations, you would be able to follow these easily enough, but you could perhaps wonder what the big overarching idea is. In fact, the foundation of the report is the notion of an innovation ‘ecosystem’, and the recommendations are intended to give effect to that. Like many such concepts, it can become a tad grating when repeated too often, but let us stick with it. The term is of course borrowed from science, where it refers to the interaction between organisms and their physical environment. It’s actually quite a useful metaphor, as it allows an exploration of the interaction between what the report calls the ‘different elements’ (including entrepreneurs, education, tax, finance, public institutions, R&D, and so forth). Actually, the ecosystem could have been developed a bit more, distinguishing for example between the ‘organisms’ (entrepreneurs, educators, officials etc) and the ‘physical environment’ (taxation, finance etc).
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Author: Ferdinand von Prondzynski
