WHEN IT comes to the promises of a smart economy and an innovation island, it’s time to make the rhetoric match reality.

While we can now boast some truly inspiring innovators from the pool of start-ups and hothouse projects underway, their success is the exception rather than the rule. There’s an ever-growing list of schemes and initiatives that need to be introduced to spur further creativity, but one of the core issues remains education reform.

The former dean of the UCD school of business Tom Begley succinctly argued in the Financial Times recently that our current system “promotes rote memorisation, formulaic answers and a teach-to-the-test mentality . . . As a result (the students) start college sorely lacking in the ability to analyse, critique, synthesise, formulate substantive arguments and write essays that engage these skills.”

The question then arises as to how well these traits are instilled at third level before the students enter the working world. In the wide-ranging debate over our educational direction, we must also consider not only the ideal training for a well-rounded and creative population, but also how these traits match the changing needs of the employment market.

It’s trite to say that rote education creates robots for the modern production line, but if we wish to attract more of the inventive and creative firms that are now locating on Dublin’s Docklands – in what has been dubbed ’Silicon Dock’ – we need to provide them with creative talent that boasts the ability to contribute. The same demand for such talent is being made by start-ups with very limited funds for staffing. They want people who actively contribute to the growth of the business, not merely follow orders.

Most industry sectors are facing massive disruptive change in their business environments, caused by the frontier-like opportunities from new technology. It offers enormous opportunities for all forms of creativity and innovation, where ideally every employee can play a part. Employers need their staff to participate. Foreign multinationals need Irish subsidiaries to be more than low-tax production plants. And Ireland needs a workforce that can be creative. To achieve this we need to reassess the education on offer.