There are a bunch of innovation-supporting activities afoot, but will they make a difference, asks Karlin Lillington

INNOVATION IS in the air – or at least in a broad range of company formation, technology transfer, policy report and innovation centre announcements that have emerged in recent weeks.

The centrepiece of such announcements was the long-awaited report from the Government’s Innovation Taskforce, which set a context for several announcements and activities.

In the same week, Trinity College Dublin announced that 10 new spin-off companies had emerged from the university in 2009, with the support of the university’s technology transfer office. Two weeks before, University College Dublin’s technology transfer and company incubation centre, NovaUCD, announced UCD had produced seven spin-offs last year.

Last week, the Irish Technology Leadership Group (ITLG) in Silicon Valley announced a new Irish Innovation Center to support Irish technology companies in the valley. Meanwhile, the Government was pondering the Innovation Taskforce report, and considering how to make Ireland an innovation hub.

That is just a small slice of what’s going on around the State. Most universities and many other third-level institutions have structured technology transfer programmes and, in some cases, incubation centres to support their start-ups. A range of accelerator programmes and support facilities exist, from Kerry to Dublin. A few new venture funds are coming online.

But is all this activity more minimal window dressing and policy talk than action? Are the spin-out start-ups viable companies? Do accelerator programmes actually help? And is the Innovation Taskforce report a good action plan, or is it, as economist Colm McCarthy complained in an article last week, “vague” and too “aspirational”?

Out on Twitter and on blogs, the report itself seems to have had a mostly positive reception, with concern centring on how – and whether – it will be implemented.

Serial entrepreneur Dylan Collins, currently chief executive of games company Jolt Online, was one of many expressing such reservations, alongside general praise for the report itself.

The report is “a great start, but we have to make sure the implementation committee are businesspeople who can go in and make it happen in a short timeframe. It comes down to implementation. If you don’t have doers, it’s going to continue being talk.”

On the broader range of innovation activity happening around the island, Innovation Taskforce member Damien Callaghan of Intel Capital Ireland says: “I think it is a good start, and represents the fruits of a lot of activity and investment in Enterprise Ireland, and lots of people who got involved in tech transfer at Maynooth, TCD, Cork, UCD and other institutions.”

But as a basis for that desired jackpot of tens of thousands of “smart economy” jobs in Ireland – perhaps not. Callaghan notes that fellow taskforce member Burton Lee of Stanford said at the group’s first meeting that universities only generate 8 per cent of start-ups in Silicon Valley. Irish universities are unlikely to better the record of valley academic innovation stalwarts such as Stanford University.

Still, it is a starting point and the basis for an overall target, he says – if Irish universities could be spinning out about 70 companies a year, this would be a good proportion.

But Collins has some scepticism on whether existing university graduate and PhD programmes in Ireland have enough commercial focus. “If you are not making sure those research programmes are geared to a commercial process, that technology transfer isn’t going to go very far,” he says. “You need to have commercial awareness in those programmes from the start, not some guy at the end trying to shoehorn that work into a company.”

The broader goal, as the taskforce report notes, is to have the State generating considerably more start-ups annually from all sources.

“If you wish to drive an innovation economy, you have to have a large number of companies starting – and failing,” Callaghan says. Most will ultimately fail, or be sold early on, but this is part of the whole innovation process – recycling capital, expertise and people back into the system, he argues.

On the economic front, Callaghan sees the taskforce report as a complement to the McCarthy report. “The McCarthy report talked a lot about the need to get public finances under control, but what it didn’t cover was where you need to make investments to get economic growth and high quality jobs. If getting finances under control gets us back to where we were – well, the world has moved on. It ain’t good enough.

“The thing is, how can we dramatically increase the growth of our companies? There are really three issues. One, how can we create more big companies? These serve as role models. Two, how do you ramp start-ups? And three, how do you attract and embed the multinationals?”

Those topics are at the heart of the taskforce report. Responding to criticisms that the report doesn’t adequately explain how such goals would be achieved or funded, he notes that smaller, detailed reports from taskforce members fed into the final product. These often go into detail of the “hows”, he says – and have been submitted to the Government but were not released in the public report because such information could be commercially and competitively sensitive.

Increasing private capital investment is one major goal, and widely recognised as a problem in Ireland. Collins notes, “The VC industry in this country has been broken for years.”

Callaghan agrees that raising capital is a huge issue. “Getting the capital to get to the next major milestone” is very hard for Irish companies. “Irish companies typically have to invest a lot of time for relatively small amount of capital. They need better seed capital.” It’s important to increase the quality and quantity of the venture capital community in Ireland, he says.

Collins notes that while innovation centres and support programmes can be helpful to companies in Ireland, “the biggest problem we have is people aren’t getting out and meeting people, especially in Silicon Valley. There needs to be a focus, a more proactive policy in Enterprise Ireland, for example, to get companies out to Silicon Valley. More roadshows. Showcase more companies.”

Callaghan thinks that organisations like the ITLG and its new Irish Innovation Center can play a major role in supporting such aims, as well as harnessing the Irish diaspora, a key objective that came out of Farmleigh.

“I would look at the ITLG as the diaspora organising itself to be supportive. And the innovation centre is really a place for Irish companies to have a base in the valley to have access to that whole environment and resources.”