Smart policy - Focus on hi-tech, rest will follow

Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Innovation Batt O’Keeffe announced yesterday that he is to chair a high-level implementation group to deal with the recommendations in the report of the innovation taskforce published in March.

The implementation group is drawn from both the private and public sectors with the aim of generating 117,000 jobs in the next 10 years.

The goal is to support technological ideas and processes that have commercial potential. The group’s brief is to ensure that the country makes the best use of the smart economy, and this can be achieved by ensuring that people with an innovative track record in the private sector are combined with the senior members of the various government departments that are likely to be involved. Those include the secretaries general of the Departments of the Taoiseach, Finance, Enterprise, Education and Communication.

“We want to make Ireland the best place in Europe to turn research and knowledge into products and services, and the best place in Europe to start and grow an innovative company,” Mr O’Keeffe said. The Taoiseach has asked his ministers to prioritise the implementation of the taskforce report recommendations.

Chris Horn, of the implementation group and a former chief executive officer of Iona Technologies, explained that the aim will be to pull Ireland out of recession by creating sustainable jobs and companies that will utilise innovation across the entire economy from agrifood, to tourism, to the hi-tech sector.

While particular emphasis is being placed on the hi-tech sector, not everybody will be suited to this area, but for every hi-tech job, there will be as many as four other supporting jobs in the rest of the economy. So if 100,000 hi-tech jobs can be generated, it would solve our current unemployment problems by generating up to four times as many additional jobs.

In order to generate those jobs it will be necessary to revitalise our educational system, energy policy, competitiveness and our labour laws. We have moved from having average energy prices to the most expensive in Europe, which undermines our competitiveness. Our educational system needs to prioritise those skills that facilitate high technology.

We cannot expect to operate effectively in the information age by preserving outdated policies just because they were effective in the era of the donkey and cart. A modern approach requires new thinking and the updating of our educational sector.

Learning a foreign language is good, but learning computer programming languages or how to create a spreadsheet could be even more useful.