€56M To Radically Reboot  Economy

Tánaiste Says Investment in Nine Competence Centres is a Radical Move Towards Collaborative Research

The Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade & Employment Mary Coughlan TD has provided a €56m boost to companies that want to succeed in the Smart Economy. The money will enable 180 companies  who might have been past rivals to work together in researching new approaches to common problems in nine transformational Competence Centres.

Conceived by the Department  of Enterprise, Trade & Employment as part of the Government's Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation, the nine new Competence Centres will be delivered jointly by Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland. Clusters of companies will work together to overcome common research challenges and drive opportunities for innovation, growth and jobs.

Enterprise Ireland CEO Frank Ryan, said: "These centres are a radical step in enabling companies in Ireland to
achieve the kind of transformational change that is required to re-boot our economy.

"We have chosen an industry-led Competence Centre model in partnership with IDA Ireland, as it is regarded as the most sophisticated R&D vehicle that currently exists internationally.

"The centres will dramatically increase the amount of intellectual property available to Irish companies that they might otherwise never get access to,"  Ryan (pictured above) concluded.

Launching the Competence Centres the Tánaiste said: "Today we are marking a departure from the traditional approach to R&D in favour of a collaborative system where companies that might ordinarily be competitors agree to share knowledge, risk and the rewards of pooling their research resources. The Competence Centres initiative offers Ireland the
opportunity to excel in nine key sectors. These industry-led centres will convert the research undertaken into new products and services, leading to growth in export markets and jobs in Ireland".

Five centres are already  established  in Bioenergy & Biorefining, IT Innovation, Applied Nanotechnology, Composite
Materials and Microelectronics.

Four more -  in Manufacturing Productivity; Energy Efficiency; Financial Services and E-learning - are at different

stages of completion. Each centre will be based in a University where it will get support from partner Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) to further the research needs of the companies. Around  180 SMEs  are expected to work with multinational companies at the nine centres.

Enterprise Ireland has already ring-fenced €32 million to fund the first five centres and it anticipates investing a further €24 million over the next five years at the others.

Speaking about the benefits of participation for the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) companies that are involved, IDA Ireland CEO Barry O'Leary, said: "Companies like Intel, Xilinx, Pfizer and Microsoft are engaged in these Competence Centres so they can access the collective expertise of Ireland's top universities and work with Irish SMEs in partnership.

"This sort of collaboration is charting the direction of Ireland's Smart Economy and is a hugely welcome development amongst the FDI community here that rely so heavily on the generation of new products and services from research," said O'Leary.

Six Universities are already involved: NUI Galway, NUI Maynooth,UCD, UL,TCD (CRANN) and UCC (Tyndall) and more HEIs are expected to join. One of the key benefits to HEIs will be getting access to industry and the real problems it faces. This will help them to align their research agendas with industry needs.

The Competence Centres are expected to generate greater levels of R&D activity in Irish companies and overseas companies based in Ireland. Real impacts expected within five years include:

• Transferring at least 80 pieces of commercially viable intellectual property in the form of technology licences
• Over 60 engineers and scientists  will be directly employed in the centres working on industrially relevant research
• A further 60-80 industry personnel working on centre research projects, maintaining the centre's market focus and driving a culture of innovation

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