Forfás (Ireland’s national policy advisory body for enterprise and science) has just published a new report called “Skills in Creativity, Design and Innovation”
It is 129 pages of definition, data, discussion and direction and makes pretty interesting reading. Link is below.

The report refers to Ireland’s past “outstanding economic performance” coming from a position of having:

  • Strong Supply of Skills
  • English
  • Low corporate tax rates
  • Low costs (relative to other political stable countries)

The expert group behind the report has compiled a lot of data and reports to give a picture of Ireland’s Innovation performance relative to other countries. For example this table are measures of Innovation on Which Ireland has a High or Low Rank on a List of 34* Countries EEA plus US, Japan, Turkey.

That’s not our unique value proposition now and the report rightfully acknowledges that countries that we might have thought of as “low cost competititors” are aiming for the same high added value smart economies that Ireland has targeted.

The expert group makes eight recommendations:

  1. The main responsibility for levelling up performance at third and fourth levels lies with colleges themselves. All Irish higher education institutions should set objectives in developing creativity and capability to innovate among their students as a part of their strategic plans and should regularly review progress against those objectives.
  2. Higher Education Institutions should make a major effort to break down the disconnect between SET and business disciplines.
  3. Support for the work of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment in reforming second level education.
  4. To assist Irish businesses in assessing their skills in creativity, design and innovation using the frameworks presented in this report, and material from other sources, and to help them to respond to opportunities and deficiencies that they identify, an audit tool for this purpose should be developed.
  5. Skillnets and its stakeholders should place an increasing emphasis on funding networks that target skills in creativity, design and innovation.
  6. While continuing to develop and promote the use of standard modules in personal development across different subject areas, FETAC should encourage providers of further education and training to adapt the content to the subject matter of each course.
  7. Organisations such as Enterprise Ireland, industry representative bodies and relevant higher education institutions should consider introducing a placement programme for Product Design graduates, broadly similar to the existing Export Orientation Programme.
  8. Agencies including Enterprise Ireland and the Higher Education Authority, as well as higher education institutions, should support the development of a strong design skills development infrastructure, building organically on the existing infrastructure.

Very interested in what the Irish Innovation community makes of this.

There clearly is a lot to welcome here and to think about.

I’m not sure an audit tool is exactly what Irish Business has been looking to improve innovation, perhaps neccesary but not sufficient, given the otherwise meaty stuff in the report.

Recommendation 5 is of particular interest given the recent debate on Innovation Networks in Ireland.

pdf here.

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