Brian Cowen’s Innovation Taskforce, Innovative Policy

An Bord Snip reports tomorrow, with cuts to social welfare and services likely to top its list of recommendations (if our Sunday’s are to be believed). In the meantime though, Brian Cowen has announced an Innovation taskforce whose aim will be something about getting Ireland toward the Smart Economy. The members will be people who are charged with advising “the Government on options to increase innovation and entrepreneurship and to ensure that investment in science, technology and research translates into high-value jobs and sustainable economic growth.”

This is excellent, laudable stuff. This is the way of the future, surely. So why is it that this quango is being added on top of the bodies in Enterprise Ireland, the IDA, the HEA, Science foundation Ireland, the entire Dept. of Enterprise Trade and Employment and the multiplicity of business networks already out there?

It isn’t the most innovative route to innovation in the economy it seems to me, a suspicion backed up by a glance at the membership list:

Innovation taskforce: membership

Dermot McCarthy, secretary general, Department of the Taoiseach (chairman)

Lionel Alexander, vice-president general manager of Hewlett Packard (Manufacturing) Ltd and chairman of the Government’s Enterprise Feedback Group

Prof Don Barry, president, University of Limerick

Dr Hugh Brady, president, University College Dublin

Damien Callaghan, investment director, Intel Capital

Michael Carmody, president, Institute of Technology Tralee

Dr Steven Collins, co-founder chief technical officer, Kore Virtual Machines

Ned Costello, chief executive, Irish Universities Association

Joe Harford, chairman of the Government’s High Level Action Group on Green Enterprise

Dr John Hegarty, provost, Trinity College Dublin

Dr Chris Horn, co-founder of Iona Technologies

Dr Brian Kelly, founder chief executive, Celtic Catalysts

Dr Burton Lee, director, European entrepreneurship programme, Stanford University; managing partner, Innovarium Ventures

John Lynch, chief executive, Merrion Pharmaceuticals

Tara MacMahon, IP lawyer

Dan MacSweeney, chief executive, Carbery Group

Bryan Mohally, vice-president of supply chain operations Europe, Johnson and Johnson

Mark O’Donovan, director, Raglan Capital

Barry O’Sullivan, senior vice-president, Cisco Systems

Dr Paul Roben, president, Celtic Consulting

Anna Scally, partner, KPMG

The proliferation of government and multi-national execs on this body suggests it is a little more than the simple innovation quango, it is a direct route (another one) for the policy makers in the corporate world to get direct access to government, make their needs/demands clear and ensure the whole thing is heard.

The list of tasks that it is charged with… ” increase the commercialisation of research and development; speed up the link-up of private and public organisations, and to identify policy measures that are needed to support the concept of Ireland as an innovation hub”…are all under the purview of other areas of the civil service – what happens to these areas?

What we have here is a declaration of strategy alright, but as Michael Hennigan points out on Finfacts, it is more of the same.

Taskforces are very popular in the Irish governance system and the usual task is to give the impression of action. In this case, the group selected is dominated by third level officials who are currently in receipt of spades of taxpayer cash.
One of the appointees, Ned Costello , chief executive, Irish Universities Association, recently wrote a paen to existing policy in the Irish Times, to which Finfacts provided some inconvenient truths in response…

Whether the insider dominated 28-strong taskforce provides something more substantial than ministerial blather, remains to be seen.

I doubt it.With Cowen’s leading civil servant in the chair, it will be politeness all-around when at this perilous time, iconoclasm and the courage to tell little emperors, they’ve no clothes, is so badly need.

I agree, not least because of a general jaundice with the idea of a taskforce but this one in particular is not innovatively put together in the slightest. It is instead populated with a clear vision that Ireland must be returned to the 1992-2002 model of growth. There are plenty out there who argue that the model then is not the model for now – Ireland has to prove it is capable of generating indigenous enterprise and fostering capacity to compete globally. Whether this latest quango is the means to do it is unclear.

As Karl Whelan notes over on Irish Economy, the capacity of our universities to foster this kind of R&D/Development and innovation is unproven and possible exaggerated. If that is the case then we are relying on a hanful of civil servants, corporate directors from mulitnationals and a few local business people to come up with ways to get Irish companies into the smart economy model. If we are utterly reliant on inviting in FDI for the purpose, we are building another house of cards to collapse when we become too expensive.

New business is formed by people outside of universities – generally in Ireland there is such a famine of VC and startup that many pare back their vision in the first two years to stay alive and hope for funding once they have proven they won’t shrivel and die. (And just why isn’t Patrick Collison on this taskforce?) Instead of fostering innovation in young companies – encouraging them to do things differently and develop – the system forces them to copy what works in the hope of being alive long enough to get funding to expand. That is hardly innovative, and this taskforce doesn’t strike me as grasping that particular nettle as others have.