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The Innovation Game
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Why Ireland is well placed to become a leader in RD&I

A pipeline of skilled talent is universally acknowledged as a key attraction for multinationals looking to invest in Ireland — particularly when they carry out research, development and innovation (RD&I) here.

That trend is reflected in figures from IDA Ireland, the government agency with the job of attracting inward investment.

In the past year, global big hitters such as Huawei, Qualcomm, Analog Devices, 3M, Bosch and pharma giant Abbott, among many others, have all announced R&D investments in Ireland.

RD&I
Almost half of all IDA clients have an R&D mandate in Ireland

The number of R&D staff in IDA Ireland’s client companies has risen by 55 per cent over the last five years.

Source: IDA Ireland

Smart-chip giant Qualcomm has been in Ireland since 2015, and its €78m expansion of R&D activities in Cork will create hundreds of skilled roles. Paul Kelleher, Engineering Senior Director, ascribes Qualcomm’s success in Ireland to the engineers joining the company. “The engineers coming out of college are smarter, more skilled and have this flexibility to adapt to changing environments.”

It is a concept which resonates with Martin Cotter, Senior Vice president of Industrial, Consumer & Multi-Markets at US semiconductor company Analog Devices (AD). The company’s latest R&D enterprise in Ireland is the ADI Catalyst Centre, a 9000 sq m facility on its Limerick campus. Here the organisation works collaboratively with customers, including Johnson & Johnson, and research partners in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and digital healthcare.

#11

Ireland is 11th in global scientific rankings for overall quality of scientific research.

Source: IDA Ireland
RD&I
SFI Ireland partners with…

812 international bodies, and has signed 900 collaborative research agreements with 470 global companies.

Source: SFI

Cotter attributes the success of AD’s Irish operations in part to its workers bringing an “automatic team dynamic,” an “inclination to connect” and being “willing to cope with uncertainty” in solving problems. That collaborative mindset has made AD’s Irish site a hub for its European R&D. “We work closely with teams all across the world. Ireland is too small a country not to be open.”

This will undoubtedly sit well with IDA Ireland, which sees R&D as a driver for competitiveness, productivity and economic growth. The agency has set a target of €3.8bn in cumulative RD&I investments over the next four years in areas such as robotic process automation, AI and digitisation.

Key to RD&I in Ireland is a model that sees multinationals such as Analog Devices and Qualcomm collaborating on research with a network of 16 research centres part funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), the country’s chief funder of science research. This is strengthened through several close partnerships with third-level institutions such as the University of Limerick and University College Cork.

With some funding coming from industry, research at SFI centres cover strategic areas of importance for Ireland, including pharma, big data, medical devices, nanotechnology, applied geosciences, software, digital content and telecommunications. Crucially, SFI will only fund centres whose research is internationally peer-reviewed as excellent.

“Companies can access publicly funded research and collaborate with those researchers quite easily,” says Dónal Travers, IDA Ireland’s Head of Technology, Consumer and Business Services, “with well-defined structures for working out who owns IP at the end of it, and how that IP might be used and leveraged”.

246

In 2020, the IDA secured 246 new FDI investments, of which almost 20 per cent were in R&D.

Source: IDA Ireland
We work closely with teams all across the world. Ireland is too small a country not to be open.
Martin Cotter,
Senior Vice president of Industrial, Consumer & Multi-Markets at Analog Devices

Qualcomm, for example, is collaborating with CeADAR, the SFI centre for applied AI. “We’re trying to predict where we want to be in three years’ time, and so we’re joining with organisations that will give us an insight,” says Kelleher, “but [we] also discuss with them about what they need to be looking at going forward.”

Dónal Travers says that Ireland’s 25 per cent R&D tax credit, introduced in 2004, is an important incentive for companies, removing some of the costs of building IP and solving technical challenges through innovation. These businesses can also leverage cash incentives from IDA Ireland that help accelerate and scale R&D activities.

Professor Mark Ferguson, Director General of SFI, is confident of Ireland’s potential as an innovation-rich economy. “We are already the most R&D-efficient country in Europe. For every euro spent on R&D in Ireland, we produce more innovation outputs than any other country in Europe. Our aim now is to move to being an innovation leader.”

Ferguson is pleased that Ireland now has a cabinet-level minister with responsibility for higher education and science. Simon Harris, who heads the Department for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science has described continued R&D investment as “critical” for the economy.

Ireland’s start-up culture, which has thrived over the past 15 years, is another important factor in the evolution of Ireland’s innovation landscape. As IDA’s Travers points out, blue chip names such as Verizon, Intel, Apple, Google and Bloomberg have all been keen to acquire start-ups and more established indigenous companies over the last five years for their innovation and talent.

“We then see those acquiring companies building research and innovation activities at scale,” he says. A good example of this is IBM, which has bought Irish companies and established a scaled software capability in Dublin – also the location of its only research lab in the EU. “That’s because of the ability to access the research ecosystem here and to leverage new innovation.”

Ireland’s trump card will always be its agile and creative workforce. “Irish people are considered to be problem-solvers — you could call it an X factor,” Travers concludes. “Companies need creative people who are not afraid to be bold and push the boundaries, but in a way that doesn’t put their employer at risk, and Irish people have a good understanding of how to do that. It’s hard to put a figure against that in terms of value, but it’s a really important factor.”

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Ireland’s 25 per cent R&D tax credit, introduced in 2004, is an important incentive for companies.

Source: IDA Ireland
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