Fostering Innovation in Irish Innovation Policy

Over the past decade or so there have been many radical changes in the Irish national system of innovation and how it is administered. To some extent these administrative changes were a consequence of the financial crisis and the subsequent need to control public expenditure. This paper argues that it is now time to reassess these changes and to consider if the innovation system and its governance is fit for purpose for the challenging times ahead. The management of the Irish system of innovation is now radically out of line with systems in peer, small developed countries such as Sweden, Denmark and Finland. A particular problem is the absence of any independent mechanism for providing expert policy advice to the Government and its agencies on the various aspects of innovation. In large part, this is a consequence of the 2014 government decision to dissolve Forfás (and, with it, the Advisory Council for Science, Technology & Innovation) and to transfer its innovation-related staff into the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation. However, the Forfás functions around strategy and analysis have now been so diluted that, for the first time since the 1960s, Ireland does not have a vital element of the national innovation system – a mechanism to provide a continuously updated source of expert policy advice and evaluation on all aspects of innovation. The main recommendation in this paper is creating a new-style Irish Innovation Council that will take a holistic approach to the formulation and evaluation of policy. A Council drawn from business, academia and government/public service would be in keeping with the approach previously and successfully adopted. Such a Council would need expert secretarial support. A detailed argument for this and the functions of such a body are provided in the paper. Other recommendations are: conducting a Foresight exercise and commissioning an OECD Review of Irish Innovation Policy.