I see a great swell of mindset change on the ground in business leaders – they have stopped waiting for things to happen and we are starting to create our own change within aspects of our business and our customers. This needs to be captured and turned to positive energy in creating new business opportunities for export, specifically for Ireland Inc in creating revenue and employment.

Currently there is very little support for them and business leaders will not pay for new programs – unless they get value and impact for their business, so training or listening to consultants is not on their agenda.

So programs that deliver hands on interventions on how to apply practical (and as I term) NON TECHNICAL INNOVATION tools and techniques to help them get from A to B with their vision / plans / opportunities.

But don’t expect them to pay, cash flow is serious issues for every indigenous business, so payment when you deliver tangible inputs and results.

Other barriers or hurdles, as I like to call them, as I show my clients how to go under as well as over – I have had one business colleague who recently turned down by one of our major banks for extra overdraft for 65k to complete client work, ended up going to a minister who intervened and got approval. Naturally hefty personal guarantees from third parties were required for same.

Some thing seriously wrong if we have to go to minister to get loan approval and then they get granted at different level – what criteria had changed?

Others I am directly dealing with now involve getting funding from outside of Ireland and this is great but carries risks for Ireland Inc in lost revenue and employment with two high tech businesses relocated to London and another keeping a token presence here for patent revenue requirements.

So what to do, Task Force and reports are all very good, but need a core team to drive this activity at the highest level across all agencies and align policy with programs and make collaborations a reality with great urgency.

This team must command respect and have excellent Project Mangers, sure they must be some in Different Departments who could drivers of this type of activity.

We have all the resources we need in Ireland already and all the finance we need either buried in personal accounts which need tax breaks, EU funds and then the right type of risk and SME focused business bank mindset which links funding with assigned staged interventions and joined up thinking between a team and program of coordinated activities.

This can not be done easily or readily by the current incumbents as need a new and higher level Attack Team as I would like to call them – to create new ways of doing things and deliver on faster return to economic growth and turn in our employment back to creating sustainable jobs – in the short term ( next 9 to 18 months) .

He is right, the context I am experience is indigenous businesses are exploring seeking new business opportunities and many realising at long last that exporting is the only sustainable option. But this is a complex process and requires the linking up of many different factors to deliver success, and no guidance on the best tools and techniques to use.

Up to now we have quite rightly built up our levels into Research and Development, which I term as technical innovation (38m allocated to HEI this year) – but Booze Allan Hamilton show that outcome from this investment is longterm ( min 5 years, tpically 15 years and ROI of 3%) and with 455,000 unemployed, this is not a good bet on its own.

What we need to balance this with non technical innovation tools around identifying unmet and hidden customer and market needs ( called Demand or Market led Innovation) and also developing innovative business models that can create these significant value offerings, capture this value within the business and deliver it effectively through using new revenue streams and collaborations. Like combining a Michael O ‘Leary with new technology, this is the trick we have ignored.

Some facts to evidence this by:-

“Analysis of data shows however that more than 50% of innovative firms innovate without performing R&D” Source: Innobarometer 2007 Survey

“These companies however are growing at the same rate as their R&D counterparts, through the use of alternative creative & design activities and processes to bring products and services to market”

Source: Commission of The European Communities, Design as a Driver of User Centred Design 2009

However hope is on the horizon as Enterprise Ireland are reviewing these tools and techniques and possible piloting programs around there use, but needs to happen faster, we need to allocate significant more funding.

But all this is happening in a unplanned fashion which is delaying our route to recover, there are some good regional initiatives underway around different themes and also getting educational bodies and enterprises to work together.

But without an intensive set of program run regionally – every thing will happen in slow motion and that means reduced revenue intake for the Government and extending our journey to economic recovery and a turn in employment by a needless 18 – 24 months.

What you and your colleagues will get from this workshop:
* Bring new innovation practices into your business
* Create sustainable business models for generating new revenue
* Rapidly amend existing offerings to tap into new markets
* Take skills learned to easily prototype and create new products and offerings

Using the massively expanding travel security market as an example (though these principles work for all industries) we’ll see how marketing companies, training companies, web service developers, lighting manufacturers and dozens more company types can all bring their products and services into this market.

InterTradeIreland have commissioned industry experts, INNOVATOR and Centre for Irish & European Security, to design and run this workshop.

The workshop will be most relevant to SMEs from all business sectors whose focus is:
Short to medium new business opportunities
Delivering services, products and processes which meet real customer needs

For this programme, the tarket market was the Civil Security Sector. This sector is valued at €26bn in Europe alone and is growing at 5% per annum. Having only scratched the surface, we have uncovered 15 new business opportunities, all of which have been validated as “unmet needs” by lead customers. These opportunities, along with key insights will be presented by civil security experts.

INNOVATOR and the Centre for Irish & European Security are available to provide expert mentoring & support to interested companies, throughout and on completion of the programme. More info on Innovator website.

The presentations kicked off at, starting with Minister Billy Kelleher. He was very enthusiastic about the whole area of Demand Led Innovation and said that the government will need to really start focusing on helping SMEs to grow their businesses through innovation, which is not all about R&D and Large Enterprises.  Chris Horn spoke about current Innovation initiatives in Ireland, including his own work through the innovation task force.  He spoke of the importance of innovating for the short term so that SMEs achieve results in 2010 and he acknowledged that Demand Led Innovation was certainly a great way to achieve this.

The launch took the form of an open forum where attendee’s were given the opportunity to ask questions to the panel. It was great to hear such positive feedback about the area of Demand Led Innovation, which is quite a new concept in Ireland (as user-centered design expert, Toby Scott, rightly pointed out). A great introduction to a programme which “innovates innovation” (or so says Aidan Gough, Policy Director– let there be many more!