Mary Mulvihill

It was good to read Chris Horn’s provocative and analytical post this week, contrasting Ireland with Silicon Valley, and arguing for an Irish ‘innovation system’. In essence, if I have got him right, he is arguing for a system that encourages entrepreneurs to start-up and get rich, or fail and start-up again.

There is much to be said for this: if what we want are jobs (smart or otherwise), then jobs (and entrepreneurs) are what we should encourage. Just as we created a property boom by creating generous incentives for the construction industry, perhaps we now need incentives to encourage an ‘intellectual property boom’.

But for this, it seems to me, we need to be more aware of the fundamental differences between innovation and research, and how one will lead to jobs, but the other may not, or at best indirectly.

Research, it is often said, is a way of turning money into knowledge, where innovation turns knowledge into money.

Research turns money into knowledge.

Innovation turns knowledge into money

Research is: long-term, curiosity driven, disciplinary in nature, and something you do yourself, ‘just in case’.

Innovation, in contrast, is: short term, problem driven — and therefore interdisciplinary — something you do ‘just in time’, but also (significantly) something you don’t have to do yourself, but which you can import.

Ireland, as a relatively small country, might hope to contribute perhaps at most 1% to the world’s research efforts.  But to innovate  — to create those smart jobs — we need access to the full 100% of the world’s research efforts.

The key is to make sure we choose and do that 1% well in the long-term but, in the short term, to make sure we build innovation systems that give us access to the 100%.

Much of our national policy now, and over the past decade, has been to support research. This is fine in the long-term, but won’t necessarily translate into jobs in the short-term. For that, we need innovation systems and supports, and incentives for entrepreneurs and intellectual property developers.

At the end of the day, you get what you pay for.

If farmers are paid for corncrake-friendly farming, then we get corncrake-friendly farming.  If we want more corncrakes, we need to pay farmers for the number of corncrakes successfully hatched on their land.

Jobs are like corncrakes (and not just because they are both endangered!): if we want jobs, then we should provide direct support for jobs.

And, if we can successfully create innovation systems, entrepreneurs and smart jobs, then more students might be tempted to study science as a route to those jobs.