A recurring issue for Irish business over the past number of years has been the shortage of skills in key areas. Enterprise Ireland has been working to address this by linking companies with graduates and PhD students from Ireland’s globally competitive research and university system.
Christian Stafford is head of Knowledge Transfer Ireland (KTI), a team within Enterprise Ireland set up as a bridge between the research ecosystem and industry.
“Historically, our work has been supporting research collaborations and the flow of intellectual property, research and ideas into industry,” he explains. “A new area for us is the flow of talent from the research system into industry. The best form of knowledge transfer is people. If you get really high-calibre research talent into industry it will have much greater impact.”
This will help Irish companies to develop their innovation capacity. “One of the ways we measure industry’s growth potential and innovation capacity is a metric known as business expenditure on research and development (BERD),” says Stafford. “At present, between 70 and 75 per cent of BERD in Ireland is accounted for by the multinational sector. The remainder is indigenous Irish industry and SMEs. We need to rebalance that and build the research and innovation capacity of SMEs. One of the ways of doing that is by bringing high-calibre research talent into the companies. This is a key enabler for companies to grow and scale.”
This is particularly important due to Ireland’s falling ranking in the Global Innovation Index, says Micol Martinelli, national director for the Horizon Europe programme at Enterprise Ireland.
“This is an issue that hasn’t received enough media attention,” she says. “Ireland fell from seventh in 2015 to 23rd in 2022. The innovation performance globally of Ireland Inc fell quite rapidly and significantly. We are trying to help Irish enterprise boost its research and innovation activity and capability through an injection of research talent from the university and third-level system.”
That injection of talent is being facilitated by a number of programmes run by Enterprise Ireland. “We want to capitalise on talent being nurtured in the third-level institutions,” says Martinelli. “We have come up with initiatives for masters-level graduates, PhDs and post-docs, and principal investigators. At the core of initiatives is the recognition that there are so many other initiatives already funded by other agencies. It doesn’t make sense to compete with them. We need to complement and achieve synergies with them.”
The first of these initiatives is the Work Ready Graduate Training Programme, which Stafford describes as almost like a finishing school for graduates. This programme, which was piloted last year, sees graduates working with an industry partner of one of Enterprise Ireland’s national network of technology centres for a 12-month period.
“We have nine centres across the country,” says Stafford. “These are large-scale applied centres which are close to industry needs and are excellent hubs for talent development. The programme takes graduates from university and places them on structured training programme for a year in an industry environment. They get exposure to industry and research in a collaborative environment and gain additional skills.”
The aim is to provide a pipeline of experienced graduates that industry can recruit.
The second initiative is the PhD Start programme which is about to launch. “We are trying to get PhD-level talent transferred into industry, particularly SMEs,” says Stafford. About 1,500 PhDs graduate every year from the Irish third-level system and a lot of them end up in academia or multinational companies. Only a small number go to SMEs. The programme aims to open up the potential of a career in indigenous industry for PhD talent.”
Enterprise Ireland is incentivising SMEs to hire PhDs, paying 50 per cent of their salary for a two-year period.
“We have leveraged the HEA Odyssey scheme for this,” Martinelli adds. “This is a pilot scheme run earlier this year for PhDs to diversify their skill sets. We are giving 50 PhDs who have gone through that pilot programme the opportunity to work with an Irish SME on a two-year placement.”
Another initiative is Sustainability Fit, a follow-up to the agency’s highly successful Career Fit programmes which will launch January 2025.
“We are going to recruit 50 high-calibre PhDs worldwide to work on collaborative research projects between the Irish third-level system and industry with a focus on sustainability,” says Martinelli. “This is a highly mobile workforce but the majority of the graduates who participated in the Career Fit programmes have chosen to stay here in Ireland. In fact, one of them has set up a medtech company and is in the process of raising venture capital funding at present.”