Mr. Gearóid Mooney:

We believe that they are absolutely vital. One of the significant investments of recent years has been to ensure that each institute and university has a fit for purpose campus incubation which was co-funded by Enterprise Ireland. We also helped the institutes of technology fund the professional management of those incubation centres. The Deputy is absolutely right. Waterford is a shining example of how co-locating the incubation centre with the institute has led to the establishment of a software industry that probably should not have existed in Waterford. Unlike the normal impacts of business around there, this industry has been driven from the educational facility. Also in Waterford one sees the flow of graduates and researchers into local industry and start-ups. It is vitally important to equip the institutes properly for incubation. In 2011 and previous years there was a programme aimed specifically at linking companies in the region to the institutes and funding those projects. This evolved in 2012 into the Technology Gateway programme which was set up specifically to give the institutes the resources to reach out properly to industry and to engage with it. Rather than wait for industries to show up and ask for research, the institutes actively market the research. This is having quite a strong influence. Approximately 150 projects a year are completed between the institutes and companies. More and more the companies fund these, particularly the smaller projects, without an incentive from anybody else because the infrastructure exists with which they can interact.

Whatever shape the technological universities take, our main emphasis is to make sure that the infrastructure exists for us to get the maximum commercial impact out of them. Even if they are re-shaped with the infrastructure between the technology gateways, we do not see any reason they would not survive any kind of restructuring or re-shaping. We will continue to have the means to get the researchers engaged with companies in a commercially productive way.