Mr. Declan Doyle:

I welcome the opportunity to address the committee. I will give a brief overview of IT Carlow and its current position. I will then hand over to Mr. Brian Ogilvie, who will discuss the enterprise development aspects of what we do in the institute. I will then outline some of the challenges and opportunities we face.

The institute is committed to research and enterprise-related activities. We will discuss some of these as we make our presentation. In common with the other institutes of technology, IT Carlow is a little over 40 years old. We intend to maintain our technology and technician-based training at levels 6 and 7 on the national framework. Jointly, the institutes have committed to this. We work right up to PhD level. While I will not speak for Waterford Institute of technology, I consider both institutions to be university-level institutions. IT Carlow delivers programmes in three counties, namely, Wicklow, Wexford and Carlow. We also have a very strong initiative with the Defence Forces, in particular, and the Irish Aviation Authority. We have strength in the areas of aviation and aircraft and aerospace engineering.

We deliver 82 programmes, from bio-environmental sciences through to engineering, ICT, business and accounting. We ask ourselves from where demand is coming. We need to examine what our graduates are doing and the types of companies to which they are adding value. We have a very strong humanities department and are providing courses in youth and community development. This is adding to the social fabric of the region.

In addition to facilitating Masters degrees by research, particularly in biotechnology, software engineering and electronics engineering, we have taught programmes, such as an MBA and MSc in IT management. There are other programmes listed in the documentation we have provided.

One challenge we face, which is partly good, is filling our postgraduate places for research and taught programmes, particularly in the areas of ICT and biotechnology. Our final-year honours degree graduates are successfully gaining employment, including quite well-paid employment, in the region and beyond. This is a very positive sign. As a consequence, our business graduates, particularly accounting graduates, are also finding employment relatively quickly after graduation owing to the upturn in export-led business. Obviously, there is a need for graduates with business skills.

One of the most important issues for us, which will require much of the energy of all our staff over the next couple of years, is the development of the technological university. I assume there will be questions on this. Between February 2012, when the landscape document was issued by the HEA, and 31 July, when the joint submission was made by the south-east institutes of technology, much work was done on developing linkages and collaboration between the two colleges. This came to a halt while the submissions were being reviewed. It is only in the past couple of weeks that the Minister has issued recommendations and made a decision. The work that will be done on stage 2 of the application will be an important part of the activities of our college in the next six to nine months. I hope that, from there, we will proceed to stage 4 and eventual redesignation as a technological university.

We are here to talk about our RDI activities and the ways we develop entrepreneurship. People in the room will be familiar with Maslow and his psychological model. He said that when a country was trying to build and develop, it did not need 100 philosophers, it needed 100 entrepreneurs. Much of what we have been doing in Carlow in recent years is developing our infrastructure to support business ideas through technology transfer, protection of intellectual property and the development of fully commercial organisations which provide jobs. Mr. Ogilvie will talk the committee through the model we use in the college.