Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will deal with the Enterprise Ireland element and my colleague Deputy English will comment on SFI.

We expect that there will be a full drawdown of EI funding. The truth as the Deputy will know, is that the drawdown in any one year is partly a reflection of the number of approvals in previous years. What was happening in the more difficult years was that plans were postponed or did not happen, that resulted in the drawdown being lower and did not fulfil the expectations. Some of the funds had slower drawdown. We had established an innovation fund or a seed and venture fund and with the drop in the number of start-ups there was a drop in the take up of the funds. Now that things are back, it looks like we will be on target.

We have steadily built up the number of high performance start-ups. There were 104 high performance start-up businesses last year with an associated 2,100 jobs to be created by the end of 2015. We have looked at high potential start-ups and they have a very high success rate, over 85% success rate in surviving but the difficulty we have identified with them is not failure but the scaling which has been more disappointing that we would like. One of the issues that Enterprise Ireland is now looking at is whether it needs to look at a subset of the high potential start-ups and drive them to scale and look at whether a different approach is needed to scaling companies as opposed to getting innovative companies to start up. That will be one of the challenges. The lower demand in the domestic market is part of the reason and the companies must go global from the very start.

One of the areas that Enterprise Ireland will be looking at as part of its three year strategies will be how to get more of the start-ups to scale. I like to look at the three aspects of high potential start-ups, the number of high potential start-ups, the number of start-ups that survive and the number that grow to scale. Each of the elements is equally important. Perhaps we have had too much focus on getting companies to the starting gate and not enough focus on getting them to grow. Nobody likes to see failure but perhaps the very high survival rates are too high. Perhaps, as the Deputy suggests, we should be taking a punt on more start-ups. That is an issue we will continue to examine.

Part of our entrepreneurship strategy will be to accelerate developments in this area, reflecting the Senator's concern. We have grown the number to 104 from only 83 a few years ago. It has grown considerably in recent times. Overall 20,000 people were at work in high-potential start-up companies over the 13 year period.