Tom Neville (Limerick County, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for his presentation which I welcome. I also welcome the focus on science, technology and innovation. I had the good fortune to visit the Minister of State's offices a week to ten days ago at which a very comprehensive presentation was made. I welcome that. It was highly beneficial and educational to me. I have a quick question on collaborations. Does the Minister of State predict or is there a target increase in collaboration and over what period would that target be achieved? Would it be one or two years? Is there any metric around collaborations which may have started but later collapsed? Things happen in business, in particular in innovation. A lot of it will be speculative. Are there any metrics or statistics in that regard?