Dr. Jane Bourke:

One of the roles of the Enterprise Research Centre is curating existing knowledge for policymakers. We have recently launched what we are calling state-of-the-art reviews and we are happy to share them with the committee. I will not go through them now but some recent ones were on the evaluation of innovation policy initiatives, management practices and technology adoption. They would be of interest to the committee.

On the proposed national small business strategy, it is important it would draw on evidence-based decision-making using international research but also draw on Irish data because it is very likely that country-specific factors influence what works and what does not work for SMEs.