Ms Ann Riordan:

My experience in the MIT MediaLab goes back to 2000, which was the earliest indication of what a knowledge based economy can do for us. I was to the forefront of that. The Government at the time approached the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was trying to set up a digital hub beside the Guinness hops store and its success in attracting MIT MediaLab as an anchor tenant was very much welcomed at the time. It attracted a number of organisations to set up that digital hub. It was very successful from that perspective. A number of patents had gone to Enterprise Ireland which were being worked on just as MediaLab Europe was closing down.

In terms of the way MediaLab approached research, it was based on demonstrations rather than research papers. As it was in the area of media, demonstrations would be used as evidence of the research. We worked with a number of universities. It was the early days when everybody was scrabbling, so to speak. I remember it was the beginning of the Internet and everybody was wondering what would be the killer application, so to speak. At Microsoft we spent years trying to define what would be the killer application on the Internet. It turned out to be e-mail, which was in front of us all the time. At the same time, as we all know when moving into the digital economy content is very important. That is what MIT Media Lab was all about. It was very exciting.

PhD students, principal investigators and others were studying there. They went to Cambridge on many occasions and worked with MIT MediaLab. That was a great transfer of knowledge. Likewise, many of those working in MIT came over to Dublin. It was a fantastic experience but then the dotcom crash happened and sponsorship was no longer available. It was completely reliant on public donations, as are the universities in the United States. It is staggering to see what individuals put into those organisations. It did not work here because of the time it was, which was very unfortunate.

In terms of what I learned from that and the reason I refer to it is because as a board member, it was an experience for me. I had been involved in managing research teams in London previously with Wordplex but it gave me an insight, especially into this demo-model, which is very valid, particularly in the ICT area. I picked up valuable lessons from that but I do not want to discuss what happened at board level.