Mr. Eoin Costello:

I thank the committee for giving us time today to address this issue. I am joined by Ms Fionnuala Healy, who is chief technology officer with start-up Gotcha Ninjas and was a senior software engineer with Ericsson; successful tech entrepreneur Mr. Sean Blanchfield, who is scaling up his latest venture, PageFair, having recently raised a round of investment and is very familiar with the scaling challenges which face start-ups; Mr. Gene Murphy, one of the most committed start-up community activists I have ever met, who spends a huge amount of time mentoring and invigorating the start-up community in Dublin; and Mr. Karl Aherne, who is a long time supporter of the start-up community and leads Dublin's largest corporate accelerator, Wayra, and has many Irish successes to his credit.

We wish to speak to the committee about the challenges Dublin faces in its goal of being a global tech start-up hub, and about the momentum and success which Startup Ireland has achieved to date. We are a group of volunteers and it is very much a grassroots movement. We are very much committed to making a success of this. We also want to speak about the vision we have for Dublin as a global tech start-up hub by the year 2020.

Committee members will remember that Mr. Sean O'Sullivan chaired the Entrepreneurship Forum, and I was in the public gallery for his presentation on its report. We see ourselves as carrying on the good work of the forum. The report contained 69 recommendations, and for today's purposes we will focus on the aspect of vibrant hotspots of activities, whereby a density of networks - in cities - creates successful start-up communities.

Our goal is to make Dublin a global tech start-up hub by 2020, and one might ask why this is our goal. A minimum of 2,800 jobs could be achieved by then and the contribution to the Dublin economy could be in excess of €200 million per annum. These figures are based on the Activating Dublin report. The goal is that Dublin will be an international centre for innovation. The real importance of start-ups as creators of jobs is underpinned by the Action Plan for Jobs, which found that two thirds of all new jobs are created by start-up businesses. This is a common factor throughout the world in all advanced economies. The role of start-ups in creating innovation is important and recognised by the big multinationals, which invest increasing amounts in start-ups through their corporate venturing arms, so much so that many of the big corporates will not only invest directly in start-ups but will run accelerator programmes for them. An accelerator programme typically offers an amount of seed capital between €20,000 and €40,000 or $20,000 and $40,000. There is a competitive process to get on the, typically, three-month programmes and hundreds will apply for ten to 20 places. A corporate accelerator programme often facilitates introductions to divisions within the business, which makes getting the first big corporate sale much easier. Similar processes are involved in other accelerator programmes.

At present, Dublin does not appear in any of the key tech start-up ecosystem rankings. An element of perception is possibly involved in the challenge Dublin faces, as we are doing quite well on many metrics but we do not figure in many of the research reports. The 2012 Startup Genome rankings did not feature Dublin. Neither did the start-up ecosystem report, which examined 35 cities throughout the world, and Dublin was not on the most active cities list compiled by TechCrunch. For anyone out there who thinks the biggest challenge facing Dublin at present is the Kilkenny hurling team, I would like to put it differently.

Dublin faces many challenges with regard to our goal of being a tech start-up hub. If anyone thinks Dublin has it easy, I ask him or her to bear this in mind the next time someone states Dublin gets all the good stuff. At present the research and development venturing activities of the corporates are not located in Dublin.