Professor Stephen Roper:

I would like to echo one of Mr. Mac Flynn's comments. There is potential for greater collaboration between Enterprise Ireland and Invest Northern Ireland in terms of the targeting of State support for innovation and exporting. That does not need to involve direct support in terms of grant support for businesses, but it could involve the provision of export market information and information about partner networks or partners which might enhance brokerage.

As part of the innovation strategy preparations in the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment in the North, the potential for an open innovation centre in Northern Ireland was defined. It involved a range of activities around trying to build the awareness of open innovation among businesses, that is, building demand and trying to build the capability within small companies to work together to deal with the innovation and exporting which might come from that. That built on a range of other examples of best practice across Europe, where universities and cities have established intermediary organisations, such as Fraunhofer in Germany, to develop that kind of connectivity between firms. Not all firms will play, but a significant number may do so.

On the supply chain point, I had a couple of things in mind. One is that there are quite a number of logistic networks which spread across the Border. I was also thinking in terms of agrifood, where I guess there is quite a lot of cross-Border trade as part of those kinds of supply chains. I am not an expert on that sector, but it strikes me that trading links are very often the basis for innovation collaboration. It provides a good starting point because some trust has already been established between the businesses involved.