Dr. Brian Caulfield:

There are a few issues there so I will try to cover them briefly. I think Knowledge Transfer Ireland is a positive initiative. However, we still have a distance to travel in facilitating the commercialisation of research coming from our third level sector. There are definitely improvements that could be made to the process.

Without wishing to be critical, it is probably fair to say that the technology transfer system within the universities tends to operate, in some cases, at a relatively slow pace, which is not necessarily compatible with the needs of industry. I would also suggest that sometimes for technology transfer, the emphasis is more on protection of the intellectual property, IP, rather than ensuring that the IP is exploited, which is what will ultimately generate benefits for the country.

Stripe is a fantastic success story and it demonstrates that there is no lack of capability or ambition in Irish people. It is much more likely that such a company could be built from Ireland today than might have been the case historically. However, we need to remember that as a company like Stripe scales, it must inevitably be present in its customer markets and Ireland is a very small customer market. In addition, in terms of access to capital, it is clearly questionable whether Stripe would have been able to raise the vast amounts of capital it has raised if it had had to depend on the Irish market. Inevitably, as a company raises money from foreign markets, that creates a pull to locate in those markets.

What concerns me most about SVB is that a narrative may emerge that it failed because it invested in tech and that tech is risky. That is simply not the case. SVB failed because of some very bad banking risk management decisions. It would be problematic were such a narrative to emerge. SVB has been a fantastic partner for the ecosystem over the years. It is very important to plug that gap.