Ms Claire McGee:

It is quite reassuring that there is now a political focus on Ireland's innovation capacity. IBEC has made numerous submissions to the Government around the fact that there has been a slippage, as I would call it, and as the Senator demonstrated through the various indices she referenced. We are not investing enough in the public innovation ecosystem that is required for the ambitions of the country.

We should be investing about 2.5% of GDP but we have probably stagnated at about 1.2%. That is a major challenge for us, particularly if we look at the breadth of industries that we have all spoken about here this morning. We cannot really distinguish between the innovation ecosystem, our research system, and then our STEM talent pipeline into those. On the one level we talk about high levels of educational attainment but we are not at the races when it comes to innovation capacity. We are internationally communicating that we are and that we have many high-tech industries here.

How do we improve that? First, we need to get an enhanced and renewed focus on capital investment and current investment into our innovation capacity. That could involve increasing core funding into higher education or increased programmatic funding into programmes that enhance collaboration between industry and our research community. We also need to start looking at the State supports for businesses to innovate. One of the key recommendations in our pre-budget submissions for last year was the development of an innovation capacity diagnostic tool. We also looked at doubling the Enterprise Ireland innovation voucher scheme. We would have a significant gain for a low investment quality. Looking at our investment pipeline, we have our SFI research centres. We try to ensure we have the right connection between the research coming from the research centres and the translational element as to where that research goes next and how it diffuses into industry. We try to identify pipeline gaps between the offerings of the IDA and Enterprise Ireland. There is a renewed focus needed on the translational investment area between some of the bigger supports that we currently have.

To summarise, we need to really ramp up and scale our investment in innovation and our capacity overall. That requires nearly a doubling or tripling of the current figure. We are probably looking at a €500 million investment in innovation capacity to be where we want to be. We want to be on a par with Denmark and Sweden and what is coming out of Israel and the US. That is the class of country we want to be with. At the same time, we need to ensure our higher education system, which is supporting academic research, has the capability, capacity, equipment and infrastructure to be able to do that. We can have all this great innovation, but we need to make sure that businesses and people can access it. We have all spoken about the importance of lifelong learning. We need to ensure that our research centres and our Enterprise Ireland technology centres have the opportunity to train people in business to get the diffusion of innovation.

We know we have great research centres in manufacturing. We should be making sure that nearly every apprenticeship in the country that is related to manufacturing has access to those research centres. Joining the dots and greater investment is the way we can do it.