Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein)
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I thank our guests for their information this morning. I want to talk a bit about investment in research, development and innovation. The White Paper on enterprise rightly talks a lot about innovation, as it should. When we look at European and global indicators, however, we can see that in some we are doing well and in others not so much. Therefore, in terms of innovation scorecards and international competitiveness, we have moved in the right direction. We are classed as a strong innovator on the European innovation scorecard, which is very positive. However, we are not yet on the innovation leader tags with countries like Belgium, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden. The European scorecard shows we are at 118.9%, which is a percentage my mathematics teacher told me was impossible when I was in secondary school but there you go; life moves fast. Our lead over other European Union counterparts is actually getting smaller. We have gone from 12 to 19 in the global innovation index.

There is a very heavy emphasis in the White Paper on the need to improve and for us to become innovation leaders. Will the witnesses tell me what can be done to ensure we actually go that last mile to capitalise on the progress to date and move us from the "Doing well; could do better" category into the "Doing very well; not much room for improvement" category?