Mr. Robert Watt:

The Deputy receives requests for meetings but he can only imagine how many the Department and HSE receive. There is an issue with procurement law in that if someone has an idea we believe is great, we cannot just give the money to get the initiative up and running. If it is to be scaled, there have to be pilots. Clearly, there is a disconnect between respecting the procurement rules on open competition and nurturing innovation. In order to scale something, there needs to be a tender. If the tender is motivated by the individual's initiative, his or her intellectual property could be disseminated in the process of procurement. Therefore, there is a difficult policy trade-off. I do not know whether the CEO wants to add to it. It is a challenge for us because there are ideas we would like to embrace. We cannot embrace them fast enough. That is not a criticism of the procurement rules as it is a matter of the EU directive we transposed, but there is a trade-off-----