Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will refer to the types of projects that will be funded. They must include the use of disruptive technologies that will significantly alter the way we work and live. It will involve collaboration, innovation and-or be disruptive in its impact on one of the sectors in the research priority areas. That includes ICT, health and well-being, food, energy, climate action and sustainability, manufacturing and materials, business services and processes. Within each of these six themes, we identified specific priority areas such as robotics, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, advances and smart manufacturing and smart and sustainable food production and processing. When we launched the call, we published a reference document that clearly set out the eligibility and selection criteria for selecting suitable projects.

These criteria were designed to ensure that we are funding truly disruptive technologies and that we are not funding projects that we can do through other programmes. To ensure that we fund projects of scale and impact we are asking for funding applications for amounts of €1 million or more. There has been a major response to the fund, so much so that the qualifying projects have now been whittled down by the experts. They were expressions of interest initially and they have now been asked to put forward full applications. To be helpful to those businesses that put considerable effort into submitting applications or expressions of interest I have asked my Department to give them all feedback and to see whether there are any other opportunities, including, for example, whether these businesses could get funding through initiatives funded by Enterprise Ireland and whether there are other ways we could help them.

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