Services Innovation in Ireland - Options for ... - Europe INNOVA

The requirement to accelerate the development of an ICT and broadband infrastructure were
highlighted in a recent Forfás report on ‘Benchmarking Ireland’s Broadband performance’. 8
6. Competitiveness and Convergence through Networks, Clusters and Centres
of Excellence
Clusters and concentrations of activity have a positive impact on services innovation activity.
Concentrations or ‘hot spots’, allow world-class companies to prosper and innovate alongside
locally based service innovators. In such concentrations vibrant competition seems to be at least
as important as collaboration and services innovation requires this element of competition for
ideas, customers and skills to be able to prosper.
7. Innovation and Creativity through Education and Skills Development
Services innovation relies heavily upon human capital particularly the talent and creative skills of
individuals and teams. Creativity is a vital ingredient in the innovation process and an invaluable
source of competitive advantage to services companies. It therefore needs to be cultivated, from
an early age, in school learning curricula through to vocational college and university teaching
and lifelong learning. This requires a partnership approach between those agencies involved in
delivering both the skills agenda and the new services innovation policy framework.
. Services Innovation Policy and an International Economic Image
A service innovation policy represents an important opportunity to market Ireland’s services
sector and delivery agencies as global leaders in the area of services innovation. It also presents
an opportunity to incorporate a new, state of the art, services innovation support framework
within IDA Ireland’s offering to FDI. Ireland’s emerging role as a global leader in services
innovation can become a key theme in the branding of the Irish economy, complementary to the
message that ‘knowledge is in our nature’.
Implementation Environment Conclusions
The typology of services innovation that was developed and used throughout this Study, has been
tested and verified in a range of sectors and circumstances. The typology provides the basis for
shaping the structure and content of a services innovation policy and framework programmes. The
typology is sufficiently robust to allow an Implementation Environment to be proposed using the
three types of services innovation.
9. The Typology of Services Innovation and the Development of Support Measures
A number of the existing innovation support measures in place in Ireland can be implemented
within services innovation policy. However, simply integrating services innovation into RTD
innovation policy would not possess the impact that is required to successfully reach those
services companies that traditional RTD innovation policy has not.
Therefore a distinctive services innovation policy will enable policymakers in Ireland to build upon
past successes while realigning overall innovation support according to the growing importance
of services innovation for the Irish economy.
In order to articulate how a services innovation policy could be developed and implemented,
examples of activities around which a services innovation policy could be formed are presented
in the main Study report. These have been extensively based on the evidence and experience of
the global sectors and concentrations studied and the existing experiences of leading services
companies in Ireland.
8 Forfás report – Benchmarking Ireland’s Broadband performance. November 2005. http://www.forfas.ie/publications/forfas051205/webopt/
forfas051205_broadband_webopt.pdf