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

These activities should aim to foster services innovation through the process of creative and ‘lateral’
thinking in directing new technologies to the challenge of service delivery to customers.
Conclusion 7 – Innovation and Creativity Through Education and Skills Development
The evidence contained in this Study is that services innovation relies heavily upon human capital
particularly ass seen in the talent and creative skills of individuals and teams. This was noted not only
in the global sectors and concentrations but also in the leading Irish services companies featured in
the case studies reviewed in Chapter 4.
Creativity has been heralded as a vital ingredient in the innovation process and as 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 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.
The integration of these two policy areas must be driven in part by the services innovation skills
requirements of Irish enterprise and FDI as well as current and emerging global trends. This will
necessitate a broad portfolio of skills provision at a variety of levels and across different occupational
roles within services companies.
Conclusion – Services Innovation Policy and an International Economic Image
Services innovation is already a strategic priority and an operational reality for Ireland’s leading
service companies and this Study has identified the potential for services innovation in attracting and
embedding FDI.
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. Company success stories
of the development of new business models, customer interfaces and service-products can be woven
into IDA Ireland marketing of the Irish service-sector supply base to potential inward investors. It also
presents an opportunity to incorporate a new, state of the art, services innovation support framework
within IDA Ireland’s offering to FDI, which can contributes towards the embedding and expansion of
FDI within the Irish economy.
In this sense, 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’. Furthermore, Ireland’s adoption of a services innovation policy will reflect very
favourably against the recent OECD and EU interest in services innovation as a potential driver of
global competitiveness. 98
6.5 An Implementation Environment for a Services Innovation policy
The typology of services innovation that was established in Chapter 2 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
(Figure 8: Levels 1 and 2).
Crucially the typology is sufficiently robust to allow an Implementation Environment to be proposed
using the three types of services innovation (Figure 8: Level 3). This is set out below and puts forward,
as examples of possible actions, a range of potential services innovation programmes and supports
that would complement existing support measures.
98 OECD. 2006. ‘Innovation and Knowledge-Intensive Service Activities’.
71