Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)

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In the most recent Innovation Union Scoreboard it was most encouraging to see Ireland retaining its position among those member states with above average performance in their research and innovation systems. This complements Ireland's recent ranking of tenth in the Global Innovation Index 2013 which is also a very positive affirmation of our capabilities in this area. In the Innovation Union Scoreboard, Ireland is notably ranked first for economic effectsdue toits strong performance in employment in knowledge-intensive activities and third for human resources. Ireland also performs well above the EU 27 average for indicators such as population, with tertiary education, international scientific co-publications, and knowledge-intensive services exports. The average annual growth rate of Ireland's performance, as calculated over the five-years 2008 to 2012, is positive at 0.7%, notwithstanding the economic difficulties experienced over the period. There is, of course, room for improvement in our performance and in the context of the development of a framework for monitoring the impact of public investment in science, technology and innovation developed as part of the research prioritisation exercise soon to be published, we have set a target for Ireland to increase its ranking from tenth to eighth place overall by 2017.

The scoreboard identifies a number of areas where Ireland's performance is below the EU average, including venture capital; non-research and development expenditure by firms and sales of new-to-market and new-to-firm innovations. A number of initiatives are in place to strengthen Ireland's innovation position generally and to address these specific weaknesses.

We recently launched a new €175 million seed and venture capital scheme, 2013-2018, aimed at providing additional funding for high-growth Irish companies with the potential to generate large amounts of additional export sales and grow jobs. The scheme is part of a series of funding mechanisms put in place by the Government to improve access to finance for companies, including the micro-finance fund, the development capital scheme, the credit guarantee scheme, the international start-up fund and innovation fund Ireland.

Implementation of the recommendations in the report of the research prioritisation steering group, which I chair, will see an enhanced focus on commercialisation of research and collaboration with enterprise.