Ellen Hazelkorn gave the opening keynote talk at the Policy Forum for Ireland: Next Steps for Research & Innovation Policy and Funding in Ireland, Tuesday 30 January 2024.

In summary, Ellen raised the following key priorities for the R&I landscape in Ireland:

·      Educating and training, and recruiting, attracting, retaining and supporting talent is key to our continued success and future.

·      We should recognise and address the fact that Ireland has a relatively weak national system of innovation, with weak linkages between the R&I community, enterprise and indigenous firms.

·      We need to invest more in R&I. While it is increasing, Ireland remains comparatively low, just above Mexico.

·      We need a more comprehensive understanding of innovation diffusion and the role of people, skills and social innovation.

·      Our policy focus needs to recognise that R&I operates in a global context that is now more open and competitive.

·      We need a well-integrated national R&I system, moving away from having many individual agencies pursuing their own strategies.

·      We should strike a better balance between high-risk/frontier science and supporting ECRs, and between high-quality, world-competitive fundamental research with application-focused R&I – across all disciplines.

·      We can’t be comprehensively excellent. We should identify specific fields of inquiry and investment.

·      Unless we promote/ensure closer engagement between universities, other HEIs, and FET, along with other regional stakeholders, it will be impossible to unlock the huge potential of smart specialisation.

A copy of the keynote is available here.