Researchers at NUI Galway believe the Government's technology strategy could be improved to benefit regional communities, writes Karlin Lillington

With Dublin getting about 75 per cent of technology-related development proj- ects, the question of how to spread the activity - and the presumed benefits to local communities - out into the regions has perplexed policy-makers for some time.

Current policy is to encourage the growth of networks of inter-related companies to form small industrial ecosystems. But does this work? Are the right types of companies being targeted as part of overall strategy? And do communities in the regions truly benefit from this approach?

Those are questions being pondered by several of the researchers at NUI Galway affiliated to CISC, the Centre for Innovation and Structural Change, an interdisciplinary research centre at the NUI Galway partnered by University College Dublin and Dublin City University Business School.

Dr Patrick Collins, who is a postdoctoral research fellow affiliated with the department of geography at NUI Galway and is working on this area of research, sees these questions as central not just to creating better development policy in the future, but to understanding the choices made by the State in the past regarding technology and society in Ireland, and the consequences of those decisions.

As part of his doctoral work, he has cast a cold eye on Irish technology policy in the 1990s, when Dublin made a decision to approach technology development as an economic issue and not - as was the focus in Brussels - a social issue, he says.

"Dublin took a neo-liberal approach with a touch of State intervention," he notes, an "open economy" notion of technology in which building up a strong technology sector would have trickle-down effects for the general population. Projects like the Ennis information age town - intended to be a model for how technology could permeate society - were mostly corporate-driven, and about the sole large gesture made by Government was the establishment of the Information Society Commission.

The rest of Europe (outside of the UK), by contrast, opted for a society-led approach that pushed Government initiatives to encourage the use of technology in businesses and homes.

The Irish, Ennis-project style of approach he labels the "build- it-and-they-will-come" approach, which is heavily based around public-private partnerships (PPPs) trying to create demand for technology. The wider European model pushed by Brussels, a more information and education-led approach that is based on greater Government funding, he calls "inspire before you wire".

The result? Ireland has had huge economic success with its approach, but consistently ranks at the bottom of European tables on almost every social aspect of technology use: low internet penetration, low PC penetration, low broadband penetration, declining numbers following careers or studies in engineering or computer science.

"What we have in Ireland is an information economy, and in Brussels, an information society," he argues.

"In terms of ICT employment, Ireland has it all. It's a leader in the EU, but in social terms, there's a total disparity. Think of the gap between the two - we have the presence of the Intels, the eBays, the Googles, and everyone knows someone in a high-tech job. But in terms of how technology affects everyday life?" He shakes his head.

He thinks creating demand at a local level for people to want to engage in the use of information and communications technologies is what works best - not telling them how they should use them, as in Ennis.

And such an approach has knock-on effects for true national innovation, which currently is defined mostly, it seems, in economic terms.

"Do you call Ireland innovative? Just look at our research and development figures - we're not even at the races." R&D innovation is closely related to an educated, technology-comfortable wider population, he notes.

Such perspectives have now led him to consider Government policy in the regions by questioning the foundation on which it is based - that of promoting "clusters" of companies in a particular area - and looking at whether there are real benefits going to the regions.

Behind the Government's approach is a belief that companies do form regional ecosystems, so that policy should support a network of supplier companies alongside larger multinationals and indigenous companies.

These "linkages" - and the assumption that many smaller indigenous companies benefit from them - are central to how the IDA encourages development in the regions, and informs most wider Government technology policy.

"What I've tried hard to do, and found very hard to get, is some quantification of figures," he says, regarding everything from overall sales to breakdowns of who is buying what - in other words, if regional companies are really supplying to the broader regional ecosystem companies - and how communities are benefiting. The Government and agencies keep surprisingly few figures useful to understanding a sector so important to the economy, he says.

On the other hand, he also had a revelation: "What I am beginning to realise is we've had a blinkered approach to regional technology policy, which is mostly based on looking at software companies."

"When I was looking at software companies I was also looking constantly at 'where are the linkages, where are the linkages', between cluster companies," he says. "They were very hard to see."

But when he expanded the notion of a cluster to include hardware companies - anything from a computer manufacturer to a maker of medical devices - a new picture began to come together. Not immediately, however.

"It's easy to see that Dell is buying chips from Intel. However Forfás counts this as part of the local linkages, when there just aren't those linkages." Dell and Intel repatriate profits back to the US, and those two are multinationals buying from each other, who would buy from each other anyway - not supporting each other within a regional cluster because of proximity, he says.

So he tried to broaden the spectrum of companies further. "Then I could begin to see linkages, both within the sector and even broader," he says. For example, Analog Devices was supplying both the medical device industry and Pfizer, he says. "The linkages are there as a result of geographic proximity."

He hopes his research team will publish soon on this broader perspective - and finally supply some hard evidence to back existing policy, which does seem to work - even if not in the way the policy-makers originally conceived or defended it.