Your Country, Your Call: 'It would have been easy but wrong to give up'

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO Your Country, Your Call? The competition developed by Martin McAleese, promising a €100,000 prize and up to €500,000 in development funding for two winners, was in the news for weeks after it was launched, in February last year. More than 9,000 proposals, in every conceivable area, flooded into the competition website.

When two winning proposals were announced last September, one to develop a global digital media hub for creative industries in Dublin and the other a “data island” strategy to form a digital-services ecosystem around energy-efficient data centres, the response was more muted – perhaps because these were big, multilayered ideas not easily translated into terms that would capture the imagination, but also because public interest had moved on.

Critics had also emerged. Some believed the winning proposals were not new, fitting the government’s already established intentions to develop digital media. Some questioned why the winners needed to sign over their intellectual-property rights to the competition. (Organisers say it was so entrants could not use the contest as a form of venture capital, to benefit an individual company.)

Then €300,000 promised by Mary Coughlan, as tánaiste, failed to materialise, because of cutbacks. The organisers say that they had a standing request for support but that they never needed it, as, within weeks of the launch, they had raised enough money to support the competition. (Individual donations were capped at €150,000, to prevent any one donor from dominating the project.)

In some circles, especially online, people wondered whether the competition had gone to ground in the intervening months, to shelter from such concerns. Not so, the key organisers say. They argue that a big project needs a timeline long enough for a thorough feasibility study and detailed business plan, which has resulted in the two projects being merged into one, called the International Digital Services Centre.

The proposal is also supported by some of Ireland’s top technology multinationals, which have been involved in its continuing development, sometimes internationally. For example, one of Microsoft’s most senior executives, its chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie, came to Ireland and advised on the strategy for the data centre. His counsel shaped the direction subsequently taken: the building of costly data centres was dropped and analytics – large-scale data crunching and data mining – were pushed to the fore.

“It was always intended to be a three-year piece of work. The ambition and vision set out in 2008 have been achieved. Our big difficulty was getting across what we meant by proposals. People think of business plans, and we weren’t looking for that at all. We were looking for something bigger,” McAleese says. The organisers wanted large concepts that “people wouldn’t necessarily have the resources or skill sets to take through to completion”.

It was by chance that the independent judges chose two technology projects. “And there came a point where both of them started to converge, so one project came out of the two,” he says. “Now we’re very much at the point of implementation.”

The father-and-son team who proposed the winning data-island strategy are no longer directly involved with the project (and by agreement have retained the intellectual-property rights to aspects of their proposal that will not be implemented in the services centres.

The new project will “operate in both the physical and virtual world”. A premises has been taken in Eastpoint Business Park, in Dublin, chosen for the large number of technology and digital-media firms in the area and the availability of further office space to encourage growth of a digital-media cluster. That office will provide a “one-stop shop for SMEs that need support and resources to take their companies to the next step”, says McAleese.

ACCORDING TO Neil Leyden, who proposed the winning media-hub idea, “Games, films, publishing: it’s all becoming ones and zeros [digital]. I saw the possibility of an IFSC-like model where Ireland could become the location of choice.” The idea, he says, is that Ireland can offer a broad range of services to entice this rapidly expanding industry to base companies here. Many of the services are already in Ireland. “We’re taking everything that’s here already and putting it together in a more coherent way.”

Content can be hosted in the cloud – which is to say on servers, in existing Irish data centres – and distributed and delivered over Ireland’s international broadband cables. Payment and royalties would all be managed in Ireland – Ericsson, for example, is interested in creating a rights-clearance test bed in Ireland – as would localisation and translation, offering tax efficiencies around those activities. And analysis of the data received and generated by such companies would be available, provided by a host of new data applications, such as mobile services, apps, online gaming and online services.

Similar to the International Financial Services Centre, another big-concept proposal criticised in its time, the digital-services centre will have a Government-led clearing house set up by the Department of the Taoiseach to “clear obstacles”, says McAleese.

It is envisaged that Government agencies, venture-capital firms, service organisations and industry consultants will join working groups in areas such as taxation, IP development, visas and sourcing property. About 10 multinationals, including Microsoft, Google, Intel, Cisco, Salesforce.com, Ericsson and Accenture, have pledged support. And there would be benefits for such firms. “These companies will have the opportunity to sell hardware and software”, develop business relationships and, along with venture capitalists, get a chance to meet young companies, perhaps to invest.

The key element of the services centre that is different from other initiatives, says Leyden, is that “it’s enterprise-led and State-supported” rather than the other way around, an approach more in line with successful innovation centres in places such as Israel and Singapore.

Several of Ireland’s key multinationals, which got involved with Your Country, Your Call from the start, offering funding, services or advice, remain committed to the project. Cisco was one of the first to step up, providing the technology to run the website and manage the 9,000 project proposals, says Mary Lou Nolan, Cisco Ireland’s country manager. “We just really believed in the idea,” she says.

Cisco liked it so much that it used the idea as the model for two similar competitions, in Greece (through the American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce) and in Russia, she says, with similar prizes.

The consultancy firm Accenture was also a supporter from the start and remains involved in the implementation phase. Accenture initially helped with the technology to run the competition, says Tim Cody, its head of management consulting. “We liked supporting a culture of idea-making and entrepreneurship, particularly at a difficult economic time,” he says. “We believe the explosion in digital services is a big opportunity for Ireland. If we can capture that opportunity and encourage companies to locate here, that will help accelerate the recovery of the economic environment.”

Salesforce.com is a more recent supporter. “We joined to lend some heavyweight support and to provide some funding, if needed – to be one of the anchors,” says David Dempsey, a founding director of Salesforce.com in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He says because the services centre is structured around cloud computing, the heart of Salesforce.com’s business model, the fit was good. “We also liked the idea that it allows us to get together with other companies to support Irish innovation.”

McAleese, while acknowledging that there have been doubters and critics of the competition, remains upbeat. “You have to try and ignore the critics and get on with something you feel has integrity and will work. I think you have to think big and feel big. If we think small, we’re letting the country down. If it fails, it fails. But by God, it’s better to have tried. It would have been very easy to give up. It would have been the wrong thing to do.”

Your country, your competition. Implementing a big idea

In February last year President Mary McAleese arrived at the National Gallery of Ireland to launch a global competition largely conceived by her husband, Martin McAleese, now a senator and chancellor of Dublin City University.

Offering €100,000 prizes and up to €500,000 in development money for each of two winning proposals, Your Country, Your Call aimed to capture minds, focus on a positive event at a time of deepening recession and help launch a large, innovative project that would ultimately produce jobs. Proposals from any sector or industry were welcome.

According to the organisers, more than a year of work went into the idea, beginning with consultations on the general idea with business leaders, industry experts, government specialists, students and academics. In September 2009, a steering committee had been established, a chief executive selected and a limited company with charitable status, An Smaoineamh Mór, formed to oversee the process.

Your Country, Your Call garnered plenty of publicity and more than 9,000 entries. More than 200 businesses and individuals also responded to a request for financial support, raising €1.6 million, and offered pro-bono services.

In September last year an external judging panel chaired by David Byrne, the former EU commissioner, selected two winners from five finalists. One was a proposal from the digital-media expert Neil Leyden to make Ireland a global digital-media business hub; the other was from father-and- son team Colm MacFhlannachadha and Cianán Clancy to make Ireland a “data island” ecosystem for digital services.

A feasibility assessment resulted in a single, merged project, renamed the International Digital Services Centre. This focused on developing Ireland as a global digital-media-industry centre that would also offer sophisticated data analytics. A detailed business plan has been written, and implementation has begun. This includes the transition of An Smaoineamh Mór to a new entity, IDSC, with a new board and a headquarters at Eastpoint Business Park, in Dublin.

The business plan now has the support of Accenture, Cisco, Microsoft, Colt, Ericsson, EMC, Google, Intel, HP, Salesforce.com and other multinationals.