All business leaders want to improve the innovation performance of their companies, but for many, innovation is still more of a buzzword rather than a competence. To asssist business leaders accelerate innovation, the Innovation Foundation, a new specialist innovation agency, today announced the launch of the Irish Innovation Index at an event in NovaUCD.

The Irish Innovation Index is a new, free, online tool developed to assist Irish companies, of all sizes, to grow and develop their businesses through innovation. Launched to coincide with the Innovation Dublin 2010 festival, the Irish Innovation Index offers organisations a rigorous, original and definitive online tool to assess  and develop their innovation capabilities.

Peter Robbins launching the Irish Innovation Index at NovaUCD

Now, for the first time, business leaders can complete a straighforward online survey of 30 questions which should take less than 10 minutes to complete. By return email they receive an accurate, tailored assessment of just how innovation-centric they are, combined with practical suggestions on how they can enhance their innovation skills, processes, structures and portfolio to deliver tangible results.  By using the Irish Innovation Index tool companies, large and small, can develop a roadmap to improve their own innovation performance.   

The Irish Innovation Index has been developed by The Innovation Foundation in conjunction with the UCD Geary Institute and was partially funded through Enterprise Ireland’s innovation voucher scheme. 

The Index synthesises leading international work in innovation auditing  to create a unifying and robust, new framework through which Irish companies can evaluate just how innovation-centric they really are.  It will provide companies with an objective measure of their current innovation capability and will provide best-practice pointers indicating areas for potential improvement. 

Speaking at the launch Peter Robbins, founder, The Innovation Foundation, said, “Tougher competition, increased globalisation, more demandng consumers and shorter product life cycles are all fuelling a higher-than-ever interest in innovation and, specifically new product and service development. The development of Ireland’s Smart Economy puts innovation firmly at the heart of plans for economic prosperity. But although many companies have innovation as a top priority, very few have it as a core competency. He added, “The launch of this new tool now offers companies an opportunity to explore how they can accelerate innovation within their firms.” 

The Innovation Foundation, based at NovaUCD, is a specialist innovation agency established in 2009 by Peter Robbins, to assist in the acceleration of innovation in Irish organisations. Peter Robbins, a former Global Director of Innovation Excellence for GlaxoSmithKline, trained at the renowned innovation D-School in Stanford University and is also a graduate of the What-if? Creativity programme in London. Peter lectures on innovation for DCU and for the IMI.  He is completing a PhD on the subject of how innovation really happens in large companies and what organisations can do to accelerate it.

Click here to access The Irish Innovation Index.

ENDS

11 November 2010

For further information contact Micéal Whelan, NovaUCD, e: miceal.whelan@ucd.ie, t: + 353 1 716 3712 or Peter Robbins, The Innovation Foundation, e: innovation@ireland.com or m: +353 86 606 9448.

Editors Notes

The Innovation Foundation is a new specialist innovation agency established at the end of 2009, to accelerate innovation in Irish organisations. The Innovation Foundation is already working with leading Irish commercial semi-states and multi-national businesses to drive innovation in everything from culture to metrics and processes right down to individual projects.

The Irish Innovation Index synthesises much of the international work in innovation auditing to create a unifying and robust, new framework through which Irish companies can evaluate just how innovation-centric they really are. It includes work by NESTA (The National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts in the UK), Solvay, a leading school of economics and management located in Brussels, the PDMA (Product Development Management Association), the EU Innovation Scorecard,  and CIS (Community Innovation Survey). It also includes the research findings of leading academics such as Dr Robert Cooper, Professor Julian Birkinshaw and Professor Morten T. Hansen.

NovaUCD, the Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre, is the hub of knowledge transfer activities at University College Dublin. NovaUCD is responsible for the commercialisation of intellectual property arising from UCD research and for the development of co-operation with industry and business. NovaUCD as a purpose-built centre also nurtures new technology and knowledge-intensive enterprises. NovaUCD has been funded through a unique public-private partnership that includes AIB Bank, Arthur Cox, Deloitte, Enterprise Ireland, Ericsson, Goodbody Stockbrokers, UCD and Xilinx.