Podcasts - InterTradeIreland All-island Innovation Programme

The InterTradeIreland All-island Innovation Programme aims to promote and encourage innovation across the island of Ireland. It enables international expertise and best practice innovation to be shared with business leaders, students, academics, knowledge transfer professionals and policy makers across Ireland via innovation lectures, seminars and master classes.

The Programme is organised by InterTradeIreland, Queen’s University Belfast, NovaUCD and the Centre for Innovation and Structural Change at NUI Galway.

Podcasts of some of the previous innovation lectures are available to listen to/view via the links below:

Innovate for Advantage: A Strategic Toolkit for Designing and Delivering a Breakout Strategy (June 2011)

Business leaders and entrepreneurs who want to lead high-performance, double-digit growth companies, need to assemble an integrated strategic toolkit to design, develop and deliver a strategy to breakout beyond average economic performance. That was the key message from Professor Thomas Lawton when he delivered the InterTradeIreland 2011 Innovation Lecture at University College Dublin.

  
Professor Thomas Lawton 

Professor Thomas Lawton is Professor of Strategy and International Business at EMLYON Business School (France), one of Europe’s top ten business schools, and visiting Professor at the internationally renowned Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth (USA).

Rethinking Business Models: Creativity Inspired Innovation (March 2011)

In his innovation lecture Dr Peter Kelly challenged conventional wisdom about developing a business, and also provided practical guidance on how to succeed in the current economic climate. He also offered some concrete suggestions of how to instil more creativity into our innovation system. In his lecture Dr Kelly argued that Ireland and Europe have all the ingredients to be in a better innovative space and said that we just need the creative courage to explore it.

 
Dr Peter Kelly

Dr Peter Kelly, School of Science, Aalto University, Finland, is an award winning entrepreneurship educator and practitioner. He is a leading international authority on business angels and was directly involved in the creation of Europe’s first university pre-seed fund and an associated angel network. 

Building Robust Business Clusters - Lessons from Biotech (June 2010)

In his innovation lecture, Professor Woody Powell, a leading economic sociologist at Stanford University, California outlined key factors required to build robust business clusters within an economy.

Professor Woody Powell

His lecture focused on the development of the biotech industry in the United States. Each of the 11 regions he studied were rich in resources such as scientific knowledge, money and business skills and had the potential to form biotech clusters. However only three of the regions formed robust clusters while the other eight failed to do so. Professor Powell's lecture concluded that the successful clusters were marked by the presence of  local ‘anchor tenants’ who fostered the values of openness and transparency in the region and encouraged exploration, a diversity of types of organisations and a dense web of local relationships.

Corporate Entrepreneurship - The Key to Making Innovation Happen (March 2010)

The bottleneck in the innovation process for Irish companies is not normally the generation of ideas but the successful commercialisation of those ideas, according to Professor Peter Russo, when he delivered his innovation lecture. This requires companies giving their employees the freedom to act as entrepreneurs and providing them with adequate structures and processes to create an entire entrepreneurial environment within the company. Professor Peter Russo, is founder and Director of the Strascheg Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, European Business School, Frankfurt.

 
Professor Peter Russo

How to Build Momentum for Innovation (April 2009)

Companies must take a twin approach to innovation to survive and grow in the current economic climate. That was the message from renowned innovation expert Professor Erkko Autio, Chair of Technology Transfer and Entrepreneurship, Imperial College London when he delivered his innovation lecture.

 
Professor Erkko Autio 

According to Finnish-born Professor Autio, as the global economic momentum has faded, firms can no longer 'ride the waves' created by others. They need to build their own momentum for innovation. In addition to identifying market needs and adapting their products or services to meet those needs, firms must also find ways of prompting the market to lock-in to their innovations ahead of others. If this successful two-way adaptation is achieved, spectacular growth may follow, even in challenging times.