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The approach to
the National Software Centre campus in Cork features few of the familiar characteristics
of large Irish institutions. Significantly, it's not in Dublin. Its single boxy,
four-storey building stands in Blackrock, just off the Ring Road, tucked away
in a new business park surrounded by the type of unremarkable housing estates
found at the fringes of every Irish city.
In short, there is nothing apparently national or central about the place - it
is just another office block in the suburbs. Yet in the past year this anonymous
structure has become the nexus of Cork's ambitious software cluster - a sector
of about 75 firms - actively supported by national initiatives, local government,
educational institutions and formal business networks.
Like any building of its type, the centre provides office space for software firms.
Its unique contribution to building a software cluster out of an otherwise disparate
sector is its `innovation component' (IC): a section of the centre managed by
the Cork Business Innovation Centre (CorkBIC) and dedicated to startup companies
in software and internationally traded services.
The IC provides vital shared services such as conference rooms, video conferencing
and administration to all companies in the centre, as well as to virtual clients'
whose offices are located elsewhere, but who might lack the scale or the money
to provide these services in their own offices. The idea is to give small companies
the type of facilities normally available only to long-established firms, as well
as to promote opportunities for the kind of spontaneous interaction among firms
that might lead to deeper partnerships.
To that end, the centre also offers a range of business expertise and development
programmes to help start-up tenants build their businesses. The fundamental thrust
is to create a global footprint for start-up ventures by using innovative networking
technologies and linking to major corporates in the area to build strategic alliances
and routes to market.
The idea for the National Software Centre (NSC) grew out of the South West Regional
Authority's strategic plan of 1996 and was echoed by a number of other regional
studies, including a study by the Cork Business Innovation Centre (CorkBIC). This
also recommended setting up IT@Cork, a regional network of IT firms. Local planners
and business leaders wanted a facility that not only advertised Cork's status
as a centre for software development, but also symbolised and promoted the linkages
between the region's energetic software industry and its highly engaged local
government and educational institutions. Finally opened in January 2002, the NSC
now acts as the physical centre and conceptual focus for the software industry
in the Cork city region.
The way in which the NSC developed from an idea into a reality - shaped by business
interests, supported by public policy, driven by strategic interaction - defines
cluster dynamics generally. Thus, the NSC is not only a place business gets done,
but it is the concrete manifestation of the otherwise intangible relationships
that had to converge to form Cork's software cluster out of the raw material of
the IT sector.
As a national model
for the productive centralisation of a sector, the design of the NSC belies its
otherwise `peripheral' status.
In contrast to the NSC's widely cooperative genesis, the National Digital Park
at Citywest in south Co Dublin grew out of a developer-led project to build a
desirable location for general global business investment. Citywest broke ground
nearly a decade ago and has since attracted a range of tenants across sectors
from software and telecommunications companies to newspaper-printing facilities
and call centres.
The National Digital Park within the campus was founded in 1998 as a joint venture
between the IDA and Davy Hickey Properties, the company that developed and manages
Citywest. The idea was to take advantage of Citywest's status as a `point of presence'
for Ireland's international broadband connectivity. Press releases at the time
spoke of building the `IFSC of e-commerce'.
Indeed, the Digital Park's direct fibre connections to 24 major international
cities, and its hook-up to the big Atlantic broadband pipe, make it an obvious
location for data-heavy businesses. This is why Eircom, Esat/BT, Telecity and
Metromedia have all located data centres in the park. And, while the dream of
creating a locus in Ireland for e-commerce and other IT activity may have been
adjusted to suit reality in the last five years, Citywest and the National Digital
Park still boast an impressive roster of technology companies. Adobe, AOL, Nortel,
Sage, SAP and Xilinx all have operations there. Beyond co-location, however, these
representatives of the IT industry share little else. Despite their immediate
proximity to one another, the technology companies in Citywest do not form much
of a cluster - they are operationally atomised.
This is because
the design of Citywest caters to large multinational corporations that are less
reliant on the kinds of economies of scope, strategic alliances and routes to
international markets that small firms or start-ups need to succeed in Ireland.
Firms in the National Digital Park share very little public space or services,
so the opportunities for spontaneous interaction is extremely limited. Furthermore,
the anchor tenants - the data centres - don't engage in the kind of knowledge-intensive
business that lends itself to strategic cooperation.
One recent exception is DCU's Tony Ryan
Entrepreneurial Academy, built at Citywest last year. The facility is meant to
promote collaboration between research and educational activities, and private
enterprise. The goal is to create a virtuous circle in which the academy will
provide the conditions and infrastructure necessary to support the basic and applied
research undertakings of national strategic importance. This will attract leading-edge
research investment.
But already, most of the dynamic activity within the Dublin IT sector takes place
within a small area of Dublin 2 and 4 where leading indigenous companies like
Iona and Fineos, as well as the technology hothouses at Trinity and UCD, have
pulled a number of small, ambitious firms into their orbit. The city centre environment
combines access to infrastructure with opportunities for strategic partnership,
spin-offs and venture capital.
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Inside
Track
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Honour Thy People
Irish governments have played lip-service to the idea of creating an honours system
but party political activists have been rewarded with appointments to State boards.
Ray Dooney reports.
Various Irish governments have considered the idea of launching an Irish honours
system. Most recently, the Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution recommended
one in 1998 and the Taoiseach had desultory consultations with other political
parties about it.
He got nowhere.
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Row
the boat
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Taxing Times
Ahead For EU
Plans for tax harmonisation among European Union members states are likely to
be accelerated. There are fears that Ireland's corporation rates, in particular,
could be affected.
Brendan Lynch
draws up the battlelines.
In the 30 years since Ireland joined the I EU (yes it's as long as that!), there
has been a strong incremental trend to coordinate economic policies within the
EU. Economists reckon that the Irish economy can no longer be considered an independent
economy. It is now closer in style to a regional economy in a very large economic
and political union.
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