Damien Mulley

Enterprise Ireland brought out Innovation Vouchers last year. The idea being that any limited company could apply for a voucher, worth €5000, that could be redeemed at a knowledge provider (University, IT, etc). The knowledge provider would then go off and do a bit of research or development for you. A handy way of getting something done when you don’t have the resources and getting the educational institutions to do something with the real world. Something they rarely experience.

If you haven’t applied for a voucher, do so now for goodness sake.

Saying that, I’ve heard some companies are finding it amazingly difficult to get a knowledge provider to do some work for them. I’m hearing that one firm were laughed out of it and told to pretty much PFO as they wouldn’t consider anything below 50k for them to do any work!

Photo owned by MikeBlogs (cc)

On the positive, I’ve heard also that some ITs are well tuned in and are doing their very best to help out companies. Informally it seems companies are talking to each other, recommending some knowledge providers and warning to not waste their time with others. National College of Ireland are having an open night about their work and what they can do with Innovation Vouchers:

Information Session on A New Facility for Measuring User-Screen Interactions featuring the newly installed National E-Learning Laboratory (NELL) at National College of Ireland on Wednesday 17th of September from 17.30 to 19.00.

Applied research can answer important questions regarding screen-based media, usability, design, content development, engagement and task-completion. The session is intended to be of particular interest to organisations intending to apply for an Enterprise Ireland Innovation Voucher.

Interested? Book your place by contacting the Centre for Research and Innovation in Learning and Teaching at 01 4498600

So what works for companies, what should companies be doing to get their vouchers redeemed? Care to recommend some good knowledge providers, are you a knowledge provider and actively want to talk to companies?

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 12:51 pm and is filed under business, irishblogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.