Submission to Innovation Taskforce
DARWINIAN INNOVATION INCENTIVE SCHEMEBackground Assumptions:- The high tech (and in particular ICT) sector is unique in that the most important raw material required is time from skilled people.
- Ireland has lots of skilled people but these don’t have time to invest as they must “pay the mortgage”.
- The people working in these niche industries on the ground know the niche markets and the products required for the future.
Proposed ApproachGoogle Research type approach where technically skilled employees can spend say 20% of their work time working on their own innovation project at work. This could be incentivised through tax breaks to employee . Sometimes this could be also be combined with tax breaks to employers if the work is related to the employer’s business.
In early stage the ideas themselves should not be approved, but merely the people. IP Ownership would be shared between employer and employee.
At end of say a one year period, results are evaluated by peers (i.e. the people running the other projects) and employers. Projects with unsatisfactory results will not be allowed use the scheme in the following year(s). Good results will be supported through increased time and so on with a funnel type filter approach at each stage. Viable innovation based businesses should emerge.
ModelConsider say if 5,000 technologies were funded through this scheme through tax breaks to employers and employees .
Estimated annual cost per project €20k
Total Cost: €100 million
Benefits:- The digital sector is a high risk numbers game so better to invest €20k in 5000 projects rather than say €2m in 50. Darwinian survival of the fittest weeds out weaker projects.
- Admin costs are low as it is self-regulated by peers (the employees and employers): A state agency only gets involved to funnel the best projects to the next level.
- Any specialised equipment, hardware services required is already available from the employer.
- Reduces employment as companies can retain good employees they might not be able to afford in difficult times.
NOTE: These views are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
Twitter replacing this blog
catch me on Twitter on
Offportal for personal stuff and
TrinityResearch as microblogging is the only way to go forward
Look out for the fake CE mark from China
While researching the CE mark for a campus spin out company in TCD
Sonitus , I cam across the fake CE mark. This means "China Export" but looks kinda familar does it not? Good
youtube video on this also.
So all those toys your children are playing with may not be so safe after all.
Digg SWARM for Twitter Search
Conor McKenna sent me this interesting
link regarding a Google-Twitter mashup. Very interesting as everyone keeps talking how you can use twitter to monitor news events (e.g. Gaza, Mumbai Hotel attacks etc.) but in my experience it is even hard to find out how to a basic Twitter search.
Even this mash up still doesn’t really work as I tested it and the stories are not connecting in any meaningful way. There is huge room for a cool visualisation tool that shows stories linking in real time in the way that
DIGG SWARM does.
Eircom's NGX and IGoPeople
I had a visit last week to
Eircom's bright and shiny new HQ near Heuston Station in Dublin. Of particular interest is their new demo centre dubbed NGX. I attach some pictures taken with my iphone.
Also I understand from that Campbell Scott (former head of Products and Services at O2) has left his role as Head of Consumer Products in Eircom to set up an interesting start up
IGoPeople. This is a social networking site that enables consumers and brands to interact. I believe it is very close to launch and you can
sign up for the beta.
Labels: Eircom NGX igopeople
Trinity Research and Innovation ICT OpenDemo
I have been busy organising, with Tara Tracey (Industrial Liaison Manager at TCD), a
Open Demonstration of ICT technologies available for Commercialisation.
We will be showcasing the latest exciting technologies developed by TCD researchers in Information Technology. The format will be open demos, so no more Death by powerpoint but rather hands on demos located in the rather cool and funky Science Gallery with refreshments served to fuel the interaction. I took the picture above with my iphone.
Examples of the types of technologies to be shown include:
* web 2.0 animation tool
* automatic image annotation through cross modal learning
* software defined radio toolkit for next generation cognitive radio networks
* hand wash monitoring device for hospitals and food industry
* p2p video streaming on t'interweb
* video based adaptive e-learning
* token based payments system for VOIP on WiFi
* building a wholesale hosting exchange
* spam prevention through email microcharging
* game authoring tool for mental health therapies
* sentiment index for financial markets
* p2p web search
* immersive experiential selling tool
and lots more.....
To register to attend please go to the registration page on the site.
Searchme
Checkout
www.searchme.com. Nice interactive visual search. wher you can scroll through thumbnails (well let's call then "hands" as bigger than "thumbnails") of the sites like the pages of a book.
On subject of search we all saw in ireland much hype about the "Irish" challenger to google
cuil.com. Not so cuil I am afraid as the search results are dismally poor when compared to Google. Try seraching fro soemthing obscurish or google-whackish and compare. I tried searching for "xeritel" par example.
Another thing: why is black the new white when it comes to search backgrounds?
Stephen Barrett's teanm here in Trinity College have devloped some very interesting next generation P2P search technology. Watch this space
Labels: searchme cuil
