The smart economy is the holy grail for many politicians but it faces many challenges in the real world, writes Fearghal O'Connor.
These days the phrase "knowledge economy" is bandied about like a salve for all our ills. But are the challenges we face in building such a thing really understood by those who matter? Out in Dublin's Park West business park one company defines the knowledge economy and all that it might or might not be for Ireland.
In 2002 Tim Fritzley was living in California, running Microsoft TV and earning a lot of money. An Irish investor friend asked him to take a look at and size up a then tiny company called Intune Networks run by two UCD PhD graduates, Tom Farrell and John Dunne.
"They flew to California and I spent two days with them and they convinced me that they had solved a very complex problem that the telecommunications industry had been working on for 25 or 30 years," he says.
He agreed to advise them and by 2006 he had packed in his job with Microsoft and moved to Dublin to become chief executive. At that time the company employed 16 people but has grown to 120 people and it is expected to employ 200 by the end of the year. It has developed hugely innovative optical switching systems using tunable lasers for the telecoms industry. It is currently preparing to bring its networking products to market. Fritzley says that in five years the company is likely to employ 2000 people, many of them in high end jobs.
But Intune Networks may also prove to be a terrible indictment of Ireland's efforts to create a knowledge economy. Fritzley says that the question of whether the company should relocate away from this country is a constant and growing issue for its board.
"That question is not settled and it is going to be an ongoing question that my board of directors will continuously ask: is Ireland the right place to be? We have kept the company here to date to get through the first cycle of product development. But it will come down to having the right infrastructure and the right regulatory and tax regime to make it beneficial to launch a big company here."
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