Innovation in EE

CathalMc

About a year and a half ago, I got involved with a group to develop an early-stage product for a start-up. (This is a California story I'm afraid). I'm doing a PhD in EE, and it was through this I met the other members of the team (post-grad engineers and MBA students - all equally motivated), came up with the ideas, and started to make it all come together. These were exactly my goals when I graduated with my degree: build a new product and start a new company; and it has been, and still is, one of the most exciting chapters of my life.

But recently, I've been reflecting on just how seldom I hear stories and goals like these from my friends and acquaintences back in Ireland - especially among the engineers themselves, even on this site. It seems that relative to other places, EE in Ireland is quite entrepreneurally stagnant, whereas the computer science/IT/web-design community is flourishing.

I wonder might people have some reflections or insights on this? Am I being overly harsh on the state of things in Ireland for example?

Is there any others on this forum actively pursuing these types of start-up opportunities, or who might have echoed some of my sentiments above?

My stab at an explanation would be::

• Ireland never had a strong entrepreneurial history so we don't have any inspiring stories of native Apples or Microsofts. It has never been glorified in our culture.
• The lack of a deep-pocketed angel investment community, and start-up resources needed for a device development.
• CS/IT/web based development being seen (correctly) as a far less capital and time-intensive development cycle well suited for low-risk start-ups, especially in the low-investment environment of Ireland.
• The national "focus" on technology innovation has driven to the esoteric depths of IC design in large companies, and up the abstraction hierarchy to computer science or further to web-based apps.

Finally, a trivial anecdote, some chap posted a query he had about an some product he wished to investigate prototyping requiring EE knowledge in the Entrepreneurial & Business Management forum in the last day or two, and I personally thought it was a little surprising that there wasn't a deluge of EE folks of a similar mindset to myself jumping in to claim a piece of the pie, as unlikely an opportunity as it might be...

DublinDilbert

I'm also an EE working in the innovation field, both in Ireland and outside of Ireland. The thing i find strange is when i work abroad I meet lots of talented Irish people in every possible field.

Some of the issues i've encountered are:-

-> The irish market is so small that any product being developed needs to have international appeal.

-> Patent layers cost a ridiculous amount of money and from what i can tell there's no way of filing a provisional patent like say canada.

-> Funding is a problem in ireland, in other countries people invest in high tech start-up companies cause that's where they made their money... In Ireland people bought up house cause they'd keep going up in value :rolleyes:
The property buble has completely starved start up companies of capital.

-> EI lack the skills to help people actually develop a product. They'll talk about innovation all day... but they need to have a decent EE who could advise someone on how to develop a product or prototype.

-> Some start ups in ireland lack vision, and the owner just wants to make a quick money and retire... (life style business i think they call them)

-> There is a lack of people with the skills to design a complete prototype or product. Obviously depending on the product a range of skills will be required, its getting the right people. These people also need to be able to make a working prototype of the product quickly and cheaply... They need to be practical and not need a team of 20 people around them to get anything done.


In the last few years things have started to change (but have a long way to go), but ireland is only doing in the year 2000, what was going on in other countries in the 1970. A good example is campus companies, universities across the US/Canada were developing these to commercialise technologies invented at the universities in the 1970. In Ireland it took 25+ years before we saw anything like that. UL was one of the leaders in this field as it's president saw it working in other countries....

There have been small R&D groups around the country, but usually tied to a manufacturing company/site. But as it gets too expensive to manufacture anything here, the whole lot goes, which is very unfortunate.