This project will undertake cutting-edge research on the needs of the Irish economy to breed an innovation ecosystem with optimally structured university-industry-government networks. We will use computational modelling, informed by large new datasets coming from empirical research within the proposed project, to investigate the actors, designs, processes and policies of Irish innovation networks. In our Computational Policy Lab, we will develop and test optimising strategies for Irish innovation networks, and work on options for anticipating and analysing new developments to help the recovery of the economy. Building on research in traditional fields already firmly present in Ireland (e.g. tax, healthcare, financial services, management, industry R&D, policy research), new problem fields for the Irish Smart Economy (e.g. green economy, public sector innovation, adaptive policy networks) will be tackled using our novel methodological framework, which is just emerging as an international research trend: a “hard science” approach to innovation research concerned with scenario modelling, simulation and computational network analyses, with the option of bringing in mathematics (for rigorous controlled computation) and large-scale empirical analyses (for realistic simulation).

This project is lead by Prof. Petra Ahrweiler of the UCD - Innovation Research Unit with partners from UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, UCD Centre for Innovation, Technology & Organisation (CITO), UCD Geary Institute and Queens University, Belfast.

The Innovation Research Unit has been awarded €1,15M research funding from the Irish Government's PRTLI5 Programme for IPSE.

eGovPoliNet - Building a global multidisciplinary digital governance and policy modelling research and practice community

eGovPoliNet sets up an international community in ICT solutions for governance and policy modelling.