Upcoming Events

InterTradeIreland All-Island Innovation Programme 2010 Annual conference 

"Building Collaborative Networks for Innovation"

9th -10th  June 2010

Call for abstracts out shortly. In the meantime if you would like further information on this event please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

EASST Conference 2010

Track 24 - "Innovation Networks and real-world experimentation"

2nd - 4th September 2010

Call for abstracts 

UCD Cultural Innovation conference 2010

The purpose of the conference is to analyse the socio-cultural forces which shape the economic, technological and political innovation agenda. The event will promote and establish an interface between academia, the Irish public and the diverse inhabitants of Dublin for the public discussion of an important current social issue – the issue of innovation. Cities play a unique role in the cultural impulses and environments that trigger novelty. The Symposium aims to focus on the cultural sources of economic value creation by addressing specifically Dublin’s urban, community and artistic culture and their contribution to the country's innovation agenda. The conference also intends on investigating how the arts are used by organisations as sources and models for innovating their routines and cultural and creative industries, which can be observed as a strong growth in employment in comparison to other economic sectors. It will critically analyse the impact of cultural activity for different economic contexts and the complex relationship between cultural production and social dynamics.

Call for abstracts out shortly. In the meantime if you would like further information on this event please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Previously Held Events 

The IRU as a new unit would like to publicise their research in an attempt to inform business managers, policy makers and the public about the importance of the work that is currently carried out by the unit and the future direction of some of these projects, in particular during these unsettled economic times. To this end they have recently held a number of dissemination days where they have showcased their research. 

Event Title: Modelling Innovative Futures

The IRU presented their research projects in an event as part of Innovation Dublin, a week-long festival of workshops, events and showcases promoting innovation in the city. The event took place on October 16th 2009 and featured IRU, UCD´s newly established Innovation Research Unit. At the event, held in NovaUCD, IRU´s academic team showcased their cutting-edge research projects. Interested parties came along to see what is hot in innovation research and to discuss our projects and findings with us.

This exciting research is developed in our Computational Policy Lab, a new powerful infrastructure for Innovation Research built on a high-performance computing cluster. Here we are developing and testing optimising strategies for innovative organisations, entire innovation networks that span many organisations and we work on tools for anticipating and analysing new developments to help the recovery of the economy.

Our “hard science” approach to innovation research is made accessible to organisations in business and public policy. Our research projects, mostly international, are concerned with scenario modelling, agent-based simulation, and computational network analysis.

NEMO Dissemination Event - University of Hamburg - November 17-19 2009

Three years ago, the EU project “Network Models, Governance, and R&D Collaboration Networks” NEMO (6th Framework Programme of the European Commission, TSER Programme) started at the Research Centre Media & Politics, University of Hamburg. The project describes ways to optimise the structure of R&D collaboration networks in Europe for creating, transferring and distributing knowledge. In the meantime, NEMO has helped to create a whole programme of related research projects at Dublin´s newly established UCD Innovation Research Unit (IRU).

The purpose of IRU is to provide cutting-edge research on the needs of today´s economies to breed an innovation ecosystem with optimally structured university-industry-government networks. At IRU, we use computational modelling, informed by large new datasets coming from empirical research, to investigate the actors, designs, processes and policies of innovation networks. In our Computational Policy Lab, we develop and test optimising strategies for innovation networks, and work on options for anticipating and analysing new developments to help the recovery of the economy. IRU is centred around 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).

To mark the end of the EU project NEMO in November 2009, its results will be showcased at a final dissemination event in the University of Hamburg, the location of the origination of the project. The event will be in the format of presentations on the methods and the final results of the project, and a poster exhibition of NEMO studies and further projects located at UCD´s Innovation Research Unit (IRU). This event was held on November 17th, 18th and 19th 2009, at the University of Hamburg and in TuTech Innovation GmbH. The event was a huge success with people from varied disciplines attending, below are some photos of the event.

NEMO Dissemination Event - European Union House, Dublin - November 24th 2009

Our final event held for this year took place in the European Union House in Dublin city centre below are some pictures of the event. Please watch this space for details of future events or contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .