Speaking in Galway this week, Dr Craig Barrett, the former head of Intel in Ireland, said that we had to be smarter, better educated and think quicker, if we were to survive in the modern world of economic development.
Dr Barrett, Chair of the Irish Technology Leadership Group, was speaking in NUI, Galway where he was leading a team of industrialists from Silicon Valley on a visit to Ireland to strengthen education, research and industry links to the US.
Dr Barrett said that the future lay in investment in education and in research. We had to out-think our international opposition and be smarter than them, otherwise .... ‘our lunch will be eaten by someone else.’
He told a conference in NUI Galway on Innovation in Education: “That is the future for Ireland. Quite frankly, if we do not pursue that with passion, with energy and resources, there is no future because our ‘lunch will be eaten by someone else.’
“There are too many people around the world already committed to this investment in education and research and if we want to enjoy the standard of living we have today, the only thing we can do is outsmart them, outwit them and out-think them,” he said.
He said that, in many respects, the US economy had suffered somewhat similarly to the Irish economy – for a time, the heads of young people, especially, had been turned away from areas such as engineering, science and maths by the vision of easy money in the property markets.
Speaking in the city as the Galway annual Galway Festival of Science and Technology goes on – aimed at increasing uptake in science, engineering and maths subjects among young people – he said that we now had to compete with emerging economies with our brains.
If we looked at the countries of the world that had established economies, our futures were very simple – we had to compete with the rest of the world with our brains. If we wanted to get paid more than workers in the rest of the world, then we had better add more value to what we did, we had better have a better education and better contribute more.
Ireland had grown dramatically in the last 20 years on the basis of foreign direct investment (FDI ), on the basis of international companies like Intel coming here creating jobs. (Dr Barrett led the Intel move to Ireland ) That jump-started Ireland over the last 20 years.
But, going forward, Ireland had to compete with the United States, Japan, China and the rest of the world. It was not going to be done on the basis of FDI. It was going to be done on the basis of brains and the ingenuity and the innovation and the capabilities of the Irish workforce. It was going to be done internally, rather than on than depending on external help.
Dr Barret said Ireland’s crucial test was to recognise the key opportunities of the 21st century. They were no secret – new materials, nano technology, alternative energies, bio-technology. The question was were we going to be committed to making the investment in areas like primary, secondary and tertiary education, increase involvement in areas like science, engineering and maths, and make the substantial investments in these areas and research and development.
He warned that our present investment levels might not be enough and said that such investment had to be large enough to compete against the concentration in economies like those of the US and China. It had to be proofed against what he called the ‘electoral cycle’ of governments coming and going. There also had to be an increased link between industry and research and education.
And development did not mean that challenges had to come from huge corporations – some of the major challenges of recent years had come from tiny groups of researchers involved in concepts such as Google and Yahoo. This was where Ireland had to see its future.
