IDA and the Irish mind

[farnaby]

The IDA has a full page ad in the latest Economist magazine praising "the Irish mind" as "the unique resource you'll need to bring your knowledge-based business to peak performance". Under an Image of Oscar Wilde by Louis le Brocquy it says:

The Irish. Creative. Imaginative. And flexible. Agile minds with a unique capacity to initiate, and innovate, without being directed. Always thinking on their feet. Adapting and improving. Generating new knowledge and new ideas. Working together to find new ways of getting things done. Better and faster.

This flexible attitude pervades the ecosystem. Nowhere else will you find such close, frequently informal, links between enterprise, education and research facilities and a pro-business government. Connected by a dynamic information infrastructure. In Ireland, everything works together.

What do people think? Is the Irish mind a great and unique asset?
The first paragraph could be written by any national/regional business development organisation about the virtues of its people, so is this just a pure marketing attempt to convince others we are at the forefront of the knowledge economy, so that they come with better jobs than the low-skilled, here-for-the-tax-breaks ones we got over the past 20 years? For years our culture has been associated with history, tradition, rural life, emigration, all of which contradicts the image of innovation and rapid change.

However, while initially cynical, I like the fact that we are presented so positively, and also that they tangibly link the artistic creativity which we are proud of (Wilde, plus Joyce and Beckett here) to our desire to be creative in other walks of life. Who knows, we may all start to believe the hype someday.

[Ponzi]

Strange they use Irish artists in attempt to encourage business to locate here, when the artists concerned chose to locate elsewhere.

[Twin Towers]

The Irish. Creative. Imaginative. And flexible. Agile minds with a unique capacity to initiate, and innovate, without being directed. Always thinking on their feet. Adapting and improving. Generating new knowledge and new ideas. Working together to find new ways of getting things done. Better and faster.

This flexible attitude pervades the ecosystem. Nowhere else will you find such close, frequently informal, links between enterprise, education and research facilities and a pro-business government. Connected by a dynamic information infrastructure. In Ireland, everything works together.

Its plausible to an international audience and plays to the view that people already have of us.

Don't know about "Connected by a dynamic information infrastructure. In Ireland, everything works together." though.

[TradCat]

But the Irish have jobs. If you set up in Ireland now you'll have to employ people from everywhere else who don't have the unique Irish mind. Imagine the disappointment of the multi-nationalist who thought he'd be getting Oscar Wilde but ended up with Franz Kafka.

[farnaby]

But the Irish have jobs. If you set up in Ireland now you'll have to employ people from everywhere else who don't have the unique Irish mind. Imagine the disappointment of the multi-nationalist who thought he'd be getting Oscar Wilde but ended up with Franz Kafka.

Not necessarily an issue - would multi-nationals employ high-skilled knowledge workers who didn't already have a job? No - unless applicants were direct out of university they'd be a bit suspicious as to why. The whole point of government promoting a knowledge economy is to raise demand for irish workers and thus create jobs with higher salaries (which wouldn't happen if supply was increasing equally).

[joel]

The IDA has a full page ad in the latest Economist magazine praising "the Irish mind" as "the unique resource you'll need to bring your knowledge-based business to peak performance". Under an Image of Oscar Wilde by Louis le Brocquy it says:

The Irish. Creative. Imaginative. And flexible. Agile minds with a unique capacity to initiate, and innovate, without being directed. Always thinking on their feet. Adapting and improving. Generating new knowledge and new ideas. Working together to find new ways of getting things done. Better and faster.

This flexible attitude pervades the ecosystem. Nowhere else will you find such close, frequently informal, links between enterprise, education and research facilities and a pro-business government. Connected by a dynamic information infrastructure. In Ireland, everything works together.

What do people think? Is the Irish mind a great and unique asset?
The first paragraph could be written by any national/regional business development organisation about the virtues of its people, so is this just a pure marketing attempt to convince others we are at the forefront of the knowledge economy, so that they come with better jobs than the low-skilled, here-for-the-tax-breaks ones we got over the past 20 years? For years our culture has been associated with history, tradition, rural life, emigration, all of which contradicts the image of innovation and rapid change.

However, while initially cynical, I like the fact that we are presented so positively, and also that they tangibly link the artistic creativity which we are proud of (Wilde, plus Joyce and Beckett here) to our desire to be creative in other walks of life. Who knows, we may all start to believe the hype someday.

I definitely think the IDA has something there.

I thought similar when I was reading Peter O'Tooles biography - I thought, no Englishmen could come close to writing this!

An Englishman would give you a linear biography - incidents one after another. But O'Toole was bringing all sorts of things into it - an agile, innovative mind, indeed.

[just_society]

I work in an American owned multi-national. An Irish operation was opened years ago and at this stage it is one of the biggest sites of the company. Some of the top brass are referred to as 'The Irish Mafia' to my amusement.

We employ quite a few other nationalities and while there are always the few Irish who embody the negative Irish stereotype I think we compare favourably to many other nationalities. Below is based on my own experience, but shouldn't be taken too seriously.

Compared to the continentals, we are far less bureaucratic. Many of them expect very close supervision and slowly develop autonomy. In a case here a non-Irish guy with 20+ years experience was asking for his supervisor to arrange his tasks in order of priority on a daily basis while Irish guys with less than half that were working with minimal supervision. Their approach was reactive, rather than the Irish being pro-active.

Compared with the Americans we are probably less selfish in our careers. Many of them jealously guard knowledge for fear their ideas will be stolen. They probably work harder, but seem less adept at communicating (ironically!).

Irish management can tend to be autocratic though. The worry I have is that management complacency couild cause the downfall of many Irish companies.

[Ard-Taoiseach]

I like this ad.

I get the Economist weekly as I have a subscription to it and almost every week there's some govt investment agency advertising. Ours are way more sophisticated to the others I read, even Singapore's smack of a narrow focus on things like tax rates and statistics.

"Invest in Macedonia" ads remind me of IDA's efforts about 20 years ago. They sell themselves as a cheap and cheerful peripheral European country with low/no taxes in which to invest. The ads are very basic, though, even the typeface is quite standard.

The Irish ones with the "unique" font and interesting use of le Brocquy's paintings always stand out for me. You'll only find them in the pages of the Economist's Technology Quarterly too, subliminally associating Ireland with high-tech enterprise.

Well done, IDA!

[HanleyS]

If the Irish mind is so great then why have we no world scale multinationals of our own?

It's time we stood on our own two feet and ceased to be an offshoring centre.

[odie1kanobe]

If the Irish mind is so great then why have we no world scale multinationals of our own?

It's time we stood on our own two feet and ceased to be an offshoring centre.

CRH, Kerry Food and Smurfit (before Michael got greedy) did ok in their chosen markets.