Research Ireland recently launched their inaugural strategy to “help deliver a stronger, more resilient Ireland enabled through research and innovation.” Has this new strategy laid the foundations for a successful “triple-helix model” of innovation in Ireland?
If you’ve not heard the term before, a triple-helix model is where government, academia and industry work together in partnership to drive innovation, economic growth and societal progress. The idea was termed by Henry Etzkowitz and Loet Leydesdorff back in 1995, who wrote that a “triple-helix” of academic-industry-government relations was needed for modern innovation strategies.
The key part of the model is transforming universities from traditional teaching grounds into research institutions that drive innovation and entrepreneurial success, leading to broader prosperity for the economy and beyond. The model has worked well in countries like Denmark, which boasts about their “triple-helix advantage” for research when trying to attract foreign investment (Denmark ranks 2nd on the 2025 European Innovation Scoreboard classed as an “innovation leader”, Ireland is 5th and classed as a “strong innovator”).
While Research Ireland’s new strategy doesn’t say it explicitly, the innovation model appears to be the template. In Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, James Lawless’s words, Research Ireland will “strengthen the connections between academia, enterprise, public policy, and society.”
Research Ireland’s Chair and CEO, Michael Horgan and Diarmuid O’Brien, both echo this, saying that they will work “proactively to accelerate innovation and impact – connecting researchers to enterprise, investors, policymakers, and international partners; strengthening pathways from discovery to application; and reinforcing the link between research excellence, innovation-led growth, and regional development.”
What does Research Ireland’s new strategy say?
Research Ireland actually released two documents as part of their strategy launch. Curiosity, Capability, Competitiveness – Charting Ireland’s Research and Innovation Future 2026–2030 or, if you’re pushed for time, there is also a more digestible Strategy Snapshot.
Both present a vision of how Research Ireland plans to “develop an internationally renowned research and innovation system for the prosperity of the people of Ireland”, dividing strategic actions and KPIs into three themes: talent (empowering people), economy (strengthening competitiveness) and society (driving solutions).
The strategy sets out an ambitious list of actions and KPIs, including targets for 3,800 new PhDs and 2,000 postdoctoral fellows, 50 active spin-out companies founded by Research Ireland-funded researchers, and a pledge to fund 150 Research Ireland awards targeting societal impact.
But it’s the focus on funding for academia (as well as better connecting it with industry) that is of particular interest, as investment in Irish universities was cut back following the global financial crisis in 2008, leading to criticism of underfunding higher education in Ireland.
Appearing to recognise this issue, the strategy repeatedly talks about investment in Higher Education Institution (HEI) infrastructure, committing to “strengthen the international research competitiveness of the HEIs by investing in developing and attracting the best researchers, and ensuring Ireland has the skills, infrastructure, and people needed to capitalise on national opportunities and address pressing societal challenges.”
€4.55 billion has already been pledged by the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science for Ireland’s education, research, and innovation, with over €2.45 billion of that set for research and innovation.
Curiosity-driven research
Not only does Research Ireland aim to forge new partnerships between businesses and academia, government funding is being directed towards the type of aspirational research (or “curiosity-driven excellence”) that’s more obviously suited for academic environments.
Curiosity-driven research is what helps humanity to advance, with society-changing innovations such as nuclear fission, space exploration, the World Wide Web, and now artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, curiosity-driven research has many more failures than successes, and the work often never becomes commercial viabile. We’ve still not yet cracked self-driving cars, despite working on the technologies for years, and we have yet to see nuclear fusion provide the limitless clean energy it has promised for decades.
Public funding is needed for these types of projects because the risk for industry is too high. Universities act as the starting point, researching and developing ideas at the earliest stages to see if they’re viable.
If we were to use the NASA-developed Technology Readiness Level (TRL), universities tend to focus on the early stages like TRL1 (basic principles observed) and TRL 2 (technology concept formulated), where the emphasis is on discovery, early-stage exploration and proving that an idea has potential. Businesses usually only step in at the later stages, once an idea has been proven to work and is almost ready to be developed into a product that can be scaled and commercialised.
Tellingly, all of the strategy’s case studies show how university-led research and discovery can strengthen Ireland’s talent pipeline, deliver economic impact, or create wider benefits for society, with examples including Irish spin-out companies coming from breakthroughs in quantum computing and biopharmaceuticals.
Research Ireland clearly wants to take a step beyond being more than just a source of grants. As the Chair and CEO both say, their strategy is to “be a development agency for the system by being More than a Funder: we will help shape the conditions under which research and innovation deliver maximum benefit for Ireland.”
On paper, this is a very encouraging shift but the hard part, of course, will be the delivery. Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff warned that there needs to be “purposeful adjustment” before the triple-helix model can succeed. Research Ireland’s strategy looks like a welcome attempt to do exactly that: create the conditions for relationships between government, academia and industry to become more structured, more ambitious and more useful to Ireland’s long-term economic and social future.
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