Last week, I stirred some outrage by uttering heresy: the indigenous Irish economy has a problem with innovation. In a piece about Tony O’Reilly, I compared Ireland, in this regard, unfavourably with Denmark. The apparently widespread belief that this is ridiculous suggests we don’t just have a problem with innovation – we have a problem with complacency.

It would be absurd to suggest that there are no innovative indigenous Irish companies. But it’s the big picture that matters. We can get it from the Global Innovation Index, produced annually by a United Nations agency, the World Intellectual Property Organisation. It aims to “reveal the most innovative economies in the world, ranking the innovation performance of around 132 economies”.

Ireland is 22nd, which is mediocre for a young, open, highly educated, wealthy country with relatively massive inward investment from many of the world’s most advanced companies. What’s more worrying is that Ireland’s ranking has dropped rapidly in recent years.

Ireland is especially weak in the area I was trying to draw attention to last week: the creation of international brands. We rank 37th on “global brand value”, 38th on the creation of patents for new products and a miserable 64th on industrial designs. On the export of cultural and creative services as a percentage of total trade – an area where we imagine ourselves to be world-beaters because we have Jessie Buckley, Cillian Murphy, Andrew Scott and Saoirse Ronan – we rank 45th.

Another index is the European Innovation........

© The Irish Times