Digital Tiger
Ireland is an export machine, very productive and globally competitive. It focuses on companies located in three of its big cities. Their model allows local businesses like Kerry Group, Smurfit Kappa, Ardagh Glass, CRH or Ryanair to grow worldwide, and has stimulated the establishment of external multinational companies due to lower taxes, more flexible labor laws, the lure of the English language and a flow of aid for the creation of real employment and — in order to stimulate a technological model – of research and development.
The opposite of what has happened in other countries that have been publicly rescued (Greece) or privately (Spain), the collapse of the economy, lowering of salaries, and administrative cuts has made Ireland more attractive for foreign investors.
Despite the fact that not everything is rose-colored and the difficulty of the global situation is what it is, on the streets of Dublin, you can enjoy vitality similar to that of what I experience in Miami or San Francisco when I am there. Thousands of workers from Google, Ebay, Facebook, Amazon, Citibank, Price or IDODI Ireland spread out on the streets of Temple Bar or the bodegas of the new Docklands and are able to see things in a different way. One of the members of the board of directors of our company in the Dominican Republic who took a course at Complutense described the socioeconomic crisis in Spain to me. He said, “They’ve turned out the lights in the souls of you Spaniards.
What a shame. So much complaining”. What do they do here? At a private level, they innovate; they are pragmatic and take risks. At the public level, they organize, stimulate and generate support models. Overall, they talk very little, but they do a lot. They were one of the first multinationals to set root in Ireland. In the Eighties they used to be Digital Equipment Corp., and used to be the leading manufacturer of the mini-computer. At its height, Digital had 1,500 employees assembling computers in Galway. It shows this didn’t start just yesterday, and it allows us to understand the spirit of this little nation. The chart represents data related to debt, management, and business. What stands out is the data on foreign companies that set up and how they make profits.
It’s interesting that the origin of Ireland technologically is not so much due to the lowering of taxes that it suffered at the beginning of the 2000’s but due to the fact that after the technological bubble of the Nineties many of those techs from Digital Equipment began taking advantage of their experience and found their way deep into the large American and Asian multinational corporations. Once in those companies, they began to push for them to branch into their home countries.
Digital opened the road to Hewlett-Packard in Galway. Most of them are engineers and programmers researching and developing advanced services for companies in the cloud.
Even though universities in Ireland don’t appear in the rankings, no one can ignore the fact that some of them have a lot to do with this resurgence in the new Irish economy — centers such as the Center for Research on Nanostructures and Nanodevices Adaptation (CRANN) at Trinity College. CRANN accounts for 300 researchers from 45 countries, working with more than 125 companies like Intel and Merck. Companies make use of the research and installations of CRANN, while students of CRANN and post doctorates acquire knowledge, experience and employment in the companies.
The connection between research centers and companies is enviable and follows the American model which has such good results. The combination of tax policies, research, history, entrepreneurship and innovation make Ireland an extraordinary place to start projects. It should be said though that here are those who insist it isn’t so.
In my case, we’ve always done it thinking ambitiously and consider that from this point we can get set up to later make qualitative jumps into the giant English-speaking markets, all the while becoming nourished by the greatest and best competition in which to learn and improve.
If you are interested, don’t hesitate to try. We can help you boost your project from here. It’s not easy to get set up; it’s not cheap to get settled; it’s not so simple to build a structure and speed up the necessary procedures to get set up, but we can help you.
