PROFESSOR DYLAN JONES-EVANS

Twenty-one years ago this week, I was appointed to my first professorial chair in entrepreneurship at the University of Glamorgan. Since then, I have been lucky to have had a wonderful career which has taken me across the World and presented me with incredible opportunities to engage with so many individuals and organisations and hopefully help make a difference to people’s lives. One of those opportunities that I value tremendously is my annual visit to Dublin, where I am privileged to chair the International Assessment Board for the Irish Research Council’s Enterprise Partnership Scheme. This is an innovative initiative where the Council, working with private enterprises and public bodies, awards scholarships to the most promising researchers in Ireland, offering them the opportunity to gain real world experience by working on a project with a non-academic organisation. In return, industry gets access to an exceptional pool of competitively selected, high-calibre researche...

Since the 2008 financial crisis that led to the worse economic downturn since the 1920s, the high street banks have introduced more stringent rules regarding credit availability that have reduced the terms of loans and the affordability to many businesses. For example, whilst the average length of a commercial banking loan was approximately nine years for accounts opened in 2008, this was shortened to approximately five years in 2009, and has continued at that level since thus making lending less affordable to many businesses. Indeed, the latest Banking Taskforce Appeals Process Review for the UK has shown that for bank lending above £25,000, nearly half of the businesses cited affordability as the key reason for banks declining their request for a loan. Whilst it seems that little is being done to address the issue of affordability of finance in the UK which is restricting funding to many SMEs, the Irish Government has recently decided to deal with the lack of credit being made ...

One of my favourite cities in the World is Dublin and it was great to be there again earlier this week to meet with high growth firms at the invitation of Enterprise Ireland, their development agency. Although it’s been nearly nineteen years since I left my job as a research fellow at University College Dublin, I have been a frequent returnee to the Emerald Isle. When I first arrived in Ireland in the mid 1990s, it was the beginning of the rise of the Celtic Tiger when the Irish economy expanded beyond the expectations and dreams of Irish people. In fact, between 1995 and 2000, it grew at an average rate of 9 per cent and, whilst there was some slowdown after this, it still had an average growth of 5.9 per cent in the years up to the crash of 2008. Not surprisingly, this success meant that Ireland was the country that many small economies, including Wales, wanted to emulate. How this growth happened is still a cause for debate amongst economists but it is probably due to a mix...

During the last year, I was privileged to be a member of a taskforce set up by the Economy Minister, Mrs Edwina Hart, to consider the links between the Welsh language and economic development.  The panel’s findings were published last week and made a number of recommendations that examine not only how the Welsh language and bilingualism can support business growth and economic development but also, more significantly, how economic development can support increased use of the Welsh language. It was encouraging that we received many constructive ideas and positive examples from the private sector as to how they considered the Welsh language could be used to support business communities across the nation. Perhaps one of the most important suggestions from the report is related to a business view of the unique nature of the Welsh language, namely the fact that it is one of the oldest in Europe means that it has its own specific brand value that can bring potential comme...

Given the increased interest in local shopping, which was discussed in yesterday's Daily Post column, I thought I would revisit an article I wrote back in December 2005 for the same newspaper. It specifically examined how an Irish supermarket, Superquinn, encouraged greater purchasing of goods and services in Ireland through developing a new type of loyalty card. Could it work here in Wales? Well, as far as I can tell, something like this has never been tried in the UK but I am sure that one of the supermarkets could trial this for a period to see if consumers can be encouraged to buy local. " When I lived in Dublin during the mid 1990s, I was astounded, on visiting my first Irish supermarket, to find that Irish goods were being promoted above and beyond the call of any retailer’s duty.  Perhaps this was because I had been fortunate enough to visit a ‘Superquinn’s’ outlet, which has a superb record of promoting Irish produce.  For example, everything sold in the ...

The Republic of Ireland was one of the economies hardest hit by the recent global recession. With unemployment reaching 15 per cent earlier this year and the Irish Government having to make austerity cuts that make those emanating from Whitehall look positively generous in comparison, there remained serious doubts as to whether the Celtic Tiger could recover any of its bite during the next decade. Yet despite these challenges, the new Irish Government has begun a serious fightback and is continuing to look to innovation as the key driver in growing its economy for the future. In particular, it is developing key strategies that are focusing on those areas of the economy it sees as being critical in transforming the business sector over the next decade. One of these is the so-called Green Economy that encompasses a range of activities spread across different sectors that have the common objective of providing goods and services in a sustainable way that reduces the impact on t...

Whilst it seems, after Saturday's enthralling quarter final in the rugby World Cup, there is very little that Ireland can teach Wales in terms of modern rugby, the same is certainly not true in terms of how to get everyone working together to revitalise an economy. On Saturday, I wrote about the sterling work of the Irish Technology Leaders Group (ITLG) and mentioned the upcoming Global Irish Economic Summit that was to take place over the weekend in Dublin Castle.  Following this prestigious event, at which former US President Bill Clinton and a host of others spoke, there are a number of recommendations that have already been announced in the last couple of days. These include: Private sector expertise - ITLG has offered to put together a group of Irish technology leaders to sit on the boards of semi-state companies without charge to help the country weather the current economic storm. They would initially offer to work for free to help run various sta...

Last week, I was delighted to be invited to Dublin for the fourth Annual “Silicon Valley Comes to Ireland” conference, organised by the Irish Technology Leaders Group’s (ITLG) . This is a regular event in which senior executives from the world’s innovation hotspot come over to Ireland to engage with more than fifty Irish technology companies in a series of private investor workshops. Earlier this summer, the University of Wales Global Academy opened an office in ITLG’s Irish Innovation Centre in San Jose , the capital city of Silicon Valley, to give Welsh firms access to the region’s investors and universities. So this was a real opportunity to catch up with John Hartnett, the President of ITLG, and see the effect that his team is having on delivering a more innovative economy. As John suggested during the event, their aim is to help Ireland focus on enlarging its indigenous high-tech sector to drive economic recovery as there is significant opportunity for growth created by ...