Policy on business networking in Ireland: a review, and prospects for evaluation

INTRODUCTION: In early 2006 the Irish Government announced a Pilot Initiative for Collaborative Projects from Industry-Led Networks, the latest in a series of policies on ‘business networking’ that date back to the mid-1980s. The purpose of this chapter is to describe and comment on those policies by reviewing the previous literature (both academic and policy documents). What we stress is that over the years and across different policies, the precise focus has varied, in terms of networking aims and objectives and networking forms.1 We appreciate that there is considerable confusion in the wider discussions as to the meaning of ‘networks’ and ‘networking’ in a business context, and indeed this has been recognized before in analysis of Irish policy (for example, in Forfás (2004)). However, our approach is to avoid much of that confusion by simply centring discussion on those (inter-related and overlapping) areas of policy that the literature on Ireland consistently addresses when considering ‘business networking’, namely: ‘linkages’ between ‘local’ firms and transnational/multinational corporation (TNCs); training networks; research and development (R&D) networks; inter-firm cooperation processes more widely. These four topics are respectively the prime focus of successive Sections in this Chapter. Our discussion culminates in a consideration of the prospects for the successful impact of the 2006 Pilot. We welcome the initiative as seeming to represent a welcome seed-change in policy, and offer preliminary insights into how it might be evaluated. In doing so we introduce the notion of ‘public interest evaluation’ (PIE), intended to assess the extent to which public interests are served by a particular policy. Part of the idea is that whilst the Pilot is focused on (to some extent) measurable benefits to participating enterprises from networking projects, it might also be desirable to consider other effects on wider publics.