UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN:Critical issues affecting start-up companies and how Ireland can build an entrepreneurial culture while commercialising ideas internationally are the focus of a key conference this month at UCD

A CONFERENCE this month in UCD will look at the future of the entrepreneur in Ireland. Entitled Nature or Nurture: Growing the Irish Entrepreneur, the event will explore some of the key issues currently affecting start-up companies and how Ireland can build a sustainable entrepreneurial culture.

The keynote address will be delivered by renewable energy entrepreneur Dr Eddie O'Connor. Prof Danny Breznitz of Georgia Institute of Technology will be sharing his insights into global trends in entrepreneurship.

The conference will also feature a panel discussion chaired by Prof Frank Roche, director of the UCD Michael Smurfit Business School. The discussion will involve a number of leading Irish entrepreneurs including Seán Melly, chairman of Powerscourt Investments; Mary Davis, managing director of Special Olympics Europe/Eurasia; Owen Murphy, a partner in ACT Venture Capital; and Seán Gallagher, managing director of Smarthomes.

According to Frank Roche, Ireland is producing lots of entrepreneurs at the moment, but we are going to have to raise our game to ensure that they succeed in starting and growing businesses in the future.

"We are producing a lot of entrepreneurs," he says. "We are very high up the international scale in this regard, coming in sixth place in the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] in terms of our propensity to be entrepreneurial. Where the difficulty lies is in helping them grow their businesses to be internationally successful."

Entrepreneurship is also more important now than it was in the past. "We have accomplished a huge amount since the early 1990s and we have a much more positive culture and environment for entrepreneurship now," he says. "But we need entrepreneurship to be a new leg for our economic development strategy. Foreign direct investment has been the main driver of the strategy up until now, but we can't rely on that any more. We are facing a lot of competition for that investment now so we need to develop our own growth drivers."

The Nature or Nurture conference will look to the future and assess how entrepreneurship can play a role in economic growth and explore what Ireland needs to do in order to help its entrepreneurs fulfil their potential.

"We need to look 10 or 15 years down the road and see where we need to be positioned as an economy," says Roche. "We have to have an industry that is as good or better than that of any of our competitors. And we have to ask ourselves where this profile is going to come from - foreign direct investment, existing indigenous industry, or new entrepreneurs. I believe that a large amount of the new wave of growth that we need is going to come from these entrepreneurs."

That said, there are still significant barriers to entrepreneurship in Ireland. "There are a lot of barriers out there," he notes. "One of the major ones is perception. According to the GEM survey of entrepreneurship, we are the number one country in Europe for new business start-ups, with a very high proportion of our population perceiving new business opportunities. However, that has taken a bit of a dunt of late . . . There seems to be a perception that a bad economic environment means that there are no opportunities."

This needs to be changed, he argues. "It might be a bad environment, but there are still lots of opportunities. People are looking for value propositions in the market at present - this relates to manufacturing as well as services in sectors such as retail and hairdressing and so on. This offers opportunities for people to deliver value. Value doesn't necessarily mean cheap, it means quality as well."

Another barrier is a lack of knowledge. And this brings Roche to the age-old argument about successful entrepreneurs - are they born or made? Are they a product of nature or nurture?

"The answer is both," Roche contends. "Some of our most famous examples, like Denis O'Brien or Barry O'Callaghan, were probably always destined to be great entrepreneurs. Others are triggered into it by events. I believe that entrepreneurship is distributed across our society in the same measure as it is in other countries. The question is why one country will have more or less entrepreneurs than another - and I think this is a question of education and knowledge."

He talks about all of this in terms of a journey. "A lot of potential entrepreneurs need to know how to do it. They need to know what the journey is and be shown it. They have no idea of how to turn something into an investor-ready business plan. It is not difficult to give people this knowledge - it is just a question of putting the structures in place in our second- and third-level education sectors to ensure that it is done."

Another barrier is finance. "Access to finance has always been a problem and it will [always] be to one extent or another," he says. "The banks have done a fairly good job in terms of funding business, as have the venture capital funds and other funders. The issue at present is that they are being far more selective when committing funds. The other issue is a lack of genuine seed capital in Ireland."

What he means here is funding for pre-start-up ventures. "When people talk about seed capital here they are actually talking about early stage venture capital," says Roche. "What we need more of is funding for ventures before they are established, and the Government has a role to play here."

Finally, there is the issue of commercialisation of research and development. "If an Irish researcher develops a piece of intellectual property and sells it on to a multinational, it could be commercialised anywhere in the world and Ireland wouldn't get the benefit," he says.

"We need to get much better at commercialising the outputs from the research being funded by Science Foundation Ireland and others.

"We need to help the research community to become more entrepreneurial to ensure that the benefit of the research stays here."

Nature or Nurture: Growing the Irish Entrepreneur takes place on Wednesday March 11th from 7.30am-12pm at O'Reilly Hall, Belfield, UCD.

For details, contact Caroline Kinsella, event manager, on 01-716 8050; e-mail: businessalumni@ucd.ie; or see ucd.ie/ growingireland