SCIENCE:We have yet to revel in knowledge economy riches because there is a secret ingredient missing, writes Dick Ahlstrom.

You should be able to buy innovation at the shops. By the pound. Or even the kilo. Right there in the aisle reserved for the ready meals. Like the "just-add-water" dinners, you simply take your innovation home, remove all packaging and there you go. An idea ready to commercialise.

It doesn't work that way unfortunately (proof perhaps that someone is slipping up on the innovation side of things). It seems we still have to come up with our own ideas to pursue, even if the chore of figuring out what to eat has been taken care of by the just-add-water folks.

Getting past the just-add-water issue is noticeably getting easier when it comes to innovation, so at least that is a step in the right direction. There is no end of money available to get ideas, develop them and make a mint out of them, at least so far as the Government is concerned.

They really are channeling lots more cash through the research and development system. There is money for basic research, applied research and also to help nascent companies make money out of new ideas. So as far as officialdom is concerned, all the water you will ever need to add (at least until the end of the current National Development Plan in 2013) is already being poured out in bucket-fulls.

So how come we aren't all already rich from the just-add-water innovation machine that churns out commercial ideas by the kilo? We have been doing this for some years haven't we? Putting taxpayers' money into research to get ideas to get rich? Somewhere in the country there are taxpayers worrying about this. I know it because some of the backbench politicians told me.

Clearly there is a secret ingredient being left out of the mix. The ready meals always have a secret ingredient (usually lots of salt) to make them absolutely delicious. So we have yet to revel in knowledge economy riches because there is a secret ingredient missing in the just-add-water innovation recipe.

One wild guess suggests it might be creativity. You can add all the water you like to a dumb idea and it stays a dumb idea, if a slightly damp one. Creativity must be like salt to a ready meal. If the creativity isn't there then you aren't going to get edible innovation out of the pack.

Years of science reporting have shown me however that the one thing our scientists, engineers, mathematicians and business people don't lack is creativity. There are always plenty of good ideas knocking about and creative people to pursue them.

Just look for example at the recently announced Beaufort marine research awards, worth €20 million in taxpayers' just-add-water. (These are named by the way after an innovative Irishman Francis Beaufort who dreamed up a clever way to tell how hard the wind was blowing.) This money was handed out to five groups who all have good research ideas and the creativity to turn them into innovation.

You could look at any one of them, but I looked at one worth €7.2 million involving University College Cork, NUI Galway, Queens University Belfast and the Marine Institute. It is all about "biodiscovery", the business of finding useful things where you least expect them.

The goal is to find biological substances that work as antibiotics, fungicides and other useful and valuable things. Given the Beaufort awards are for marine research, they are going to look in a thoroughly obvious place. In bacteria living on marine sponges. Where else would you look?

The team will have to come up with creative new ways to find, study and assess any discoveries. And perhaps these will eventually turn up in innovative products, like antimicrobials that can kill off hospital superbugs. That would be very knowledge-economy.

So if the creativity needed to make just-add-water innovation work is already in the recipe then something else must be needed to make ideas go.

Another wild guess suggests time. It takes a while for creative ideas to deliver discoveries that can deliver innovation and new ways of doing things.

It will take a few years for the just-add-water to mix with the creativity that will provide innovation.

Patience is all that is required. The Finns, Japanese and Americans have proved that this works.

Keep the water coming and allow time for the ingredients to stew a bit longer.