Management expert Dr Roy Green has gone from dispensing advice for thelikes of Tony Blair to mapping the clusters of high-tech firms in the west of Ireland. Anne Byrne reports
Professor Roy Green is technically Irish. He was born in Holles Street hospital and spent a whole three weeks in the State before departing, not to return for some decades. Not his decision, obviously.
His father, an Englishman, has been invited to head a new department of mathematical physics at the University of Adelaide. So he left his position at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and together with his Dutch wife and "Irish baby" made a new life in Australia.
In a strange type of reverse symmetry, Green, along with his wife and two children, re-crossed the world in the year 2000, to begin a new life, establishing a research institute in Galway. He was offered a professorship in NUI Galway and is frankly delighted to be here during what he says will probably be looked back upon as the golden years in Irish higher education.
The funding of €2.8 million that the university has received, under the Higher Education Authority's PRTLI cycle 3, to establish a "Centre for Innovation and Structural Change" far exceeds the monies available for socio-economic research in other OECD countries, he says. "The Irish higher education system is in a very healthy state, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of people from overseas want to come here to work - although Ireland is still in a period of catch-up, when it comes to research." Outside the ivory towers of academe he is optimistic about Ireland's economic future. (His own tower, the new centre - to be housed in an extension to the business school - has yet to be built, though the Taoiseach officially opened it last Friday.)
Green first returned to Ireland in 1998 on a visiting position to UCD because he was "interested in what was fast becoming a boom of quite extraordinary proportions, supposedly fuelled by Ireland's shift into knowledge-based industries and services. I wanted to analyse the source and extent to which this was sustainable in the long term, after the international boom had subsided." His wife, who has Irish ancestry, was "fascinated by Ireland, Irish literature and society".
Today, in NUI Galway, Green's research focuses on mapping the clusters of high-tech firms in the west of Ireland, or the Atlantic Technology Corridor, as it has been dubbed. "We looked at major and minor firms from Shannon to Limerick to Galway and found far more than appeared in the national statistics. The number of high-tech firms had been underestimated by about 50 per cent - it has taken us three months, sometimes following up anecdotes, word of mouth, telephone directories and company directories. Now, we're doing a survey of them looking at how big they are, the ways they operate, how much R and D they do, what connections there are between them."
The bigger questions to be asked, and perhaps answered, by the Centre for Innovation and Structural Change include, "To what extent is the knowledge-based activity now sustainable within the Irish economy? How do we measure the extent to which it has become part of the landscape? What are the ingredients for growth? Does the slowdown mean we're back to square one?" Links have already been forged with 10 overseas colleges, including MIT and Cambridge University, and with two colleges here.
Green's knowledge of economic policy is not confined to experience garnered within the groves of academe. For five years, he was adviser to the successive British shadow ministers for employment including Tony Blair and John Prescott. "John Prescott was the gruff traditional Labour ex-merchant seaman with a strong attachment to Labour values. Tony Blair was the public-school educated lawyer with an interest mainly in furthering his own ambitions, irrespective of which values they were attached to." Green tired of Thatcherism and the British weather and returned to Australia to act as adviser to the minister for employment in the Labour government.
"It was a very exciting time, primarily because being in government is much more productive than being in opposition. For the first time, I was able not only to develop but also to implement policy." He established a comprehensive workplace industrial relations survey, which has since become a reference series, providing data about structure, behaviour and performance in Australian workplaces. Ireland could benefit from such a survey, suggests Green.
After three years in the job, married, with young children, the pace of being on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, combined with large amounts of travel, forced him to reconsider. He returned to academia at the University of Newcastle, Australia, where he established and directed an employment studies centre, which carried out interdisciplinary research on a range of socio-economic areas. This experience should stand to him in NUI Galway. "There's no training in how to establish and sustain a research centre. It's something you learn by doing it." In the 1990s, the cold winds of "reform" were sweeping the Australian higher education landscape. Colleges were recruiting more full fee-paying students (foreign, mainly from south-east Asia) while the hurdles for gaining research funding increased. Academics were pulled in both directions, with more teaching and a limited time to do research, says Green.
By 2000, Green was ensconced in Ireland, where the warmth of the welcome from his new neighbours in Oughterard and his new colleagues in the college overwhelmed him. Ironically, the price of houses here (an offspring of the Celtic Tiger which had attracted him to Ireland in the first place) duly appalled him.
However, he remains smiling optimistic, convinced that Ireland has undergone sufficient structural change, with a skilled workforce and deeply embedded supply chains, to maintain its economic boom. Ireland's high-tech industry is largely unscathed while Scotland's silicon glen and the US's silicon valley are decimated, he says.
"Jobs will not be as plentiful as in the past and will be available at the higher end of the skills market. The emphasis for young people must be on upgrading their skills and education."
