INNOVATION ALLIANCE: A PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN DUBLIN’S BIG TWO UNIVERSITIES

The Innovation Alliance was a collective research initiative between Ireland’s two leading Universities: Trinity College Dublin (The University of Dublin’s only constituent college) and University College Dublin. The alliance built upon the extremely successful research and incubation hubs that each university had developed separately with the view to harnessing their combined expertise and, by working with the government and key strategic business partners, attracting significant investment into Ireland. In addition, the Innovation Alliance would allow both universities to collectively attract research funding and to share resources to significantly increase research output and to further academic research in Ireland.

ABOUT

The Innovation Alliance was intended to facilitate the advance of Ireland’s Smart Economy with two core initiatives: to establish a joint venture in enterprise development and to create an Innovation Academy to foster entrepreneurship. Incepted in 2009 and launched formally in 2010, the alliance brought together PhD students from both universities (which accounts for just over 50% of all PhD students in Ireland), to encourage joint-working and knowledge-sharing with a view to harnessing the potential of their combined work to unlock innovation and attract investment and grant-funding.

Both UCD and Trinity have developed reputations as Ireland’s pre-eminent universities with global reputations. The Innovation Alliance was a marked departure from their intense rivalry, seeking to build upon the extensive research output of both and to put Ireland on a global footing as an innovative and academic research hub. Certainly, Ireland has garnered such a reputation.

Whilst highly regarded in their own right, the Innovation Alliance universities work closely with their peers in the United Kingdom’s Russell Group and with other leading research-intensive universities around the world.