The West Regional Enterprise Plan to 2024 includes projects and initiatives across the three West counties of Galway, Mayo and Roscommon.
The plan covers the three counties under the auspices of four local authorities – Galway City Council, Galway County Council, Mayo County Council and Roscommon County Council.
Stakeholder consultation sessions attracted over 100 participants from across industry, public sector, and higher education sectors from within the region. The high level of collaboration and ambition that exists within the region was demonstrated, despite some regional challenges. Seven key strategic objectives were agreed, with discrete actions developed for each.
The seven strategic objectives
1. Advance the development of the regional entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem.
The objective covers availability of incubation, acceleration, and sector-specific start-up infrastructure and programmes, access to early stage and scaling capital, people and skills, harnessing the Connected Hubs and Grow Remote initiatives to support placemaking and talent retention, enterprise strategy for the Strategic Development Zone at the Ireland West Airport Knock and gender equality, inclusivity and diversity in innovation and entrepreneurship.
2. Realise the Atlantic West region’s potential for enterprise and job creation in the renewable energy sector.
This objective includes scaling of CREW REDF project, to act as hub and spoke across the region, developing creative centres of excellence such as An Bealach, Roscommon, develop clustering of the creative and cultural sector to capitalise on emerging development in immersive technology and animation, collaboration between the industry, academia and researchers, supporting commercial exploitation of creative/cultural IP.
3. Support cluster organisations in driving the development and growth of enterprises.
Inter-regional collaboration for development of the supply-chain and upskilling programmes, smart specialisation of the region in the field of renewable energy, linked to natural and physical assets, for example, AMETS, including green hydrogen. Task force to support development and remove barriers to progress critical infrastructure.
4. Drive the global competitiveness of the life sciences sector underpinned by an expanded regional footprint and coordination.
Further develop coordination activities and integration of the diverse support elements and actors in the ecosystem and scale and diversify sector specialisms and specialism-specific supports across the region, including access to necessary infrastructure in liaison with strategic objective 1.
5. Grow the AgTech and food sector in the West, underpinned by an integrated innovation network, facilitating the transition towards a sustainable bioeconomy.
Utilise BIA Innovator Campus for development of agri-food and AgTech, integrated regional platform for innovation. Encourage FDI in the sector to support clustering and intra-company collaboration. Expand opportunities for AgTech. Develop industry-HEI collaboration and research to facilitate transition to circular bioeconomy and development of the Blue Bioeconomy.
6. Expand prospects for sustainable entrepreneurship, employment and upskilling in tourism.
Develop a pilot accelerator programme focused on experience economy and build out integrated, networked approaches for smarter, greener, connected and a more sustainable tourism offering (harnessing, for example, Hidden Heartlands initiative).
7. Facilitate an equitable digital and green transformation in the West.
Develop European Digital Innovation Hub (EDIH) to progress adaptation of AI, HPC and cybersecurity tech. Develop initiative to encourage emergence of ‘born sustainable, born circular’ start-ups. Further capacity to stimulate circular economy adaptation by enterprise.
Chair
Chair of the West Regional Enterprise Plan: Evelyn O’Toole, Founder and CEO, Complete Laboratory Solutions (CLS)
Contact
West Regional Enterprise Plan Programme Manager: Helena Deane
Email: helenadeane@wdc.ie
Plan and progress reports
West Regional Enterprise Plan to 2024 and progress reports
Related links
Growth of Onshore to Offshore Wind – Atlantic Region Wind Energy and Supply Chain Feasibility Study (PDF, 389KB)