The Enabler, Martin Shanahan, CEO, IDA Ireland Featured in Leadership Next Fintech 35

Currently, in its 70th year of operations, IDA Ireland, the investment promotion agency of the Government of Ireland,  has played a crucial role in attracting foreign investments from all over the world into Ireland.  We caught up with Martin Shanahan, CEO of IDA Ireland, to talk about the Irish economy, the attractiveness of Ireland as a destination to set up global operations, and the reasoning behind why several Silicon Valley biggies including Facebook, Uber, Apple, Airbnb, and Dropbox locate their European headquarters in the country. We also caught up with Tanaz Buhariwalla, Director – India, IDA Ireland, to get a glimpse into why leading Indian firms including TCS, Wipro, Tech Mahindra, Infosys, HCL, NIIT, SMT (Sahajanand Medical Technologies), JLR Tata, Wockhardt and BrowserStack has established operations in the country

Currently, in its 70th year of operations, IDA Ireland, the investment promotion agency of the Government of Ireland, has played a crucial role in attracting foreign investments from all over the world into Ireland. We caught up with Martin Shanahan, CEO of IDA Ireland, to talk about the Irish economy, the attractiveness of Ireland as a destination to set up global operations, and the reasoning behind why several Silicon Valley biggies including Facebook, Uber, Apple, Airbnb, and Dropbox locate their European headquarters in the country.

We also caught up with Tanaz Buhariwalla, Director – India, IDA Ireland, to get a glimpse into why leading Indian firms including TCS, Wipro, Tech Mahindra, Infosys, HCL, NIIT, SMT (Sahajanand Medical Technologies), JLR Tata, Wockhardt and BrowserStack has established operations in the country. While IDA Ireland is officially positioned as an investment promotion agency, as Martin mentions during our conversation for this article, the DNA of IDA Ireland has revolved around its approach of working as a development partner that indeed ‘enables’ an enterprise in making the right decision, as it gears up to establish operations in a new country.

IDA acts as a catalyst, helping with relevant introductions to partners and service providers, ensuring the ‘ease of doing business that Ireland is proud of, is genuinely felt by the companies trying to enter the region. My primary role is to ensure that we continue to have a strong run of inbound investments over the next few years. When I joined IDA five years back, over 72% of our investments came from this region. Of course, our fastest-growing markets are in Asia; We’ve seen good progress in India, China, South Korea, and Japan.

While it certainly does provide us an opportunity to attract investments as well, the Irish economy has taken a bit of a hit because of Brexit. It is essential for IDA Ireland as an organization to recognize this aspect and work actively to not only attract investments but also nurture them for an extended period. We understand that technology, life sciences, medical devices, and international financial services are some of your focus areas. We’ve attracted over the US $1 billion in investments per annum over the last ten years in this segment.

Companies like Citi, Fidelity and Mastercard have come into the region to set up innovation operations. Post-Brexit, we’ve had Barclays, Standard & Poor’s, J.P. Morgan and Bank of America Merrill Lynch set up financial services operations in Dublin. The fourth segment is engineering, especially new technology, research, and innovation operations of companies like Jaguar Land Rover and vision systems major, Valeo. Also, in the food and beverage segment, companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi have established operations in Ireland.

Our approach has been to nominate Champions for each pillar, not only to develop policies but also to implement a program of initiatives and events to ensure the Diversity & Inclusion agenda is fully visible.

                            -Martin on Diversity & Inclusion

The most important point to note here is that an organization like IDA Ireland cannot ‘over-design’ and plan a strategy to build clusters. The role of IDA Ireland is to deliver a seamless setup experience, in line with our ease of doing business philosophy. Galway in the West is home to Ireland’s Med Tech sector, which has become one of the leading clusters for medical device products globally.

As IDA Ireland, we’re proactive to let these clusters develop. What is your vision for IDA Ireland, say five years from now?

2. Winning more investment from key economies in the Asia Pacific like India Research from McKinsey, Forbes, and others has demonstrated companies in the top quartile for gender and ethnic diversity at the executive level were 21% and 33% more likely to have above-average profitability. It is essential that we have the skills and experience available to attract companies into Ireland, independent of where they originate from.

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