Medtech in Ireland -- Turning Green into Gold

Article preview from IN VIVO - October 1, 2011

Despite the recent downturn in the national economy, Ireland's medical device community is on the verge of a major growth spurt. A lot of the credit goes to strong government support, particularly in the form of Enterprise Ireland, which serves as a major investor in medtech start-ups. Even with such support, Ireland's medtech start-up community faces many of the challenges that any start-up community faces. But the sector has high hopes and great ambitions. The second of a two-part series.

Medtech in Ireland -- Turning Green into Gold

Article preview from IN VIVO - October 1, 2011

As we noted in the first part of this two-part series, Ireland has long been a geography rich in medical device engineering and manufacturing. The country is home to European manufacturing operations for 16 of the top 25 multinational medical device companies. Today, Ireland is second in Europe only to Germany in terms of dollar value of medtech exports.

But over the past decade or so, the Irish medtech community has been undergoing a subtle transformation. Backed by strong support from the Irish government, the country's medtech executives have been trying to turn Ireland from a skilled manufacturing base to a community of vibrant innovation and company creation – from a country built on serving the needs of other device developers to one doing much of the development itself.

For a period of time in the early to mid 2000s, a strong economic boom in Ireland helped to drive this critical shift – remember when, just a few years ago, Ireland was Europe's Irish Tiger, economically speaking? More recently, Ireland's economy has gone bust, putting it in a class with the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain) nations rather than the BRICK (Brazil, Russia, India, China, Korea) countries, as an overheated economy, driven by a housing/construction bubble and overextended banking system has hit a wall.

Continued...

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