Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Limerick Bizcamp, LOCC and Recovery plans

A quick post from my other blog, about the Limerick OCC and to invite everyone to get inolved in that, Bizcamp Limerick and the greater recovery plans. Sorry for the plugs but it's a good effort and worth sharing.

The Limerick Open Coffee Club is meeting tomorrow at 11:00am in the Absolute Hotel. All welcome. I've been getting some great support and feedback and even a few offers for the Bizcamp and the Incubator, now christened "Greenhouse Limerick" by it's founder, Evert Bopp. The LOCC is also joining forces with Stephen Kinsella to develop and deliver Bizcamp Limerick.

This is subsert of the original post here (which is quite lengthy):

Suggested Recovery Plan

We need to throw out our tax incentives and start looking inward. We had €70 billion in 2008 in the National Pension Reserve Fund. If we hit 10% or 20% unemployment, whats the point of having a massive retirement fund. Dublin has lots and lots of VC. No wonder the government cannot decentralise. Why can't we put €8 billion into Cork, Limerick, Galway, Waterford, Ennis and Sligo, in proportionate amounts, into BUSINESSES, not into hotels, property, roads.

The government and civil servants will not and cannot solve innovation, invention and enterprise growth. Private sector businesses can and need this funding. This funding would create a safe haven for banks to invest in and for the agencies to deliver grants and other inestments. €1 billion invested in Limerick and Cork, say, could help create up to 2,000 companies with 5 employees. That would remove 10,000 people from the dole.

Incubation centres, according to Wikipedia [?], have an 87% success rate even after 5 years. If just 50% of these were successful, and just 1% became big enough to employ more than 500 people, it would be a roaring success. Plus they'd have a base in Ireland, not North America where they currently have to go.

2 comments:

  1. Never been to an open coffee meet but this one sounds like its got all the right ideas going for it, looking at the news last night in relation to unemployment for january alone frightened the hell out of me, pictures of queues outside dole offices brought back visions of the 80's.

    Really hope these cups of coffee can make a difference!

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  2. 4 hours people queued to sign on in this small town and as we saw on twitter yesterday 2 more friends of twitterers lost their job's terrible

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