DCU President encourages a culture of strategic risk-taking
- 23 March 2006

Speaking at a graduation ceremony in DCU on Saturday 25 March, Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, President of the university, suggested that one of the potential dangers facing Ireland was a reluctance to encourage strategic risk-taking and a tendency to damn those whose ventures or initiatives occasionally failed.

He said: 'We have got used to what one might call the "tribunal culture", in which we take great pains to identify and condemn wrongdoing. Sometimes it is not really wrongdoing at all, but rather just failure. Failure however is one of the occasionally necessary by-products of initiative, and if we come down hard on those who don't make everything work first time, then it follows that Ireland will be seen as an inhospitable place for innovators and entrepreneurs. That will make the task of maintaining growth and prosperity much harder for the future.'

Professor von Prondzynski pointed out that Ireland still has a relatively modest record in promoting entrepreneurship, in part because most of our prosperity has come from foreign investment. 'The next wave of growth needs to be increasingly based on indigenous enterprise, and we need to honour role models who have made that effort. We should certainly not want to create the impression that we will damn those who try and occasionally get it wrong.'

The DCU President pointed to the Ryan Academy of Entrepreneurship, and the university's Innovation and Enterprise Centre (Invent) as examples of DCU's strategy for promoting strategic risk-taking, both in the interests of economic success and the development of social enterprise. 'Entrepreneurship ius not just a way to national prosperity, but is also a way of stimulating economic activity for the less well-off', he said.

ENDS