Intel Ireland and the National University of Ireland, Maynooth have been working together to explore the possibility of identifying a ‘Regional Catalyst’ for small-to-medium size enterprises (SMEs) in the Kildare and Meath region, as part of the Digital Business Ecosystem Project. The Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE), a European Commission project is an open source, internet-based software environment in which SMEs can create and use business applications free of charge.

The Regional Catalyst’s role will be to coordinate participating SMEs and provide advice and guidance to facilitate their engagement with the DBE. Intel has played a large role in the development of the DBE platform, which enables businesses to cheaply and efficiently present their products and services on the internet and conduct business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions.

Through their use of the DBE, SMEs with the help of a Regional Catalyst will be able to expand and sustain not just their own businesses but also local and regional economic development in the area. The DBE is already being used by SMEs in the West Midlands in England, Aragon in Spain and in Finland to create new and combined service offerings in the tourism and software development industries.

One of the main benefits of the DBE, is that even the smallest business can participate competitively online in the massive global marketplace for business applications. In this way, SMEs that up to now, were out priced by large scale, proprietary applications, can overcome the digital divide and build geographical and economic clusters with other SMEs in the value chain.

NUI Maynooth hosted the one-day workshop on September 13th which was attended by local development and enterprise representatives. Brian Quinn, who helped organise the project on Intel’s behalf, was delighted with the event’s success, “It was a fantastic success with nearly 40 attendees from the university, Enterprise Ireland, the European Commission, Meath and Kildare County Councils and Partners on the DBE project from all over Europe.”

Both Intel and NUI Maynooth believe that the DBE project will be a significant benefit to businesses in the locality. For more information on the DBE, see www.digital-ecosystem.org.

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