Kieran Donoghue, CEO
Invest Northern Ireland’s three-year business strategy aims to unlock the potential of businesses across NI
Kieran Donoghue, CEO of Invest NI, is pictured speaking at the Invest NI Staff Conference 2024.
Invest NI's CEO, Kieran Donoghue, writes in Ambition magazine about Invest NI's business strategy ‘Our Future in Focus 2024-27’ and how it will help businesses across Northern Ireland.
We want to help business across Northern Ireland become more productive, innovative and profitable, and in turn deliver an economy that works for everyone.
We recently launched our new business strategy ‘Our Future in Focus 2024-27’. It is a three-year plan focused on raising productivity, creating good jobs, driving sustainability, and promoting balanced regional growth – the four pillars of Minister Murphy’s Economic Mission.
The strategy is deliberately designed to re-orient Invest NI around a future in which we support our clients to invest more intellectual and financial capital in their own growth and development and Northern Ireland is also winning more international investment. The strategy has set ambitious targets for growth in the number of investments, new start-up businesses, innovation-active companies, expenditure on research and development and upskilling, external sales, and exports.
The execution of the strategy will be accompanied by a significant internal restructuring of Invest NI that will, over time, produce substantial change in the organisation’s leadership, mindset, culture, and overall approach to economic development. The strategy is structured around six key priorities as follows:
1. Boosting business investment
The productivity gap between NI and the UK average presents a £7 billion growth opportunity for our economy. To close this gap and to achieve the ambition and the targets in the strategy, we need to incentivise our client companies and businesses across NI more broadly to undertake more investment. In this context, our target is to support a minimum of 5,000 productive investments by 2027.
2. Accelerating innovation and skills
Investing in innovation and skills is a recognised way to drive productivity and competitiveness. As part of our new strategy, we will support companies to invest in product and process innovation and to adopt new technologies, automation and AI to enhance their productivity and efficiency. Our broad range of training and upskilling programs will be deployed to ensure that the employees in our client companies are enabled to innovate and utilise new technologies and new ways of thinking.
3. Driving global ambition
We want to position Northern Ireland as a leader among the world’s Small Advanced Economies. To do this we need to exploit the advantage we possess in dual market access, maintain a relentless focus on selling outside of NI and simultaneously attract more high-value inward investment. Developing our strong base of indigenous SMEs and attracting international investors are not mutually exclusive goals. We need to do both to create the sources of wealth that will produce the positive economic and social outcomes that are the legitimate focus of public policy.
4. Developing and achieving sustainability
Forecasts suggest green investment could create over $10 trillion in global GDP by 2050. Therefore, we will support companies to diversify into emerging green markets and supply chains and to lower their carbon footprint. New investments in energy-saving and net-zero technologies will be a key feature of the strategy.
5. Maximising the impact of City & Growth Deals
We believe the City & Growth Deal projects have the potential to be vehicles for both sectoral and regional development and so we have formally included them as a priority within our new strategy. Supporting the successful implementation of the deals and ensuring our clients utilise and benefit from the infrastructure and capabilities derived from them is vital.
6. Promoting places and partnerships
We must ensure that communities right across Northern Ireland share in our economic growth. As a result, we are implementing a new regional approach with an expanded network of regional teams and a new Land and Property strategy to improve the geographic distribution of investment.
Working Together
Finally, at Invest NI we recognise that collaboration and partnerships will be key to achieving our strategic goals. Therefore, we will work closely with our clients and other businesses, government departments, councils, the education sector, chambers, and service providers to implement the strategy and share the benefits of its successful implementation.
Invest NI can support businesses like yours to achieve its full potential. You can read our full business strategy here.
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