Enterprise Ireland visualisations and analysis

One of our readers, Robert Fuller, took Gav’s Enterprise Ireland data and generously spent some time “cleaning” it. He sent it to us a few days ago, I’ve since used those spreadsheets to build a number visualisations. They would be a pretty heavy download for most broadband packages so I’m keeping them off the frontpage, you can view them by clicking through the ‘continued…’ link…

You’ll need a recent version of Java to load them correctly, most browsers will have these installed as standard. You can download and/or update at this link if you experience problems viewing.

Note: More information can be viewed on each chart by either clicking or hovering your mouse on a detail…

Firstly, Robert ran some numbers for us, for which we are very grateful, here are his calculations:

Over the 4 years EI paid out €404 million to about 2760 recipients.

Approximately 80% of the money went to approximately 20% of the recipients (ie., pretty much exactly 80:20).

5% of the recipients shared 50% of the moneys.

2% of the recipients took 33% of moneys.

50% of the recipients shared 95% of the moneys.

The bottom 1000 recipients (36%) shared 2.5% of the moneys.

The total average amount of funding per recipient for the 4 years was €146,280.

The total average amount for each of the top 100 recipients was €1.75 million

The total average amount for each of the bottom 100 recipients was €1,198.

Glanbia companies took 2.66% of moneys (ie., more than the bottom 1000 recipients)

1.36% of moneys went to Bank of Ireland equity funds

The main thing I noted when building the packages was how Dublin-heavy the funding seemed to be. As you can see on the chart below 38.41% of all money goes to Dublin based companies. I suppose some would see that as logical because Dublin is the financial and business centre of the country. For more details see the chart below…

In an effort to analyse how the grants are dispersed across the country (and further afield) I calculated the number of grants and split them by county. In the chart below every time a company received funding a value of 1 was applied, this means the amount a company received becomes irrelevant – (grants range from several million to €150). Number of grants per county.

Using the data from the two above charts I could then calculate the average level of funding per county and rank them accordingly. The obvious stand-out in the below chart is Overseas.

Enterprise Ireland made a number of grants to overseas organisations between 2005 and 2008. Stanford Graduate School of Business has received almost €2m over three grants. Grimsby Institute of Further & Higher Education got almost €350,000 over four grants while Duke Corporation Education Ltd received a bulk payment of €490,560 in 2008. Lastly, a company called Cresent Diagnostics Ltd got about €135,000 over two grants, one in 2007 and the other in 2008. As you will have noted from the first two charts, Dublin receives the bulk of funding, I’ve thus displayed it’s funding by internal breakdown also. Dun-Laoghaire Rathdown is the clear outlier here, it got twice as much funding as the other two suburban regions combined.

Here is the first pie chart displayed in a bar chart format for those interested in seeing a ‘league table’ of counties.

Below is the same information except with Dublin split regionally. As you’ll note, Dun Laoghaire Rathdown alone gets significantly more funding than Galway, putting it in third spot nationally. Dublin Fingal, probably the most working class area of the county, gets the least investment of all Dublin areas, yet still more than 19 of the 26 counties.

The type of grant offered by EI was also of interest. See the next chart for a breakdown.

I’ve little knowledge of this area so am open to correction, but from my understanding, ‘Incubators’ are companies who take residence on third level campuses and develop relationships with the education facilities. It’s a sort of education/enterprise partnership. See EI’s website for more details.

RTI stands for Research Technology and Innovation. EI says the RTI fund is to support “commercially focused, industry led projects in product and process development”. It appears, that the R&D capabilities fund is open to small projects/SMEs in the main, though a clear definition is not easily located on the EI website. Grants to Industry funding is a broad scheme open to any company which meets certain criteria (or is operating in a certain industry).

‘Venture Capital’ is, as you’d perhaps expect, venture capitalist funds. Most of the ones Enterprise Ireland invested in were run by the banks, AIB and Bank of Ireland, in the main.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, but worth noting, there would be quite a bit of cross-over between each fund, some companies apply and receive funding from two funds.