Institutional Impacts on the Development of an IT Industry: The Irish Experience

Abstract

Over the last twenty years, Ireland has become a hotbed of software activity.According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Information Technology Outlook 2000, Ireland is the largest exporter of software goods in the world (IDA, 2002). In the past, smaller countries have suffered from economic disadvantage, but with the recent rapid development of IT sectors, a country that is both small geographically as well as demographically may achieve increased per capita levels of IT infrastructure built and used within that country (Dedrick et al., 1995). With a population of fewer than 4 million and

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“…The authors then review strategies of institutional intervention to produce a scheme of six categories of institutional actions (described in Table 1) that can stimulate or retard IT adoption: knowledge building, knowledge deployment, subsidy, mobilization, guideline setting, and innovation directives. Montealegre (1999) empirically validated these categories of institutional actions in the context of IT initiatives in less-developed countries, and Heavin and Fitzgerald (2004) used them to show how government institutionalinterventions have contributed to the evolution and growth ofIreland's software industry. Thus, in this study King et at.…”

Human resource development policy in the context of software exports

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