On a normal day, when I ramble down stairs from my slumber for my morning cup of coffee, the house is pretty dark and quite with kids droning through the house seeking and gathering up various artefacts looking like gaming characters from the latest version of Minecraft. This morning I barely got to the bottom of the stairs where all the kids were waiting for me. They appeared to be bright eyed and quite agitated as I tried to fain a cheesy smile. I grunted out a morning kids as my first words from my almost hang-over half slumber state. At which point they verbally attacked me with a question Daddy ... daddy have you heard the news?.

In a 2001 promotional video interview with Prof. Martin Hurley of University of Limerick, Prof. Hurley quoted a saying which suggested that … Research takes money and turns it into knowledge, innovation takes knowledge and turns it into money. I cant say that I entirely agree with this saying … why?, I would agree that … Innovation takes knowledge and turns it into commercial value or social gain. There is however a bridge that I believe needs to be crossed before research can be transformed into knowledge and that transformation is 'The Process Of Learning' and I would like to attempt an explanation of my thinking for your deeper contemplation.

If your reading this, I may have some how captured your imagination, interest and peeked your curiosity, either way, the following perhaps maybe the most valuable read and insight to me. My name is Brendon McLoughlin. Having successfully completed my 'Innovation Management' post-grad in the University of Limerick in 2014, I am currently pursuing a post-grad in Lean Systems with a desire to consolidate both specialist diplomas into a single (one-of-a-kind … always innovating me) masters in Lean Innovation (if academically possible?).

There are 230,000 small to medium enterprises (SMEs), employing over 900,000 employees in Ireland, returning over 10 billion euros each year to the Irish exchequer (McHugh, 2010). In 2013, the European Commission stated in Europe, over 92% of all enterprises are micro-SMEs and employ fewer than 10 people. Both the EC and national governments across Europe have been very active to encourage innovation as a key driver of economic growth and job creation in Ireland and Europe in recent years (McHugh, 2010). So, it is not that surprising when the battle cry comes for SMEs to innovate Ireland's recovery.

Just talking to a fellow software developer from the old days about the early days of dBase II, when we were young code monkeys using xBase languages to build DOS based software and waited desperately for the next big thing in our industry which was the long awaited release of dBase III and the arrival Quicksilver (a true dBase compiler). Little did we know that Foxpro, Visual Foxpro, CA Visual Objects, ObjectVision and Alask XBase would all unsuccessfully but seriously challenge the mother of all xBase programming languages Clipper. 2015 will mark 30 years of Clipper programming which is still going strong and now lives on through open source projects like Harbour and xHarbour.

I happened to be reading a post by Jason Goldberg, in which he set a question for his followers... How would YOU innovate a 100 year old product?. What caught my eye was the large number of posts which appeared to be talking around, but not talking through a common question which pops up in relation to innovation. Invention v Innovation ...

These days it takes little to inspire me to exercise #innovative effort. Those people that know me personally maybe surprised to learn that it was only in recent years that I realised the fullest scale of passion I have for the topic of #innovation.But perhaps you maybe a better judge of that ... If you were to measure innovation success by means of total financial gain, I would perhaps be seen as...