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The importance of sustainable and social enterprises Making your startup or existing business sustainable or ethical is a smart, future-proof option. Customers are now much more informed and aware of the environmental impact of their purchases. A more sustainable product or service will create a positive brand image that will impact the bottom line of many businesses.

Conall Laverty is the founder and CEO of WIA, a start-up company that works with property owners and developers to deploy Internet of Things hardware to reduce cost and improve their buildings’ performance. WIA provides a simple way for people and things to communicate with just a few lines of code. With over 10,000 clients across 100 countries, it has attracted €1 million in venture capital funding with backers including Suir Valley Ventures, Enterprise Ireland and NDRC. As a result, Conall has become a key figure in the global Internet of Things ecosystem. Conall is one to watch. He h

Ireland has established itself as a global leader in the medical technology sector, with 14 of the world’s top 15 Medtech companies maintaining operations in the country. At the heart of this ecosystem is Dublin, home to industry giants such as Medtronic, Abbott, Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific, 3M, Goodman, Bausch Health, and many more. With approximately 450 companies employing around 48,000 professionals, Ireland has the highest number of MedTech employees per capita in Europe. The workforce is set to

The Liberties is one of Dublin's most characterful and historic districts. It owes its name to the fact that it was originally outside the jurisdiction of the city. So it was free to follow its own rules. In many ways, it's still doing that today.

Stress baking. It’s a thing, you know. It’s what Caryna Camerino used to do after another difficult day at her old job in human resources. It was also the starting point of her successful Dublin startup: Camerino Bakery. HR to hotbuns: Caryna Camerino’s startup story Caryna Camerino, a first generation Canadian who has lived in Dublin for the past 17 years, wasn’t always a baker. However, food was always a big deal at home – partly because her father, who was from Rome, is a stickler for authentic Italian cooking. Such a stickler, in fact, that she loved going to friends’ houses where she could enjoy a regular TV dinner, like n

Roisin Lyons, who is a professor in entrepreneurship at DCU, has no time for the mindset that says, in effect, ‘Innovation? Oh that’s just for innovators’. “Everyone needs to be innovative”, she believes, “everyone needs to be enterprising, particularly with growing issues of sustainability in Ireland. People have to be more inventive about solutions”.

The second annual Dublin Startup Week, which took place from October 21st – 25th 2019, was a celebration of the city’s innovation and startup ecosystem. With five days of networking events, keynotes, panels and workshops – all free of charge – the event was aimed at future, current, and repeat startup founders. Find out more at dublinstartupweek.com Next up in this mini-series, we meet Natalie Novick, another of the event’s track captains. Natalie Novick is a University of California San Diego PhD student who now resides in Edinburgh. Sh

The second annual Dublin Startup Week, which took place from October 21st – 25th 2019, was a celebration of the city’s innovation and startup ecosystem. With five days of networking events, keynotes, panels and workshops – all free of charge – the event was aimed at future, current, and repeat startup founders. Find out more at dublinstartupweek.com First up in this mini-series, we meet Colin Keogh, one of the event’s leading lights. David R Pollard, Gene Murphy and Colin Keogh are founders and organisers of Startup Week Dublin. Keogh is also

Zendesk is a SAAS company that specialises in helping other companies with their customer care operations. It was founded in Copenhagen in 2007 and has grown massively since then. With four core products and over 170,000 customers worldwide, it has come a long way. Zendesk’s startup success story “The initial concept was making life easier for customer support engineers,” says Colum Twomey, Vice President of Product Development at Zendesk and head of its Irish office. “We developed a customer support platform, a software as a service product, and that’s where we came from. Since then, we’ve developed more products and addressed a broader marke

Sustainable, ethical clothing designed in Dublin Grown Clothing is a Dublin startup that prints beautiful, simple designs on ethically-sourced, environmentally-friendly shirts and t-shirts. Its origins lie in conversations between three friends as they journeyed back and forth between Dublin and the West of Ireland, on swimming, surfing and scuba-diving trips. What inspired this sustainable startup? The ocean-loving friends were Neil McCabe, Stephen O’Reilly and Damien Bligh. They often noticed rubbish in the water and on the beaches they explored. This made them think about the ecological impact of plastics and modern fabrics – and how we pr

Bringing responsible innovation to Dublin Innovation is what has brought the human race as far as it has come. Because of innovation, we have tackled disease; we have navigated the globe by land, sea and air; we have sent men to the moon. And, soon, we will have driverless cars. What is responsible innovation? Innovation, in many ways, defines us. However, it also has its drawbacks. There is an innate impulse to push things as far as they can go. At times we wonder why innovation has taken us in a peculiar direction. What is the need for this device? Why has this phenomenon taken over? This is when innovation becomes irresponsible. That innate drive to push