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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

Skytango is an online platform for the buying and selling of drone video footage. Irish woman Susan Flynn is Skytango’s chief operating officer. Her husband Steve, from Minnesota, is its chief executive, a job he’s been preparing for since he was seven years old: “Back in the day, you’d spend three months building a balsa wood and styrofoam airplane and it would take-off and you might have a thirty-second flight and it would explode into pieces, and you’d go back and work for three months to rebuild it. Now you can pull a drone out of a box and launch it, and it’s re

“So your bar is there. You have to have that and give me an appraisal,” says Clare. “You can be honest,” she adds. That’s a terrible idea, Clare, I think to myself. I‘m a hopeless chocolate snob. ‘Dairy-free milk chocolate’? How is that even possible? As Clare herself admits, when you say the word vegan, people assume it’s going to be horrible. She reckons that they’re thinking: ‘Oh my God, it probably tastes like sawdust!’ But guess what? This Chocolatey Clare Salted Peanut bar tastes great. It’s not too sweet and icky like lots of non-milk milk chocolate. Not too pale and wishy-washy. This milk chocolate has a he

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

There are literally hundreds of young entrepreneurs launching their startups in Dublin, hoping to climb the precarious ladder in the tech, food and pharma sectors. Many of these companies will go on to achieve greatness; some will be quietly successful; others will become well-known names across the globe. Others, sadly, will perish under the immense pressure of starting a company from scratch. Dublin.ie caught up with one of the city’s successful startup founders, Jack Kirwan – pi