| 2003 |
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YEAR BOOK |
Trinity College Dublin
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Research and Innovation Services at
Trinity College Dublin
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In the TCD Strategic Plan (2003-2008), the Provost, Dr John Hegarty, laid emphasis on strengthening research and innovation in the College. Because of this emphasis on research, the Innovation and Entrepreneurship activities of the College will grow significantly over the next five years, through commercialising intellectual property, promoting entrepreneurship in partnership with UCD and the University of Ulster, and contributing to Dublin as a city of learning and enterprise.
Entrepreneurship development at Trinity College Dublin has four distinct strands:
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The protection and development of Intellectual Property arising from College research: a major review of IP policies will be completed shortly
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The ongoing Innovation programme to encourage new companies spinning off from research and teaching
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The development of a formal entrepreneurship training programme in TCD, and a partnership with the MBA Programme in the School of Business Studies
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The development of and contribution to international networks of innovation and entrepreneurship training, which benchmark processes and results.
The process continues today with three business plans receiving professional business strategy analysis from three teams drawn from the MBA Class in the Summer of 2003.
The College's Enterprise Centre, at 160,000 sq ft, will become one of the major incubator/enterprise centres in Europe. It is gradually being converted into a knowledge-based research driven company generation and support facility. Its redevelopment is being revaluated as a private/public partnership. The initial phases of the five-year rolling programme of entrepreneurship events and training are being implemented using our international contacts and partners in several formal programmes as sources to benchmark the kind of events and general provision of services, training modules, and networking tools that are used in modern innovation centres.
Formal education in entrepreneurship is being developed through an all-island partnership between the University of Ulster, University College Dublin and TCD.
In TCD, we are developing instruction modules on New Ideas Generation, Intellectual Property, Finance and Business Planning this year as our contribution to the process. Visitors during the year have included Professor Jane Royston of the Swiss Federal Entrepreneurship Programme, Professor Shoji Shiba through collaboration with the First Trust Bank Chair in Queen's University Belfast, and John Taylor, a researcher in Innovation at Stanford University, who is working on an assessment of some features of venture capital in Ireland. The programme will continue into 2004 with two aims: to share curriculum for entrepreneurship training with an emphasis on just in time training, and collaboration on seminars and workshops such as UCD's Journey of the Entrepreneur, and a series of internal TCD workshops designed to stimulate the culture of entrepreneurship among post-graduates and staff. In this effort we are assisted by the advice of 4th Level Ventures, a new seed and venture fund run by two dynamic and experienced angel investors.
International Networking for Entrepreneurs
Research and Innovation Services runs an active programme of interaction with many businesses and entrepreneurship programme abroad. Bilaterally we have worked with the innovators at the National Technological University of Norway, regularly for the past three years and they have published evaluations of our processes comparing them to best practice in Northern Europe. We also interact with universities and businesses in South America, the USA and in Japan.
With the other Dublin universities, and enterprise development agencies and the City Council, we are members of the PANEL network of the EU Paxis programme which links the 22 most innovative regions of Europe: Munich, Milan and Barcelona are our particular partners. We are exchanging curriculum, process and practices with the entrepreneur development efforts in these cities, which have splendid records in setting up small knowledge-based companies. We are also members of REEE (Roundtable on Entrepreneurship Education for Engineers) which links us through their European network to Stanford, from which we draw continual information about North American practice in the larger universities, in a field which is undergoing very rapid development.
We are also active in the CLUSTER Network of eleven universities across Europe, which consider themselves to be the technical leaders in their own countries. This network met in Dublin in TCD in June 2003 to discuss a Masters Degree Programme in Entrepreneurship across universities and using e-learning tools.
The team at Research and Innovation Services deal daily with academics who have an interest in setting up new businesses, and this is our main ongoing work. Internally we are tightly linked with the High Performance Computing Centre, Materials Ireland, and BioResearch Ireland experts on campus.
Eoin O'Neill, Margaret Woods, Bridget Noone, Doris Alexander, Janet Ball, Fiona Shalloe, Colette Langan, John Collier, Maria Treanor, Chris Kealy, Clive Williams, Werner Blau and Michael Gibney (Dean of Research) are all major contributors to this work
Contact: Dr Eoin P. O'Neill, Director of Innovation Services, TCD; E-mail: [email protected]