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MaynoothWorks
The relative lull in research activity caused by COVID restrictions provided the MaynoothWorks team with the opportunity to lay firm foundations for our innovation pipeline, and to prepare for the changes that will be brought by the new national funding programme.
Training and retaining talent
Our local talent pipeline was strengthened by the redevelopment of our Graduate Skills Programme in Innovation & Research Commercialisation, to provide new researchers with live, hands‑on experience of business planning within real companies – and in doing so, support the development of early‑stage enterprises from our New Frontiers cohort (which was itself successfully re‑funded this year). The pilot programme ran successfully in Q4 2021, and is designed to dovetail with our flagship skills programme, the Startup Entrepreneur Experience which was highly commended at the 2021 KTI Awards. The combination of the programmes will provide a major boost to the entrepreneurial culture across our University, region, and national ecosystem, providing a pipeline of commercially experienced and technically expert graduates who will form the core of our knowledge transfer strategies over the coming years.
People and Place
Spin-out success
People and Place is a non‑typical university spin‑out, launched from the All‑Ireland Research Observatory (AIRO) and led by Justin Gleeson. Rather than spin out an academic research project, AIRO is well known for providing high quality socio‑economic analysis and research for agency partners in Ireland and the EU. In contrast, People and Place focuses on data and policy product developments through new consulting partnerships. The establishment of People and Place has provided a brilliant platform to accelerate the commercial growth of research expertise that has been nurtured and developed by the team at AIRO over the last decade.
The company developed its business plans with expertise from the Startup Entrepreneur Experience, providing People and Place with strategically‑vital information on funding opportunities, product licensing advice and route‑to‑market projections that underpin their business roadmaps. While now fully independent of the University, we look forward to collaborating with Justin and his team as People and Place develops. Industry partnerships
Empower, a major €10m industry‑academic programme driving innovations in data management and protection, launched at MU in November 2021. Incorporating four SFI research centres alongside major industry partners including Meta, Siemens, and Huawei, it will position Ireland at the forefront of the European data economy. It will develop systems to protect citizens, using their data to work to their advantage while streamlining its exchange in the European business ecosystem. Empower brings together multidisciplinary research in data governance from across Ireland, exploiting our strong culture of academic‑industry collaboration with companies across critical sectors such as biotech, fintech, agritech, and Smart Cities.
Empower
In a different digital technology space, Terrain‑AI is enabling real collaboration between Microsoft and Maynooth academics to address major challenges in how Ireland manage its greenhouse gas emissions, through development of a petabyte‑scale digital platform of multi‑layer sensor networks. Advanced Earth System modelling and Artificial Intelligence work‑flows provide accurate estimates of emissions, but can more crucially project quantitative measures to allow us to move to more sustainable production and living across our urban and rural environments. Terrain‑AI builds on an already successful relationship with Microsoft: the project commenced in early 2021 and is led in Maynooth by Dr Rowan Fealy and Professor Tim McCarthy, who this year were the recipients of the John Scanlan Award for Industry Engagement.
Business Incubation Centre news
Hospital software management provider Swiftqueue, based in the BIC since 2018, were acquired in November 2021 by global healthcare information company Dedalus. Swiftqueue’s services, which were already widely used in Ireland, Canada, and the UK, will now become the front door for a wide range of Dedalus’ worldwide services and systems. We look forward to supporting the scale‑up and expansion that will be enabled by the new injection of resources.
Swiftqueue
At an earlier stage of development, our community of start‑up companies have benefitted extensively from MaynoothWorks new programmes. The Balanced Innovation Model, the rigorous business model assessment process that is the brainchild of BIC manager Joe Moore, has been substantially developed through an emerging, AI‑enabled platform named Protolyst. This new infrastructure makes the toolkit fully scalable and it now under assessment by both Enterprise Ireland and ESA to provide development support to their start‑up clients.
Four companies supported by New Frontiers benefitted from free market assessment and business intelligence from the redeveloped Graduate Skills programme, and extensive expertise from Startup Entrepreneur Experience teams. These regional start‑ups are also benefitting from our membership of EIT Digital, leveraging our close new links to generate a wave of investments from funds previously untapped within Ireland. The partnership has begun to attract new ventures into the Maynooth ecosystem: UK companies seeking to avoid Brexit uncertainty and access EU innovation funding are now being signposted towards the region, to collaborate with the University and employ skilled staff in their R&D efforts.
To know more about any of these services, please contact maynoothworks@mu.ie.
