Introducing the Student Inc. Participants

Monday the 9th of June 2014 saw six student entrepreneurs cross the Rubicon to begin our Student Inc. Summer Programme. They came from a multitude of undergraduate courses in CIT such as business, multimedia, engineering and culinary arts. We have four out of the six in our group due to graduate at their respective conferring ceremonies and take their places as members of the CIT Alumni group.  Each budding entrepreneur received just over €4.5k to fund their business (expenses, equipment and a wage to offset the summer job) as well as a fully serviced office.
A major selling point of the programme is the peer to peer learning, not only between the six talented entrepreneurs, relationships have also been built with a number of the experienced resident entrepreneurs in the Rubicon Centre. This exposure to nearly sixty companies and the current crop of Enterprise Ireland’s New Frontiers phase two participants provides the budding entrepreneurs with a wealth of advice and insight at this critical stage of their business development.

Although you may confuse this bunch for a start-up boy band, each and every person in the above picture has put a large amount of work into their various start-up businesses to date. By doing so they will build on and improve their entrepreneurial skill set which not only affords them the opportunity to start their own business but will make them more employable in the future.
Our programme offers the participants training in various aspects of business start up to ensure they are well informed in any decision they make, they also receive mentoring sessions on a one to one basis. Student Inc. has been accredited so upon completion each participant will receive 5 academic credits at level 8 for the work they complete throughout the summer with their final evaluation coming in the form of a presentation on September 5th.
Student Inc. was generously funded €27.5k by the School of Business, the School of Engineering, Crawford Art College and CAMMS with the office space and staff expertise sponsored by the Rubicon Centre.

Introduction to each participant:

Aidan O’Sullivan (Business Administration – 4th Year)

aims to deliver an online portal for sports teams/ individuals to get the most benefit from their training and development. Aidan has interest from both professional and amateur sporting organisations.

Richard Burke (Electronic Systems Engineering – 4th Year)

is currently in the process of developing an app to help dementia sufferers stay up to date with the current affairs within their family (eg: a grandchild’s college graduation, etc.).

Aaron McCarthy (Business Information Systems – 1st Year)

is working to create a social media platform to answer the cyber bullying problems we face in society today. A self-taught coder, Aaron has a lot of his developing work nearing completion.

Kevin O’Donnell (Culinary Arts – 3rd Year)

is developing his food product which infuses Chia seeds, coconut milk yogurt and jam to make a healthy snack. He is hoping to target health conscious individuals and those with an intolerance to lactose. The high nutritional property of the Chia seed adds to the benefits of coconut milk and who doesn’t like jam!

Neville O’Donoghue (Business Studies – 4th Year)

is the founder of Benchwarmers.ie who has amassed a following of 184,501 people on Facebook and counting. His tongue in cheek method in evaluating all things sport, movies and girls has attracted interest from companies in the UK along with Paddy Power and others.

Danny O’Donovan (Business Studies – 4th Year)

is our outgoing Student Union President who spotted a gap in the market for individuals/ groups working on a large number of projects by making the decision making process more efficient and manageable. He already has a paying customer in the form of IT Tralee’s Students’ Union.