The judging panel for the LaunchBox pitch finals held on March 7th in Trinity was introduced to an inspiring smorgasbord of innovative business ideas, ranging from packaged seaweed to blockchain applications. These ideas were served up at the Innovation Academy last night with a strong helping of professionalism, style, humour and energy by diverse teams of budding entrepreneurs.
This was the culmination of an application process that involved over 60 innovative early business ideas submitted by teams of students from across a multitude of disciplines throughout Trinity.
The judges selected a final 10 from the pitches and the teams will now be provided with funding, office-space and mentoring over the summer from June to August. This is intended to create a collaborative and supportive environment to both nurture and accelerate these start-ups.
The 10 projects selected for the LaunchBox Programme are Applaud Events, RoundUp, Greener Globe, Fishue, Dockit, Luminary Hub, BOP, SeaShoreVeg, Work Smarter and EnableArm.
Several of these emerging businesses already have traction and are taking in revenue.
With Applaud Events, you could organise a band for your next big occasion, with the minimum of hassle. They claim one can book a musical act in just four clicks on their website. While paying for the band with your credit card, you could feel good knowing that if you used the RoundUp app, you could help support your favourite charities in a cost-effective manner.
Continuing in this altruistic mood, you could rest assured that when taking a shower with the Greener Globe LED-timed shower head, you could minimise your use of water, one of the most precious commodities in the world. Staying with the water theme, Fishue could provide you with a compressible and compact water bottle, that is also “stylish”. Quite a neat idea, and contributing to reducing the need for single-use plastic bottles.
Then when you want to splash out and treat yourself, Dockit could help ensure that when you go to your favourite white tablecloth restaurant, the service there will be even more tailored to your needs than ever. SeaShoreVeg from Sligo will be hoping its product will be served up in similar restaurants.
Meanwhile, our friends in Luminary Hub, could help ensure that the business website you have been meaning to setup, could be prepared for you to a high standard, yet in a very cost effective manner, through using their network of skilled undergraduate tech students from around the country. By using Work Smarter, with its blockchain based technology, it could help ensure you are paid on time.
Finally, if you do have to make a visit to hospital during this cold winter weather, it is reassuring to know that BOP is working away on an innovative solution to greatly reduce infections in hospitals. While the EnableArm team is working on developing a device that will enable many people with limited fine motor skills or manual dexterity, to still be able to shave themselves, giving them an important additional independence and dignity.
The sense of creativity, insight and compassion that went into developing many of these initiatives is very evident. The judges clearly saw many of these qualities in these pitches, along with revenue-generating and scale-up potential.
The judging panel was composed of Dr Diarmuid O’Brien, Chief Innovation Officer in Trinity; Claire McHugh, CEO of Axonista; Kathy Kelly, Investment Associate with Atlantic Bridge Capital; Dan Hobbs, Co-founder and CEO of BetterExaminations; Stephen Moran, Head of Research and Development at Bank of Ireland; and Fionnuala Healy, CEO of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Hub, Trinity.
The summer accelerator programme runs from early June to late August 2018.
