To date, Smyth has co-founded the UCD award-winning software company ChangingWorlds, which transformed the burgeoning area of online personalisation, and he now heads up CLARITY , a massive industry-linked research consortium on gathering, sorting and delivering information to consumers.
And the secret of his success? Blending an understanding of technology with a sharp business sense about upcoming trends.
That all lay ahead when Smyth first started programming on his ZX-81 before school each morning, much to his parents' bewilderment. But the satisfaction of seeing code work kept the young programmer keen as he went on to study computer science in UCD.
"I have always liked creating things and that was one of the things that drew me to computer science, it was one of the disciplines where you could create something and see it working," says Smyth, who now holds the Digital Chair of Computer Science at UCD. "You didn't have to go and build buildings or engines. Writing code you get instant gratification."
But it's not just the rapid-response technology that drives Smyth, who started his career researching forms of artificial intelligence for his PhD with Hitachi at Trinity College Dublin.
"I quickly realised it wasn't just about creating a piece of technology, that for me the really interesting thing was getting it out into the hands of individuals and seeing how they used it."
Smyth puts his entrepreneurial success down to keeping an eye on trends and predicting the markets they will impact.
After he returned to UCD, he and colleague Paul Cotter set up ChangingWorlds in 1999 to help move the software personalisation technology they were developing out towards consumers.
Their approach took the mobile Internet world by storm, changing the way portal content was delivered to users, and changing the mindset of mobile operators, explains Smyth.
"The particular innovation is that the subscriber doesn't even have to explicitly say what they are interested in, the software will automatically learn what they want. So if you read a lot of business news then it will promote business news in the future."
It may sound obvious today, but a decade ago, mobile operators were so busy developing content and infrastructure for their portals, they hadn't thought through how to connect users with the information they actually wanted.
And he encourages innovators to see commercialisation as a scientific problem rather something to be bolted on later after the technology is developed.
"Our core message to them back then was that getting all the content together is only half of the solution, the other thing you have to do is get people to the content," recalls Smyth.
"It was very much a paradigm shift for them to realise that you could automatically create a different portal for each individual subscriber, and once they wrapped their heads around that they realised this is a good thing to explore and the rest was history." "I think a lot of people who are developing technology think that it's going to sell itself. But today's world is different from the dotcom era with all its exuberance. Today people really need to get a handle on the business model: why is somebody going to pay for this technology and what are they going to pay? And if you can't answer that, then there may not be a business there yet."
That history saw the company work with industry giants like Vodafone and grow to employ over 160 people around the world including staff based in its Advanced Research Centre at NovaUCD. And it has now passed a new milestone, because ChangingWorlds has just changed hands – US software services company Amdocs bought the company for €47 million at the end of 2008.
Smyth puts his entrepreneurial success down to keeping an eye on trends and predicting the markets they will impact. He also enjoys the creative side of business, and believes scientists should start applying their minds to the market early on.See Also
"I think a lot of people who are developing technology think that it's going to sell itself. But today's world is different from the dotcom era with all its exuberance. Today people really need to get a handle on the business model: why is somebody going to pay for this technology and what are they going to pay? And if you can't answer that, then there may not be a business there yet."
Smyth also believes that computer scientists should not hold their tongues for fear of being scooped. Instead they should publish papers and share ideas with peers.
"We have always been publishing a lot and it turns out that publishing and presenting your work at scientific conferences is a good training ground for simplifying the things that you are doing, so you can pitch it to the commercial world," he says. "Every presentation you make is a sales pitch to other scientists, and then you are making other sales pitches to commercial people at a later stage. So it's a good training ground."
And he encourages innovators to see commercialisation as a scientific problem rather something to be bolted on later after the technology is developed. "I think some scientists in our area think that commercialisation is for someone else, and that's a shame because you find that scientific skills are very transferable into the marketplace and it's very rewarding intellectually to figure out new problems to solve. So I think if we can do one thing to promote commercialisation in the university, it might be to start to get people thinking about commercialisation as an interesting scientific problem."
Professor Barry Smyth is co-founder and chief scientific officer at ChangingWorlds.