Paul Groarke and Garrett Hussey, co-founders of e-learning venture ASimil8, the overall winner of NovaUCD 2008 Campus Company Development Programme
35 researchers from 16 new high-tech and knowledge-intensive business ventures are taking part in NovaUCD’s 2009 enterprise support programme. The NovaUCD 2009 Campus Company Development Programme (CCDP) assists UCD academic entrepreneurs in bringing their innovative ideas from intellectual concepts to fully-developed and sound commercial business enterprises.
Participants in this year's programme are commercialising research undertaken in disciplines that include Agriculture, Bioinformatics, Computer Science, Education, Engineering, Physics and Veterinary Medicine.
Dr Pat Frain, Director, NovaUCD said: ‘The CCDP is NovaUCD’s main enterprise support programme. It is designed specifically to assist academic entrepreneurs in establishing new high-tech and knowledge intensive ventures to commercialise the innovative ideas arising from UCD’s research programmes. Such new ventures are of critical importance as they form the backbone of the Government’s vision for Ireland’s economic future and the building of a Smart Economy.’
Now in its fourteenth year, over 140 ventures and 210 individuals have completed this NovaUCD enterprise programme which is supported by Enterprise Ireland. Former programme participants, which include companies such as BiancaMed, Celtic Catalysts, ChangingWorlds, CRDS, Haptica and TopChem collectively employ 750 people.
Examples of new ventures participating in the 2009 scheme are: Inviver (applying research on infectious disease to develop diagnostics and vaccines), promoted by Dr Jarlath Nally and Pablo Rojas, UCD School of Agriculture, Food and Veterinary Medicine; and TraceHunter (developing forensic software providing comprehensive information about user activities to forensic investigators), promoted by Dr Pavel Gladyshev, UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics.
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