TRICS: Teaching Researchers and Innovators How to Create Startups

Galway is an acknowledged medtech/tech hub, with Ireland's largest ICT and medical device research centres headquartered at NUI Galway. One of the next logical phases in developing the regional ecosystem is to empower and evangelise the hundreds of innovative research projects which are emerging through the University’s research labs, centres, etc. We designed a programme to leverage the curriculum content that has helped make the MIT spinoff ecosystem equivalent to the world’s 10th largest economy, and especially tailored for the scientific community in NUI Galway wherein the next successful and scaleable spinout is just waiting to be packaged. We have used the “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” process from MIT as the basis for an initial five-day intensive entrepreneurship development programme offered to NUI Galway PhD students and postdocs, oriented towards commercialising ideas and technologies emerging from passionate researchers. Furthermore, we have also developed an ERASMUS+ Knowledge Alliance project called "STARTED" to expand upon this at a European scale, starting with targeted regional development and culminating in the creation of a proposed online European Research-to-Startup Centre (ERSC).