Start Up Nation Podcast

Paul Healy
CEO of Skillnet
Ireland

Paul outlines the huge benefits that Skillnet Ireland offers to Irish businesses and the value of delivering innovative programmes like The Innovation Exchange. He highlights the challenges and advantages of digital transformation and the gap that currently exists in the Irish market to encourage Irish SMEs to engage with multinationals in a way that benefits both. The partnership with Dublin BIC puts a structured programme in place to help business accelerate collaboration and innovation. The benefits are:

• Established businesses get access to Ireland’s most talented and innovative SMEs and to a framework that accelerates growth through digital transformation.
• Innovative SMEs get access to a customer pipeline and to a framework that develops their capability to navigate sales and procurement, accelerate expansion and achieve commercial success.

Noel outlines how digital transformation is at the heart of IBM and how it is the driving force of their business today. He advises SMES to ensure that their applications are developed in a “containerless environment” to make them most attractive to large corporates. He explains how IBM has pivoted to partner with start-ups and SMEs and the advantages to his businesses of doing so.
The Innovation Exchange pilot programme has been a really good journey for IBM and has opened up a number of new business partners.

Noel Crawford
IBM Cloud Sales Leader

Niamh Kelly
CEO & founder of Tigim

Tigim is a communication analytics platform and plain English tool providing a data-driven way to get your message across clearly and effectively. The Innovation Exchange offers great opportunity to Tigim, providing access to large corporates and an insight into the challenges they face. The programme was structured and it clearly outlined where the synergies could work both businesses, fast tracking the time to market.

• Established businesses get access to Ireland’s most talented and innovative SMEs and to a framework that accelerates growth through digital transformation.
• Innovative SMEs get access to a customer pipeline and to a framework that develops their capability to navigate sales and procurement, accelerate expansion and achieve commercial success.