(Left to right) David Tuohy, West Cork Development Partnership; 2013 world champion for the 50km race walk, Rob Heffernan; and Anthony O'Mara, chairperson of the Offsite event. Heffernan will be giving the keynote address at Offsite. Photo via Clare Keogh
World champion Irish race walker Rob Heffernan will be giving the keynote address at an event, dubbed Offsite, in west Cork later this month. The goal of Offsite will be to help inspire and drive on the business and tech community in the region, as well as encourage new start-ups.
This will be the second such Offsite event that has been organised by West Cork Development Partnership (WCDP).
The aim will be to attract tech entrepreneurs, innovators and businesspeople in general, in order to help spawn new innovations, get entrepreneurs in west Cork networking and, ultimately, help spur job creation in West Cork.
Sharing from experience
There will be a number of motivational and business speakers on the day.
Heffernan recently became world champion for the 50km walk in the 2013 World Championships in Athletics in Moscow, Russia. Joining him at Offsite as a speaker is Elaine Doyle, who is account manager for large customers with Google. In a former guise, Doyle was marketing manager with the Irish food company Cully & Sully.
Serial entrepreneur Owen O’Brien, who has successfully exited a number of businesses and is now an economics lecturer and entrepreneur-in-residence at University College Cork (UCC), will talk about a key requisite for every business – the ability to sell.
Other speakers will include John Stone, managing director EMEA of PGi, a global player in audio, visual and web conferencing, which has a subsidiary in Clonakilty, Co Cork.
Anthony O’Mara of Voxpro and chairman of Cork Innovates, will also be lending his insights.
Irish entrepreneur Declan O’Mahoney, who is CEO of HeartSine, a maker of automated external defibrillators, will also be speaking on the day. He was CEO of Firecomms, which was Ireland’s first tech company to be bought by a Chinese corporation.
David Tuohy, Offsite project lead at WCDP, said Heffernan will cover managing performance and expectations, as well as dealing with the highs and lows of success and failure, in his keynote.
The day event will run in the Celtic Ross Hotel in Rosscarbery, West Cork, on Thursday, 26 September.
