Blackstone LaunchPad for entrepreneurs to kick off in Cork

2 Mar 2016

Trish Gibbons, manager, Blackstone LaunchPad UCC and Peter Finnegan, director, Blackstone LaunchPad UCC

Blackstone LaunchPad Cork, a new start-up resource aimed at providing entrepreneurship support to UCC students, alumni and staff, is to open its doors tomorrow (3 March).

Located in the Creative Zone of UCC’s Boole Library, the Blackstone LaunchPad programme is open to UCC students, alumni, staff and faculty, offering coaching, ideation and venture creation support free of charge.

“Blackstone LaunchPad at UCC brings entrepreneurship into the full view of students from the day they enter the university and will be a resource that they can avail of long after they leave UCC’s environs,” said Peter Finnegan, the newly-appointed director of Blackstone LaunchPad at UCC.

UCC is one of three locations in Ireland where Blackstone will establish a LaunchPad. In recent weeks, the LaunchPad at NUI Galway opened for business.

Blackstone LaunchPad programmes are now being delivered in 17 universities worldwide, with Ireland selected as the first overseas location to deliver the programme, testament to the country’s reputation for providing proactive and impactful support services and resources to early-stage ventures.

The launch of the programme is a new departure, Finnegan believes, where “students will see at first hand that entrepreneurial activity can be undertaken in conjunction with their studies and can be considered a viable career path from the day that their student journey commences.”

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com