The panel comprised:
Sean O’Sullivan, entrepreneur and investor (Chair)
Joe Cunningham, serial telecoms/software entrepreneur, inventor of the SMS message
Noelle O’Connor, entrepreneur behind TanOrganic
Tom Keogh, entrepreneur behind Keogh’s Crisps
Ray Nolan, serial software entrepreneur, including Worky.com
Daniel Ramamoorthy, representing local and international entrepreneur networks
Tom Cooney, Professor of Entrepreneurship at DIT
Representatives of the Department of Jobs, Enterprise & Innovation and Enterprise Ireland.
Anyway. There are certain stultifying patterns that you come across in Irish business. I think the above panel personifies them. And I wonder did the above get paid to come up with such ground-breaking sensational recommendations? Sorry, but this RTE/Bruton/EI/Indo crap invariably rubs me up the wrong way.
Aldiscon was an Irish company which wrote a lot of software to manage SMS stuff at a network level. It wasn’t the only one and didn’t “invent” the SMS but if you’re Fionnan Sheehan then…
He doesn’t say as much on inventing the SMS there, but rather says that he “pioneered and evangelised”. Then again, he also doesn’t mention that he is CATS and that All Our Base Are Belong to Him so he’s probably a pretty modest sort of guy. Maybe he gave that Finn the credit for the SMS invention as a dig-out.
I mean, before I made real money in PyatCoins, I invented toast. I never publicised it at the time, and allowed Tove Jansson to take credit and commercialise it in order to support her writing (I got a first edition of every book, and of course a royalty free licence to make as much toast as I wanted for personal consumption).
Actually, I got that panel list from the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. It was THEY ascribed inventorship to Joe. Nothing about it in the article, I was curious who was actually om the panel.
Getting a warm glow that nobody actually clicked through to the Indo site to read Fionnan’s usual piece of shit article!
The kind of guidance we need is not of the Bill Cullen, Dragon’s Den, small scale, small minded, ‘boutique Irish entrepreneurship’ paradigm.
Compare the menmbers of that panel to the likes of say (off the top of my head) Andrew Grove and Robert Royce of Intel, Arkadiy Dobkin of EPAM, Kumar Mahadeva of Cognizant, Jay Adelson of Equinix, and for sure, some of our own like Chris Horn of Iona.
The above personify the dynamic that we need. Founders of organisations that got stuck into real business and technological imperatives and scaled globally. For example, defining entrepreneurship as ‘inventing’ the latest clever app, is nearly as bad as defining it as innovative types of rent-seeking and speculative property development, and retail and hotels etc. It is nearly as speculative in nature with human and other precious resources of this country, or perhaps even worse. Not to mention how crowded the space is, and the faddishness in it.
Then there is this tendency in Ireland for such “entrepreneurial Irish business players” to get on lucrative speaking circuits, on the boards of (really quite conservative and small scale) investment funds, quangos, and generally have their dick pulled by Enterprise Ireland and the IDA.
Never mind RTE and the Indo who lap up this shit. The whole tone and content of the conversation needs to move up. I can’t believe this is the kind of shit Bruton and our government are buying into. If that report had come out with the one recommendation that we should burn Dragon’s Den and all it stands for and all the messages it gives out, publicly, at the stake, it might have been worthwhile.
while Joe Cunningham’s credentials have been exaggerated he has been involved in plenty of other businesses (Aldiscon, APiON, AePONA, Accuris, Ammeon) - Aldiscon sold out to Logica too early - Iona held on but I’m not sure they set the world on fire either though they did get a lot more hype.
Basically all I’m saying is that lumping genuine medium sized entrepreneurs like Cunningham in with Bill Cullen and other specuvestor twats is unfair. There needs to be a mittlestand in the country too.
But yeah; the speaking circuit one-hit-wonder guys need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Is that smarthomes guy still grinning from the pages of the Sindo Business Section?
No, I agree Joe stands out from that group. Also, I am lumping a lot of entrepreneurs together in the same vein. But just trying to get at a marked *tendency or direction *that I think we must move away from.
edit - I edited the above while you were typing to clarify why I included Chris Horn, and the thrust of my suggested list.
