Get them young enough, the possibilities are endless

NET RESULTS:Students are flocking to Kerry in their thousands to learn the business of entrepreneurship

GIVEN THE goings-on down south in recent years, don’t be too surprised if Kerry soon becomes known as the entrepreneurial county.

Quietly over the past half decade, some 3,000 second- and third-level students in the kingdom have gone through a home-grown entrepreneurship programme that aims to give them the confidence to start a local or global business, or bring a similar level of drive and resourcefulness to a future employer.

The Young Entrepreneur programme (youngentrepreneur. ie) is a challenging, standalone, interactive course that requires the full commitment of a student as well as a school (or the school is refused participation). Students are placed into workshops, examine business case studies and get guidance from business leaders from the area.

The programme runs months, starting with a high-energy introduction in September before storming through business plan development and presentations, concluding with a range of winners who receive support and seed funding for developing their ideas into a real business.

The main driver behind the programme is Kerry entrepreneur Jerry Kennelly, who sold his digital stock photography firm Stockbyte to photography giant Getty for $135 million in 2006.

Kennelly is a bundle of energy, not a person content to just sit back and enjoy his own financial success. To start with, like most entrepreneurs, “serial” precedes that designation. He recently launched an online design business called Tweak.com, aimed at democratising high-end design for small to medium-size businesses.

He is equally passionate about the entrepreneur programme, which sits alongside the Kerry-based Endeavour programme (endeavour.biz/).

Discuss Young Entrepreneur with him and he is quick to point out it isn’t just him, but involves a variety of sponsors and supporters. They range from telecommunications entrepreneur Denis O’Brien (who flies in to talk to students for the awards ceremony in May) to the Institute of Technology Tralee, Shannon Development, the Tom Crean Centre, Kerry Group and others.

Then there are the local business figures and entrepreneurs who give months of their time to work with the 15- to 23-year-olds targeted by the programme.

It is hard to imagine a project this ambitious and comprehensive – run as a not-for-profit, at no charge to participating students – working effectively, much less going at full throttle for six years, without someone with Kennelly’s personal dedication and commitment behind it.

In order to grab the students’ attention and speak in the sophisticated media language the current generation is used to, the programme uses a multimedia approach, incorporating music, video and high-production values. None of that comes cheap or without dedicated effort.

The end result, Kennelly hopes, will be real change – for the students, for the Kerry area, for the nation and Irish society.

Over the past decade, “Ireland got fat,” he says, and became too “obsessed with consumption and went for the easy buck”, looking to make money off property investment rather than hard work, intellectual capital and good business ideas.

The programme is designed to reverse that, to encourage students to think for themselves, to solve problems and to view entrepreneurship not as something restricted to a more privileged class, or even requiring special brains or university degrees. Instead, it’s about self- confidence and self-reliance, he says, coupled with learning the basics of business and how to fund a good idea.

“We’re teaching them to be disrupters,” he says with satisfaction, not to just wade through school in order to get a boring job or feel pushed to go into the professions. Kennelly feels the latter was a choice that symbolises everything that went wrong with the Celtic Tiger, a kind of default, high end, money-making lazy career option.

Instead he wants 17-year-olds to think about creating their own jobs, maybe their own company, maybe even a global company.

“It’s not really about pushing them to be entrepreneurs, but to learn that people deserve to have choice. It gives choice about being self-employed. There has been appalling career guidance in schools in terms of choice.

“There is never any suggestion that people might work for themselves, but there is the fact that it’s a really interesting way to run your life, to control your life.”

The most exciting and rewarding element for Kennelly is seeing just how committed and capable the students are.

Some come up submit business plans and make elevator pitches that are of a much higher quality than some he has seen in applications for the Endeavour programme. And to those who think a 15- year-old is too young to be thinking about entrepreneurship? Just the opposite, Kennelly says.

It’s the perfect time, before schools and university work push many students into a more narrow channel of thinking about what they can do and what is possible.