NEW INNOVATORScienceWorks

CORK-BASED engineer Joe O’Keeffe has built up considerable experience in business start-ups over the past 20 years. His latest venture, established with a team of similarly seasoned entrepreneurs, is ScienceWorks, an intellectual property (IP) commercialisation company that identifies hitherto unexploited high-tech innovations within third-level institutions and brings them to market.

“Despite the best efforts of organisations such as Enterprise Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland the number of innovations that make it from the research bench to commercialisation are actually quite small,” O’Keeffe says.

“Over the years I have worked on projects one by one and I thought there had to be a mechanism whereby a number of projects could be run simultaneously. The model we have developed will allow us take on between five and 10 projects a year.”

ScienceWorks evaluates the technical and commercial potential of new technologies and if it likes what it sees it will seed fund the project and put in a management team to nurture the idea to early maturity.

The company’s areas of interest are electronics, medical devices, clean-tech and life science technologies, nano technologies and advanced web, cloud computing, SaaS and mobile software innovations.

“Once the commercial potential of a technology is verified we will provide all the necessary infrastructure and recruit experienced entrepreneurs in residence (one technology focused and one business focused) to take on the day-to-day management of each start-up,” O’Keeffe says.

ScienceWorks has already identified its first tranche of projects and is currently on a fundraising drive to raise €1 million in Ireland and £26 million in the UK to fund the venture.

The spin-outs will be jointly owned by ScienceWorks, the management teams and the third level institutions concerned. ScienceWorks is also looking for opportunities to work with companies that have come up with innovative ideas and technologies in the course of their RD but don’t have the time, interest or funds to develop the ideas themselves.

“There has been a huge amount of RD undertaken in Ireland in the last 10 years and from talking to people it became clear to me that good ideas were getting overlooked. We have both the market expertise and the funding to bring these technologies into the light and turn them into viable businesses,” O’Keeffe says. “We also feel this is a methodology that will travel and could be applied in other locations.”