Accenture Leaders of Tomorrow: Feeding the start-up culture

This year's Accenture Leaders of Tomorrow competition has reached the semi-final stage, with the record 240 applicants now whittled down to 22. The semi-finalists will get an opportunity to develop their business ideas into business plans and pitch them to Accenture senior management before six are chosen to go through to the final round of judging on March 30th.

The overall winner will receive an all-expenses paid trip to one of Accenture's global innovation hubs – previous winners have been to France, India and New York – a place on the National Digital Research Centre's acclaimed Launchpad programme, and the option of a six-month "ideas Internship" with Accenture. This year, to mark the 10th anniversary of the competition, the winner will also receive €5,000 as start funding for their business venture.

"We have been delighted and somewhat surprised by the exceptional response this year," says Eithne Harley, Accenture Leaders of Tomorrow business sponsor. "Applications were up 70 per cent to 240. Leaders of Tomorrow is now really a student start-up programme. Students are seeing start-ups and entrepreneurship as a viable career option. The start-up ecosystem in Ireland is creating its own momentum. We have applicants who have been successful on other programmes with Local Enterprise Offices and so on and it is great to see these people coming through."

Diversity in business

One particularly gratifying statistic is the number of young women taking part this year. “Forty-eight per cent of the applications this year came from women”, says Harley. “That is really great. We need more diversity in business. We need to use the whole talent pool which is available to us. Also, 18 of the applicants came from outside Ireland and the ones from Ireland came from 28 different third-level institutions. We put in a lot of effort this year to reach out to start-up cities outside Ireland and to attract applications from throughout Ireland. We want to develop talent and encourage start-up activity; that was the whole reason for setting up the competition 10 years ago.”

The increased number of female applicants was also the result of a conscious effort. “We put a lot of work into achieve that result,” she points out. “We wanted women to be much more visible in the whole process. After all, you cannot be what you cannot see. We focused on what I call ‘the three Cs’ – community, connection and cajoling.”

Community involved actively engaging with young women and reaching out to them. Events were organised where female entrepreneurs and finalists from last year’s competition spoke about their experiences to other young women. “We had inspiring young female entrepreneurs at the events and we went out of our way to make the experience as positive as possible. We actively connected with them on the night and cajoled them into applying.”

The aim was to remove some of the barriers to greater female participation. “One of the things women do is doubt themselves and they put obstacles in front of themselves. The great thing about Leaders of Tomorrow is that applicants don’t have to have fully-baked business ideas to enter. They can be supported to develop the idea during the competition.”

The option of submitting an application by uploading a video has also helped with the uplift in entries. “Young people have no problem with the video application process. This makes it a lot more accessible than if they had to submit a formal business plan. It’s important that the programme is attractive to people with great ideas, not just those with fully-formed business plans.”

She believes the quite dramatic increase in interest is also a reflection of a growing maturity in this country when it comes to attitudes towards entrepreneurship. "It's not a case anymore that young people are going to shock their parents if they tell them that they want to start up a business rather than look for a job when they graduate. This is helping Ireland become an innovation and start-up island and this helps all organisations, big and small. People can start up a business and then go to work for an organisation like Google and then leave again to start up another business. This emerging talent flow is very encouraging."

Previous winners

The success of previous winners and finalists also serves to generate interest in the competition. "Last year's winner, Vincent Forde, went on to win the Enterprise Ireland Student Entrepreneur of the Year and the Cork Institute of Technology Entrepreneur of the Year awards," she notes. "One of the finalists, Venn, is about to launch the beta of its social media exercise platform and go for a round of seed funding. Connect the Dots, which is an events company run by two female entrepreneurs, is also doing very well while GroopEze now has more than 10,000 users for its group booking platform, revenue into seven figures and is expanding into new geographic markets. The great thing is that we have a very active Leaders of Tomorrow alumni group who are there to support the next generation of applicants."