Ireland’s 9th Living Lab took place in the IDA Business Park’s WorkLab on October 23rd. The event brought together the six participants over the three years of the Labs and a range of relevant stakeholders with the aim of transforming project recommendations into policy change.
The final Lab showcased the innovations of the six women: Catherine Kinsella, Gina Ryan, Aileen Barron, Gail Daniels, Emer Lawrence and Karen Keane, who also spoke about the main barriers and key opportunities they encountered in their entrepreneurial processes. Challenges included balancing innovations with caring responsibilities, patriarchal assumptions around entrepreneurship and the lack of effective mentoring to meet the needs of women. The cumbersome and repetitive nature of funding applications was also noted, but Catherine Kinsella highlighted the Circular Economy Innovation Grant Scheme (CEIGS) led by the Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment (DCEE), offering grants of between €40,000 and €50,000, as an effective example of a simplified application process that could be replicated for other funding schemes.
Stakeholders were present from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, the Department of Rural and Community Development and the Gaeltacht, Skillnet Ireland, the Local Enterprise Office (LEO), the South East Regional Skills Forum, and colleagues at SETU. Stakeholders, women innovators, and the Irish GRASS CEILING research team participated in round table discussions aimed at communicating key project results and identifying actions based on these findings.
The keynote address was delivered by Paula Fitzsimons, director of the ACORNS programme (Accelerating the Creation of Rural Nascent Start-ups), funded under the Rural Innovation and Development Fund through the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine (DAFM). ACORNS started in 2014 and is now in its 11th iteration. 550 women innovators have completed a cycle of the programme, among them three participants in the Irish Living Lab. Paula spoke about the importance of peer-to-peer learning among women that is both a feature of the ACORNS programme and the Living Labs.
The final Lab concluded by highlighting the importance of developing the collaborations formed at the event so that supports can be improved at a regional level and policy change can be achieved on a national basis.
Gifts were presented to the women to thank them for their invaluable participation in the project and contributions to key recommendations. These were baubles by the Waterford-based Irish Hand Made Glass Company History engraved with the GRASS CEILING logo.
