Week 10- Catalyst talk

Before our lecture today we had a talk with Soifra Frost and she explained what the Co – Founder programme is.

Basically this is part time on a Monday night where you go with a business idea or if you are interested in learning about going a start up team. If you are accepted there is a hot house weekend – where you pitch your idea to the group and then you are teamed up (speed dating vibe), when looking for a team you can look for a skill set that you lack etc. Then it becomes a team, aka – co founders! This programme gives people the opportunity to help people make their dreams a reality.

By the end of this programme you would have a rough prototype and then you can apply for 10k start up grant. There is opportunities to learn how to set up the company and they bring in marketing experts to teach how to craft your brand; also there is the legal side of things for example if you are trying to export to your product to the USA or Asia – solicitors come in to talk and explore how to do thing like that  (which I think it is such a good thing to learn about).

They also assign mentors – an industry expert, this coaching from two mentors would include design thinking training and the whole programme would allow for some amazing networking opportunities.

This is a really interesting programme that I definetly will think about this is in the future perhaps with my third year project idea.