LaunchBox is an accelerator program established by Trinity College Dublin, in 2013 to empower Trinity students to develop their own entrepreneurial ideas. Each year, 10 student enterprises receive €10,000 in equity-free funding to develop their ideas. LaunchBox has produced several notable alumni, including FoodCloud, founded by Iseult Ward while studying at Trinity which has been successful in tackling food waste. Artomatix, founded by Eric Risser was acquired for over €60m in 2019, and Equine MediRecord, founded by Pierce Dargan during his business degree in 2016, has recently secured an investment of more than €10m. Other notable alumni are Bounce Insights, and Field of Vision, winners of Enterprise Ireland Student Entrepreneur of the Year 2021.

LaunchBox provides lifelong knowledge and skills that support founders through their follow-on ventures. Dan Hobbs, who participated in LaunchBox 2016 with Better Examinations raised $18m in Series A funding for his new start-up Protex AI. James Eggers, who co-founded Better Examinations with Hobbs, raised over $10m for his new start-up, Inscribe. Both Hobbs and Aisling Byrne, who developed her start-up Nuw on LaunchBox in 2016, were named in Forbes 30 Under 30 European list for 2023.

Our student entrepreneurs are shaping their future and solving significant problems while setting themselves up to be the leaders of tomorrow's Ireland, aware of societal issues. Programs like the annual Provost's Innovation Challenge, where students vote on societal challenges, help to support this objective by developing potential solutions to the most pressing issues.

The college environment lends itself perfectly to bringing together students from different disciplines, and providing them with the skills, tools, space, and supports to create their own sustainable enterprises or to bring these transversal and entrepreneurial skills to established Enterprises.

Our ambition is to create a national centre of student entrepreneurship which reflects a deep desire to empower the next generation of innovators and leaders nationally. University hubs can support students who are passionate about creating new businesses, developing innovative products, or exploring new ideas.

By providing access to resources such as mentorship, funding, and training, we can help students turn their ambitions into reality. Additionally, the hubs can serve as a forum for collaboration with industry, allowing students from different disciplines to come together and share their knowledge and ideas. By fostering innovation and creativity, we can play a significant role in shaping the future of entrepreneurship and paving the way for a new generation of successful entrepreneurs.

Our cohort of student entrepreneurs are not only shaping their own future and solving massive problems, but they are also setting themselves up to be the leaders of tomorrow’s Ireland that are conscious of issues in society. We support this objective by running programs such as our annual Provost’s Innovation Challenge where the student population vote on a number of societal challenges and a hackathon is then run to develop potential solutions to the issue with the highest number of votes.

Tangent, the centre for innovation and entrepreneurship at Trinity College Dublin, is scaling the number of student enterprises that it can support by developing the ‘Open Incubator’. The platform enables more students to engage with Tangent through innovation challenges and self-directed idea development. It combines the best elements of university entrepreneurship programs globally with best practice in start-up community development. The digital platform was launched in November 2021 and currently has almost 1,000 registered TCD students.

Tangent has initiated conversations with several Irish universities about opening the Open Incubator platform and programs to their students to foster cross-university student collaboration. Many universities have limited support for student entrepreneurship, usually within Business schools, and focused on business students only. Tangent's mission is to empower Ireland's university-based innovators, regardless of their area of study or location, to build their companies and work on some of the biggest societal challenges.

Tangent believes that providing learners with the opportunity to develop and lead their own businesses at a young age equips them with skills that are also attractive to larger organisations when recruiting talent. Our programs put students first by empowering them to independently collaborate on shared passions.

We want to integrate the EU developed EntreComp Framework to reward consistent engagement and effort through recognition of improved entrepreneurial competence. Integration of the framework will allow students to track their competency development and provide us with data on the level of entrepreneurial competency development in students over time.