Taking small business owners for a ride to get them and universities to interact

Ron Immink is quite possibly one of Dublin's busiest entrepreneurs, running smallbusinesscan.com, bookbuzz.biz and also working with the event management company Platinum Events.

The Dutchman, who “met an Irish girl, fell madly in love and never left”, used to manage the Innovation Centre in DCU. While there he began to wonder why universities and small businesses were failing to engage.

At first he assumed that the fault lay at the door of the universities, that they were difficult to interact with because of an ivory-tower attitude. But as he started talking to small- and medium-sized businesses, he realised that part of the problem was the inertia of business owners.

Immink’s latest brainchild seeks to bridge the gap between universities offering all sorts of support for research, development and innovation, and SMEs that would benefit hugely from such support. So this Thursday, the first Innovation Campus Bus Tour will take place. “We decided to make it as easy as possible,” Immink says.

The SME owners simply board the bus and are then whisked off to UCD where they will be given a background on why innovation is important and the supports that are available to them. Then they head northside to DCU where they will get an overview of the interesting things happen there in the area of research, before finishing off in Trinity.

The tour is most suited to businesses in the ICT, life science and engineering fields. “With a day, as a small business you get a full overview of all the excitement that universities can offer,” Immink says.

“What we hope will happen is that some of those small businesses will engage [with the universities].” Ron will be tracking progress after the event, seeing if the SMEs begin to interact with universities and if that is not happening, figuring out why.

The tour is a snip at just €50 (which Ron says is just to make sure they don’t get “tyre kickers”) and places can be booked by emailing Ron@small businesscan.com. “We hope this one becomes a roaring success, and we hope to do it again.”