Sandyford Business District, a Regional Innovation Hub in Greater Dublin

Sandyford Business District, located just south of Dublin city center, is one of Ireland's most strategically significant business and innovation districts. It is home to 27,000 employees across 1,000 companies, including a dense cluster of major U.S. digital titans like Microsoft, Mastercard, Salesforce, Google, and Meta, alongside a growing base of Irish and European firms.

Despite Sandyford's impressive corporate footprint, R&D and startup activity in the district has traditionally lagged, despite being home to one of Ireland's most successful startups/scale-ups in recent years, Cubic Telecom, which just sold a 51% stake for €473M. Now, having seen firsthand the value-creating potential of startups, Sandyford's executive team has decided to embark upon a journey to develop a full-fledged innovation campus that engages with its local corporates, SMEs, universities, founders, and investors to foster greater R&D activity.

Three Mast Group is supporting Sandyford Business District and its enabling partners at Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown (DLR) County Council to develop and execute a three-pillared strategy to achieve that vision:

• Developing a dedicated physical innovation campus to support start-up formation, corporate-startup collaboration, and talent pipelines

• Deepening engagement with domestic and international investors

• Strengthening community-driven programming and stakeholder alignment

Three Mast Group's work to date has included both strategy development and execution.

Strategy Development & Stakeholder Alignment

Three Mast Group has developed the strategic case for turning Sandyford into a regional innovation node, drawing on analogies to how Silicon Valley in California grew not only in a single downtown district but across a wider network of interconnected hubs throughout the Bay Area.

To develop the strategy, interviews and workshops were held with numerous community leaders, including the senior leadership teams of some of Sandyford's biggest corporate tenants (including Microsoft and Cubic Telecom), the Sandyford Business District Board, DLR county executives, SME owners, and startup founders.

Three Mast Group and Sandyford executives present their latest developments to local, national, and international stakeholders, from business executives and academia to members of parliament and foreign ambassadors.

A major multi-stakeholder event was also organized to bring together local business leaders, academic institutions, and local / regional / national policymakers, including several foreign ambassadors, to build alignment around the innovation campus vision and advance the next phase of planning.

Investor Engagement

Three Mast Group has also led the charge on stimulating both local and foreign investment in Sandyford's innovation.

Most notably, our targeted local investors do not only include Irish family offices, investment funds, and the public investor Enterprise Ireland, but also medium and large enterprises whose balance sheets can support investment activities. By securing investments from medium and large enterprises into local funds and startups, we are securing the buy-in from major potential customers and enablers of said startups.

Our work with international investors reaches over to Europe in the east and the United States in the west. They include public-private investors and ecosystem enablers from Europe, as well as pure VC funds from the United States that are becoming increasingly interested in upstream investment opportunities from Europe.

Meetings were held with VC and PE investors at the IDA Ireland office in NYC.

To support our work, we carried out a commercial mission to engage with investors from New York City and the East Coast, timed to coincide with the Irish government's annual Saint Patrick's Day diplomatic events. Meetings were carried out with accelerators, VC and PE firms, and key Irish actors like IDA Ireland and Enteprise Ireland, as well as New York City's Economic Development Corporation.

Quick discussions were held with Irish Minister of Enterprise Peter Burke on the sidelines of a JPMorgan event.

Campus Development & Funding

The development of an innovation campus in Sandyford presents multiple business cases and investment opportunities. We are helping the Sandyford executive team to structure the innovation campus into a series of developments and business cases that make sense to investors, public funders, and wider ecosystem partners.

Three Mast Group continues to support Sandyford's management team as the district advances its planning, stakeholder engagement, and international investor outreach.