Sandyford Business District Hosts First International Innovation Summit
Updated: 14 hours ago
Dublin, Ireland - This week, Three Mast Group helped deliver Sandyford Business District's first International Innovation Summit, a two-day gathering of local, national, and international business leaders, investors, academics, entrepreneurs and public-sector representatives. The summit was held on October 13 and 14 in partnership with Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.
The summit is the latest step in Three Mast Group’s ongoing work with Sandyford Business District, which lies just south of Dublin city centre and hosts 27,000 employees across 1,000 companies, including significant operations of U.S. tech titans like Microsoft, Mastercard and Google.
A Next Step in the Development of Sandyford's Innovation Campus
Three Mast Group is supporting Sandyford as it moves from a successful multinational corporate community toward a regional innovation ecosystem with greater homegrown startup creation, R&D activities, and interconnectedness between business, academia, and investment. This work includes the development of a dedicated Innovation Campus, investor engagement, and community programming for startups and SMEs.
The venue where the summit was held, called Block G, held special significance, because it is one of the proposed operating locations for Sandyford’s Innovation Campus. This meant that summit attendees could see, walk, and experience the space for themselves.
Three Themes Workshopped Over Two Days
Day 1 opened with welcome remarks from community leaders and a keynote from prominent technology journalist and podcaster Adrian Weckler on the shifting role of business districts. Weckler then moderated a plenary panel on Sandyford’s place in a fast-changing international context, including its role in the emerging European Association of Business & Innovation Districts (EABID), which Sandyford helped found earlier this year.
The core of the summit, however, was a set of three parallel workshops held over both days that were designed to move participants from discussion to concrete action plans and commitments. The first workshop, titled "Supporting Sandyford's Businesses", explored how the district’s SMEs can collaborate on shared, AI-enabled solutions to cut costs and boost productivity, with the aim of securing in-principle commitment to a local demonstrator. The second workshop brought together diverse stakeholders to chart how business districts can shape national innovation strategies, directions, policies, and investment via "national innovation blueprints".
The third workshop, organized by Three Mast Group, focused on how Sandyford and other business districts can promote greater levels of investment, with special consideration placed on the fact that business districts often lie outside of core city centers and thus exhibit unique challenges and opportunities.
The workshop began with a healthy debate amongst investors representing different asset classes, such as venture capital, private equity, real estate development, and infrastructure development, all of which assess local market dynamics differently in their due diligence processes. Panelists included:
Liam Cronin, Director of Innovation at NovaUCD, which is the innovation arm of one of Ireland's biggest universities
Abhinaya Chandrasekaran, Senior Investment Associate at EIT Urban Mobility, a pan-European organization with a €50M fund taking equity stakes in urban mobility startups
Cian O'Hora, Founder and Managing Director at Integrated Material Solutions, an Irish SME that he recently sold to a private equity firm
Cyril McGuire, CEO of Infinity Capital, SBD board member, and co-founder of Trintech, which in 1999 became the first Irish company to dual-list on Nasdaq and Germany’s Neuer Markt
Ronan Webster, Head of Asset Management at Henderson Park, a global real estate investor that has deployed over $15B in commercial, residential, and hospitality across the United States and Europe
Paolo Carbone, Head of Public Transport Capital Programs at Transport Infrastructure Ireland, which delivers multi-billion euro transport networks across the country
During the second day, attendees were asked to reflect on their own growth goals, their ideal investor types, and how they can forge unique, creative, and unlikely relationships across sectors and asset classes to strengthen their own investment pitches which, in turn, can end up strengthening their wider business and investment ecosystem. Finally, they workshopped potential service lines that an Innovation Campus might provide them in the future.
International Interest
Sandyford's summit caught the attention of current and former ambassadors, diplomats, national ministers, and business professionals from around the world, leading to lively participation from individuals hailing from places like Morocco, Poland, Denmark, Japan, and Greece.
For example, His Excellency Mr Miyagawa Manabu, Ambassador of Japan to Ireland, and Dr. Aawatif Hayar, Professor at Mohammad VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) and former Minister of Solidarity, Social Integration, and Family, joined the National Innovation Blueprints workshop.
From Ideas to Action
The summit closed with a plenary feedback session in which theme moderators and champions shared forward commitments for each workstream. Three Mast Group will continue to support Sandyford’s management team in turning these commitments into concrete next steps, in particular advancing the Innovation Campus and building the investor relationships that will help the district’s startups and SMEs to scale.
View the video below for a recap and short interview with UrbanDNA's and Three Mast Group's Graham Colclough, DLR Councillor Pierce Dargan, and Sandyford Business District CEO Ger Corbett.
