11 March, 2019

On March 8th we were honoured to welcome Professor Tom Cooney, Technological University Dublin, to CIT to deliver a talk on the “Missing Entrepreneurs: Research & Practice Opportunities in Minority Entrepreneurship”. The seminar attracted a diverse group of attendees from different faculties across CIT and was very well attended for what was the culmination of an extremely busy week of events in CIT’s annual Innovation week.

Tom had a PowerPoint deck of slides for his presentation but we knew early on that this was no ordinary lecture and that Tom was not the type that “sticks to the slides”. In fact Tom went “freesolo” from the start, forgot about the slides and just started talking, his gift of oratory bourne out of his sincerity, passion and deep knowledge for the subject matter had his audience captivated.

He spoke about the travelling community and their unique challenges along with those in direct provision and the prison system at length and with compassion but always anchored to reality. Tom believes as strongly in the economic argument for helping these cohorts become part of the workforce as the humanitarian argument and believes that there is a dearth of research regarding the entrepreneurial behaviour of many of these communities and the additional and distinctive challenges that they face when starting a business. He argues that substantial research and practice opportunities await those who wish to analyse entrepreneurial behaviour within these communities.

Thomas Cooney is Professor in Entrepreneurship at Technological University Dublin, Academic Director of the Institute for Minority Entrepreneurship, Adjunct Professor at the University of Turku (Finland) and former Editor of the academic journal Small Enterprise Research. Additionally, he is a Fellow of the European Council for Small Business, a TedX Speaker and is Policy Advisor to Governments, the European Commission, OECD, European Training Foundation and other international organisations. He has a strong publications record in the field of entrepreneurship and his 10th book (Research Handbook on Minority Entrepreneurship) is due for publication in 2020. He is a director of several enterprises and additionally works with commercial and not-for-profit organisations in a variety of capacities. Full details of his academic career can be found at www.thomascooney.com.