Event: Troy McConnell, US entrepreneur, and Professor Suzi Javis, founder of The Innovation Academy, UCD

Date: 29 August 2014
Time: 14.00 pm
Venue: The Pembroke Hotel Patrick Street Kilkenny

Please bring a friend.
About the speakers:

Troy McConnell is an Entrepreneurial Specialist at The Innovation Academy. Troy co-founded his first company, Image Technology, in 1988 and sold it in 1995 to MCI for $26 million. He co-founded Batanga, a media business focused on the US Hispanic and Latin American market, in late 1999. Batanga raised $8M in equity funding between 2000 and 2005. McConnell sold his interest in Batanga to Tudor Ventures in a $30M funding round in 2007. In 2009, McConnell founded Clever on Demand, an Internet advertising technology company that purchased AudienceFUEL. McConnell has two patents and also teaches Entrepreneurship in the MBA program at Wake Forest University.

Professor Suzi Jarvis has been at the forefront of research, innovation and education in Ireland and abroad.
She is the founding Director of the Innovation Academy at University College Dublin and Chair of Biophysics with a multidisciplinary research team based in the UCD Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research. In 2002 she was the first female principal investigator funded by Science Foundation Ireland and continues to receive SFI funding for her research, as well as funding from the EU. Suzi has built a team of entrepreneurs (practitioner educators) who are designing ways to nurture entrepreneurial thinking and action within learners from a broad range of backgrounds. Her aim in developing the Academy is to provide a transformational educational experience for people for the betterment of Irish society and economy. Motivated to help shape the future of education, she is particularly interested in exploring new educational paradigms both within the Academy and the wider community. She was educated at the University of Oxford, and has substantial international experience, particularly in Japan where she worked for eight years. She continues to build an extensive global network across multiple sectors.