Keith Shirley

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Working on your own can be a challenge at times. Before returning to Ireland I had spent about 13 years working in a busy office environment. SOLINET is a relatively small company in terms of the number of people that work there but the atmosphere is very much corporate in terms of the amount of stuff going on.

When I returned to Ireland I started working from a home office. It was initially fantastic – I noticed a big increase in productivity without the constant phone calls or exigencies that needed to be dealt with. After a while though I noticed that there were a number of creative activities that were suffering without the benefit of social interaction. Even problem solving was a little more difficult. The process of describing problems was often enough to help me find my own solution. And lets be honest – I miss the craic.

Back in May I spoke to Michael Kelly, Carlow CEB CEO, about the potential of them providing hot desks for very short term use rather than longer term offices. Carlow CEB have an incubation centre at Enterprise House on O’Brien Road in Carlow. They provide office facilities on a medium term (generally up-to 3 years I believe) to startup businesses. They will soon be building a new premises and I thought that reserving some space for ad-hoc space would be useful – and importantly for them would not conflict with commercial offerings in the town. Carlow Chamber of Commerce have some furnished offices which are a start but I think don’t go quite far enough. Actually my brother has a place there offering Building Energy Ratings. For a start – there are no hot desk facilities. By hot-desk I mean somewhere where you can hire a desk for a short amount of time to do some work from. I can’t say if they would be commercially viable but I do think they would be very useful.

If Carlow CEB are to do something like this they need to know you are interested. I thought it would be interesting for the following situations

• Seasonal work – At certain times of the year businesses need to be able to take on extra people for a short period to deal with order etc
• Short term work packets – Sometimes I need to work with someone closely for a few days. Currently I have to travel to their offices – it would be nice to be able to offer something here
• Home Emergencies – Sometimes you just can’t work from home.
• Business Idea Testing – I imagine there are people who are interested in testing the market for some business idea but are concerned with signing up for long term leases. Even just having an office for a few months would be useful.

This morning I received a tweet from Evert Bopp. He is going to start up his own Co-working/techhub/start-up centre – presumably near his home in Nenagh. I met Evert for the first time last July when he organised the Open Coffee BBQ. The event was great and really highlighted for me how important the exchange of ideas and peer review can be. Evert is looking for comments from people for things they would need from a co-working environment. If you have any ideas then please click on the co-working link above and add a comment.

As some of you may be aware – Shercom was lucky enough to be awarded an Innovation Voucher from Enterprise Ireland. I’ve enjoyed working with the people from IT Carlow and think it’s a great idea – although I’m probably biased as I was awarded one. I can be a sore loser.

For those that are lazy readers – It’s a relatively easy way for a company to get a 5000 Euro voucher towards some research activities in association with their local Institute of Technology. By easy I mean you don’t need to invest much time in filling out the forms. Of course – you want to make the most of it so investing some thinking time is suggested. In terms of research funds – 5000 Euro will not go very far. For a small company it can be a very good starting point.

Last time I mentioned this I was only able to squeeze in the announcement at the last moment. Thank you to Mary O Higgins from the Carlow County Enterprise Board for the timely reminder. This time I’m able to give you some advance notice. Hopefully Mary won’t mind me reproducing her mail here:

Good afternoon

Some of our clients have got Innovation Vouchers in order to grow their businesses.  So here is some information ……

If you own or manage a small limited company with a company registration number and you have a business opportunity or problem that you want to explore, you can apply for an Innovation Voucher worth €5,000.  The Innovation Voucher allows you to concentrate on running your business while knowledge providers (among the 38 third level institutions around all Ireland) come up with a solution that could take your business to the next level

The next call will open on 1st September 2008

For more details and an application form, please refer to http://www.enterprise-ireland.com/innovationvouchers / www.innovationvouchers.ie

Innovation Vouchers can be used for any kind of innovation such as:

• new product / process development;
• new business model development;
• new service delivery and customer interface;
• new service development;
• tailored training in innovation management;
• innovation / technology audit

There is certain stuff that is ineligible, mostly training course costs and marketing/sales activities so please check out the website.