Dr John Breslin, Director, TechInnovate, NUI Galway
Connacht Rugby / IRUPA Talk
Innovation and
Entrepreneurship:
Tips, Tools and
Tricks
1

About me
2

What is TechInnovate?
3
● New programme at NUI Galway to create more
entrepreneurs (through a 10-month fellowship
programme) and more “intrapreneurs” (for
companies who take part in our industry training
workshops in January) in the West of Ireland
● Two fellowship teams: defence and agriculture
● Various organisations take part in our industry
training starting in January, including Bank of Ireland,
Defence Forces, etc.

Definition of innovation
(Edward Roberts, MIT)
Innovation = Invention * Commercialisation
4

Types of innovation (Bill Aulet,
MIT)
5
Type /
Category Disruptive Incremental Lateral
Technology
Process
Business
Model
Position
Other

● Not about charisma! Effecting change (leadership)...
1. Do you have a vision (possible state / future state)?
2. Do you have a sense making capability to understand
what’s going on in the world (as-is state)?
3. Do you have the relationships to make that happen?
4. How do you take where we are today (as-is state),
and get to a future state that hasn’t existed before?
5. Can you do that with your own personal signature?
6
Entrepreneur characteristics
(MIT Leadership Center)

Steps to an
innovation-driven
enterprise
7

8
● SME = small-medium enterprise
○ Local / regional market; You and family; Straight-line growth in
cash flow, then plateaus
● IDE = innovation-driven enterprise
○ Global market / super regional market; Lots of shareholders;
Significant initial burn rate, transitions to exponential cash flow
● Sometimes you can transform from one to another,
doesn’t always work as rules are different
○ Michael Jordan was a great basketball player, but as a baseball
player, not so great
SME vs. IDE

10
“Don’t download your
eyes and ears.” - Bill
Aulet

11
● Essential for entrepreneurship to be disciplined
○ You are the attacker going up against the defender
○ You don’t have a lot of resources
○ You don’t have a lot of time
○ You don’t have cash flow
○ All that belongs to the defender
● You just have this small thing called passion
● How you execute against this bigger foe requires an
extraordinary amount of discipline
● “Spirit of a pirate” + “execution skills of a navy seal”
“Disciplined entrepreneurship”

Disciplined
Entrepreneur-
ship’s 24 steps
1212

● Mentors are typically
unpaid (short time)
● Get one for free at
www.iemp.org (Irish
Executive Mentoring
Programme)
● Or free 15-minute call
with Irish leaders at
www.officehours.ie
Get some mentorship
13

Get an advisor
● Advisors are either paid or have some equity (shares)
in your venture
● How much they get (paid/equity) or what they do for
you is often a matter of some confusion/debate, so
thankfully the Founder Institute have made a free
template (legally binding), which is called the
Founder/Advisor Standard Template
● http://fi.co/fast
14

Just ask
15

Be efficient with your
time
16

Be selective: can’t do everything
17
“I’m actually as proud
of the things we
haven't done as the
things I have done.”
- Steve Jobs

Getting things done
● Yes, it’s a method (and a book, GTD, by David Allen)
● Also, do the hard stuff early in the day, when you
have most energy
● Don’t let emails dominate your day (wait a little while,
they sometimes solve themselves), but don’t be an
email black hole either
● Try the Pomodoro method to get through mundane
tasks (exam correcting!)
18

Actionable? Organizing
Bucket
TRAF Four D’s
N Trash Toss Delete
N Someday/Maybe - -
N File File -
Y + delegate Waiting For Refer Delegate
Y + < 2min Do it Act Do
Y + > 2min Defer It (Calend-
ar, Next Actions)
Act Defer
Processing stuff (e.g. emails)
19

● ...but don’t waste time making (and moving
messages) into hundreds of folders
● Email search can nearly always find what you need
● I usually just create folders for each six-month
window and move stuff from my Inbox into them:
○ 2016 Q3, Q4
○ 2016 Q1, Q2
○ 2015 Q3, Q4
○ 2015 Q1, Q2
○ etc.
Tidy up your email...
20

Manage your to dos
● Try www.wunderlist.com and the Wunderlist app
● You can create to dos, lists of to dos, categories of to
do lists, and even better, share to dos or to do lists
with others, assigning tasks to them if appropriate
21

More tools, from Google
● Google have lots of great free tools
● Google Docs, Slides and Sheets are great office tools
for collaborating with others, in real time (this
presentation is in Google Slides)
● When travelling:
○ Google Maps allows you to download an offline area for your
mobile, so no data needed to navigate
○ Google Translate app for translating signs, labels via camera
○ Google Play Music allows you to upload 50,000 songs from
your computer/iTunes library, that you can then listen to for
free from the Google Play Music app or website 22

Phones are a waste of time...
● ...if you spend all your time checking notifications!
● Turn off notifications apart from the key ones
(messages, phone calls, calendar events) or optional
ones (WhatsApp, Skype) where people need to
contact you
● You don’t need notifications for emails, social media,
news, etc. as you can catch up on those in batches
rather than one every five minutes
23

Say no
24

Personal branding
25

Starting doing some work
26
● “Stop Asking Me About Your Personal Brand, and
Start Doing Some Work”, Gary Vaynerchuk,
http://bit.ly/startdoingsomework
● Summary:
○ Decide if you’re ready to put yourself out there
○ Use email marketing to its full advantage
○ Make video content (the right way)
○ In fact, create as much content as possible
○ Never automate
○ Keep scaling your content
○ Hustle

Social media tricks
● Try and use the same username across platforms
● Get a professional picture (not one taken at a party)
● Make use of your social media header, it’s like free ad
space (the picture shown on the second slide is mine)
● Get a short URL on LinkedIn (get rid of those long
www.linkedin.com/pub/john-smith/2a/687/39 URLs)
● Put your LinkedIn link in your email signature, and
any other links you want people to click through to
27

● Set up searches in Twitter, TweetDeck, etc. like:
○ “Connacht Rugby” OR connachtrugby
○ “NUI Galway” OR nuigalway OR nuig OR “National University of
Ireland”
● Similarly for Google News, it’s a great app/website for
keeping up to date with your favourite topics:
○ Set up searches for those topics that you can go back to again
and again
○ Also try variants of search terms (e.g. irish rugby and rugby
ireland will often throw up different stories)
Make good use of social search
28

Website tips
● You can pay (lots) for a website design, hosting, etc.
● There are also some great free and easy-to-use
content management system options, like
WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, BuilderEngine (from
Galway!), etc.
● If you don’t want a content management system, you
can download professional (and mobile-responsive)
free HTML templates from www.html5up.net
29

Logo tools
30
● Mock something up using the various free tools that
are out there
● Use fonts.google.com or www.dafont.com to
generate a logo typeface (put your brand name in the
sample text box to see it); a lot of these fonts are
available under open licenses so you can use for free
● Also have a look at fontawesome.io for free graphic
icons to use (21st century version of Wingdings)
● Need some free graphic packages? Inkscape or Gimp

Lots of great free or reusable
images for websites (or talks!)
● Public domain = no credit required
● Creative Commons = need to “attribute” (reference)
the image creator, usually by name and with a link
● Variants on Creative Commons may allow you to
modify the image, use them commercially, etc.
● Two useful sources of images:
○ www.publicdomainpictures.net
○ commons.wikimedia.org
31

Caroline Léna Becker, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ST_vs_Connacht_2012_84.JPG 32

Thanks!
33