Brian O'Flaherty

Brian O'Flaherty is a member of faculty in the Department of Business Information Systems at University College Cork. Having initially worked in the software industry, he has been teaching in UCC for over 21 years. He originally studied Computer Science and completed his doctoral research in Management Science at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He was involved with Business Information Systems in UCC from its inception and is the current academic director of the MSc (Innovation, Commercialisation and Entrepreneurship), an Innovation practise programme. He is an active academic entrepreneur, with a spinout in Green IT and recently licensed a predictive analytics platform to a company. He is co-founder of the Alta Centre for Entrepreneurial Research and Learning in UCC and his areas of interest include Information Infrastructures, Service Innovation and Design Science, and University wide Entrepreneurship Education.

Since January 2015, he is coordinating the EU-XCeL (Accelerating Entrepreneurial Learning Across European Regions) Project, an EU funded Horizon 2020 project, which will establish ICT entrepreneurship education initiatives and spaces across Europe. It sets out to train ICT entrepreneurs to be ‘incubator ready’ and this is informed by research into current practice in incubators across Europe. EU-XCEL will develop a network of ICT entrepreneurship creative physical and virtual spaces and coordinate European-wide intensive entrepreneurial action training events called ‘Start-up Scrums’ between consortia members with international teams.