Leadership

A new national plan on corporate social responsibility over the next three years was launched today by Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Richard Bruton. According to the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, the new plan – Good for Business, Good for the Community – supports one of its key objectives, which is to make Ireland the best small country in which to do business. Specific measures in the plan include: Establish a stakeholder forum to support the development of CSR in Ireland, in the first half of 2014;Establish a baseline of CSR activity in Ireland, through the National Standards Association of Ireland;Work with stakeholders to raise awareness of CSR and support best practice CSR;Explore how…

Desi Dobreva – The Branding Queen Desi Dobreva is a professional creative, specializing in content creation, social media, PR and helping your business reach rock star status. She can be found on a plane, writing the night away, standing up for animal rights or hugging her sloth. Business and Leadership sat down with “The Branding Queen” to talk about being an entrepreneur, growing a team, and fighting mediocrity and creating big wins for her clients’ businesses. As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up and in what ways does that relate to what you do now? Words and stories have captivated me ever since I…

Whether it was through marketing automation or the use of big data, Jon Shugart of BookProfits (along with his partner, Luke Sample ) has tackled problems that very few others have gone after solving. However, that is what gets him excited the most, and the more difficult the challenge, the more ready he is to jump in with both feet and get to work to solve it. As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? In what ways does that relate to what you do now? I have always gravitated towards solving problems, even when I was young. Math was my favorite subject and I always felt I would be…

The 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer has placed Ireland second from the bottom in a league table measuring levels of trust in 27 countries. Overall levels of trust in Ireland has fallen 2 points to 37pc during the past 12 months. The barometer finds that NGOs in Ireland remain the most trusted institution despite a significant fall of 10 points to 48pc. And business is the second most trusted institution in Ireland, despite a further three point decline to 38pc. Trust in media is down another three points to 34pc and has now fallen 11 points since 2013. Of the 27 countries surveyed only Japan (31pc) and Turkey (20pc) have lower…

Tesco first retailer to donate all surplus food to charity using Foodcloud app Co-founders Iseult Ward and Aoibheann O’Brien Foodcloud and Christine Heffernan, corporate affairs director, Tesco Ireland Tesco Ireland and social enterprise Foodcloud have announced a partnership that means all surplus food from Tesco’s 146 stores will be redistributed to charities and community groups through the use of Foodcloud’s app. Two young social entrepreneurs, Iseult Ward and Aoibheann O’Brien set up Foodcloud in 2012 to connect businesses with surplus food with community groups and charities. The venture has graduated from Trinity College Dublin’s Launchbox, NDRC’s start-up accelerator programme Launchpad and is a winners of the Arthur Guinness Projects. It ran a pilot programme…

NDRC LaunchPad alumnus and Irish start-up Pharmapod was announced today as the European winner of The Global Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, an international business plan competition that identifies, supports and encourages projects by women entrepreneurs. Last June Pharmapod and its founder Leonora O’Brien was selected as one of the 18 Cartier finalists from over 1,200 applicants worldwide. This week she was invited to France for the final round of competition, which included submitting a detailed business plan and presenting her project in front of the jury. One winner was chosen from each of six regions worldwide with Pharmapod selected as the ‘Laureate for Europe’. The company will now receive a…

Trust in government in Ireland has fallen by 11 points over the last 12 months according to the 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer, which also reveals that trust levels in NGOs, business and media is down over the last yar. The Trust Index, the average trust across the four institutions of business, government, NGOs and media, showed a seven point drop for Ireland to 39 points. This places Ireland as the third least trusting country of 27 surveyed. Government is the least trusted of the four institutions with only 21pc of people saying that they trust government to do what is right. This is the lowest level of trust recorded for…

Kieran Doohan has been appointed chief financial officer at the The Doyle Collection. Doohan joins the company from Ballymore Group, where he was group financial controller and head of finance (Ireland). Previously, he held the position of financial controller (international division) at Mercury Engineering, between 2003 and 2007. He began his career in KPMG in 1996 and held a number of management positions in the firm’s Dublin and Sydney offices between 1996 and 2002. A fellow of Chartered Accountants Ireland, he holds a bachelor of commerce (BComm) and master’s of accounting (MAcc) from UCD, and a graduate diploma in the management and application of IT in accounting from DCU. Grainne…

Greencore CEO Patrick Coveney has been appointed to the board of Glanbia as a non-executive director. Coveney, who’s 43, has been chief executive of convenience food group Greencore – which has revenues of £1.2bn and employing over 12,000 people in the UK, Ireland, and the US, since 2007. Before that, he was Greencore’s chief financial officer. He was previously a global partner of McKinsey and Co, focused on consumer and food industries. Coveney is a former Rhodes scholar and holds a DPhil and MPhil from Oxford University. “I am very pleased that Patrick has agreed to join the Glanbia board. I believe he is well equipped to support the group’s…

Three University College Dublin (UCD) spin-out companies are among only 18 companies from across Ireland to have been shortlisted for the 2014 Irish Times InterTradeIreland Innovation Awards. The three companies are APC Ltd, Equilume Ltd and Oxymem Ltd. Now in its fifth year, the awards showcase excellence in innovation across a range of groundbreaking products and services from all sectors and company sizes across the island, North and South. In recent years the overall winners have created innovations as diverse as drug delivery systems and state-of-the art network switching, to anti-allergy pillows and new technologies for cleaning and disinfection. “I am delighted that three UCD spin-out companies, commercialising UCD research outputs,…