From fashion-savvy teenagers to confident coders, Ireland's youth are turning ideas into business proposals, writes MICHELLE McDONAGH

IT WAS a piece of red confetti stuck to the bottom of her shoe that inspired schoolgirl Tara Haughton to come up with the idea of using stick-on soles to transform any high heel into a designer look-a-like.

For David McCarthy, it was coming up with a solution for a client who lost €2 million in the space of a few hours because “some guy did not know where the ‘off’ valve was” in his factory.

Despite being the chief executive of a company exporting to 22 countries worldwide, 16-year-old Haughton was nervous at the thought of having to address a room packed full of her peers at the Brandon Hotel in Tralee, Co Kerry, on Friday.

However, once the pretty, petite entrepreneur started talking about her business to host Colette Fitzpatrick, the nerves quickly disappeared and she chatted animatedly about juggling her expanding business with school while her proud mum beamed up from the audience.

Haughton was the youngest of a series of Irish entrepreneurs who shared their business success stories to second- and third-level students at the Entrepreneur Blue Sky Day event organised by the co-founder of the Young Entrepreneur Programme and Awards, Kerryman Jerry Kennelly.

Her advice to other would-be entrepreneurs was: “If you have an idea, go for it. Get help, there is help out there, you just need to go and look for it.”

She admitted that the downside to being chief executive of her own company – which as it happens has just signed a distribution deal with the United Arab Emirates – is that “there is a lot of work involved and it does take up a lot of time”.

James Whelton (19) started his first company, Disruptive Developments, while in sixth year, raising seed capital just after his mock exams.

His company develops Sociero, a social media monitoring and analytic platform.

Whelton came up with the idea for his business when his father, a dentist who had recently discovered the internet, asked him if he could find out what people were saying about him online.

Whelton has since developed software to track what people are saying about a product, person or company through social media and to provide an analytical report based on the comments posted.

He works with all kinds of clients – even, he said, a presidential candidate. When pressed by Fitzpatrick, he would not disclose the name of the candidate but confided that his code name was “The Dragon”.

Whelton explained that once he had built a small prototype, Enterprise Ireland was “awesome”, providing him with a feasibility study grant which was matched by investors. In a short space of time, he was up and running with a business with huge global potential.

Whelton is also co-founder of a charity called Coder Dojo, which teaches young people how to write code. This is a project Kennelly is excited about and which will be starting in Kerry in a few weeks.

Kennelly, the founder of Tweak.com who sold Stockbyte to Getty Images in 2006 for $135 million (€100 million), says the pool of people writing code in Ireland is small.

“There are lots of kids in the US writing code, but Irish kids just aren’t doing it. We aim to have tens of thousands of kids around the country writing code. If you can write code, you can develop a prototype and start a business from nothing. The ones at the top will make a lot of money from it.”

Kennelly says he and his co-founders set up the Young Entrepreneur Programme in 2007 to encourage more young Irish people to start their own businesses.

By next May, 3,000 students will have come through the programme.

“We are trying to impart the message that you don’t need to be a genius or a rocket scientist to be an entrepreneur, you can take control of your own destiny from your own place,” he says.

The advice from Bill Liao, co-founder of business social network service Xing, to his young audience was to look for a problem to solve and identify a surprising way to solve it.

“The crucial part is not the idea – you could have 10 good ideas. The hard part is the hard work in the middle. If you put the work in, you can make an idea go global very fast in today’s world and you don’t need a college degree to make a success of it.”

David McCarthy is co-founder of Incidentcontrolroom.com, a cloud-based software application used by large organisations to manage emergency events and crises.

“Businesses do fail but entrepreneurs don’t and people don’t. If your idea or product doesn’t work, drop it and find something else that does work,” he advised.

Founder of triathlon business TriGrandPrix Jim Breen confided that the secret to being an entrepreneur was that you had to understand that there were two creations: “The first creation is the idea and the desire. The second is making s**t happen.”