Tony Ryan to set up €10m seed fund for start-ups

The entrepreneur and Ryanair founder Dr Tony Ryan plans to set up a new €10 million seed fund for entrepreneurs who want to establish new businesses.

Dr Ryan was speaking yesterday at the official opening of the Tony Ryan Academy for Entrepreneurship at CityWest, which is housed in a building owned by DCU.

Dr Ryan and his family have already donated €7 million to the academy, but yesterday it emerged another €10 million is to be spent on projects developed by students enrolled at the academy.

Dr Ryan said several high-profile business figures, including Dermot Desmond, David Bonderman, Seán Fitzpatrick, Denis O'Brien, Ken Rohan and Michael O'Leary were likely to help with the endeavour. He did not say whether they would be directly contributing finance.

Dr Ryan said entrepreneurs enrolled in the academy "will not be constrained if they have a practical plan". He said he hoped venture capitalists and bankers would also get involved in the fund.

The new facility will mainly offer short intense programmes and accepts its first students within weeks. Later on it may offer an MBA programme in association with DCU, said the academy's chief executive Ann Horan yesterday. The academy is housed in an environmentally friendly modern building which boasts two "pod" shaped lecture theatres covered with titanium panels.

The president of DCU, Ferdinand von Prondzynski, said the academy would have a profound influence on Irish entrepreneurship. "It will foster the kind of entrepreneurship that the country needs to meet the challenges of the future and continue Ireland's economic success."

For his part Dr Ryan said the concept for his academy was modelled on MIT in Boston which had been extraordinarily successful. Dr Ryan said a lot of people, including himself, believed you could not teach entrepreneurship, but now he had a different view.

"Entrepreneurship is about networking, it's about providing great lectures, meeting leaders, making contacts, bringing in chief executives and networking like crazy," he said. "I see this as a boot camp, a very aggressive business school where entrepreneurs can meet, who want to be challenged and who will be challenged".

He said there would be no educational barriers to entry once candidates showed a desire to be entrepreneurs.

A major element of the new academy will be social entrepreneurship. People in the not-for-profit sector will be encouraged to take courses at the academy, often alongside people from the business world.

The new academy will also be home to two outside bodies. The first of these is the Entrepreneurs' Organisation, which is a global community that facilitates links between entrepreneurs.

Also based at the centre will be the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, which works with children from disadvantaged backgrounds and tries to unlock their entrepreneurial talents.