UCC on target to spin out four companies with ThinkSmart

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE Cork is on course to spin out four companies this year with ThinkSmart Technologies, the latest company to be formed based on research being carried out at the college. Four companies were spun out in 2009.

Brendan Cremen, director of technology transfer at UCC, said the annual figure was unlikely to increase beyond this as the goal was to create strong companies that would attract outside investment.

ThinkSmart, which has licensed technology developed at the Cork Constraint Computing Centre (4C) in UCC, has the potential to create 30 new jobs over the next four years, according to its chief executive Brendan O’Brien.

Dr O’Brien has a background in multinational companies such as Accenture, IBM and Kerry. It has teamed up with James Little, a lead researcher at 4C, to co-found the new company. UCC has invested the intellectual property developed at 4C for a stake in ThinkSmart, while Dr O’Brien said funding was being provided by the founders and through company cash-flow.

ThinkSmart has already signed up a Fortune 500 global financial services company as a customer. It has developed optimisation technology which allows large companies to make the best use of their limited resources.

It has entered into a partnership with the National Digital Research Centre to apply the technology to a tool which would help organisations invest in the most suitable environmentally friendly systems.

Dr O’Brien said the company would initially target the US as the market for optimisation software was more developed there. He described the technology as an “add- on to existing systems, which will bring optimisation to the masses”.

He looked at a number of research projects in UCC before settling on the technology at 4C to form a new company. “I’m betting at least five years of my life on this so I wanted to make sure it was something I believed in,” he said.

Mr Cremen said that UCC had seen a significant increase in entrepreneurs proactively contacting the university to inquire about the possibility of creating spin-outs since the start of the recession.