Eoin O’Driscoll (Tyndall National Institute), Frank Smith (CONNECT), Philip O’Brien (Lantern), Kevin Burke (Enterprise Ireland( and Gary Leyden, (NDRC). © Fennell Photography 2017
CONNECT spin-out LANTERN has been announced as the winner of the NDRC’s Pre-Commercialisation Programme conducted this year in partnership with three
Run as a collaborative partnership between CONNECT and IPIC, another Science Foundation Ireland research centre, the aim of the programme was to help researchers actively prepare for commercialisation funding which will support them on the path to pre-seed investment.
LANTERN is led by Dr Alan Davy, CONNECT Investigator at TSSG in Waterford Institute of Technology. Responding to the NDRC win, Alan said:
“We are delighted to receive this recognition for the LANTERN system. The NDRC pre-commercialisation course provided us with the knowledge and skills to develop a very high quality investor pitch deck. We will now progress our ambitions of commercialising the LANTERN system.
“LANTERN allows businesses to understand the right size of network connectivity for them leading to savings of unnecessary and excessive network connectivity costs. This technology has the potential to completely disrupt how businesses deal with network operators”
Over a sixteen-week period, the NDRC team worked with the researchers to identify market challenges and to explore appropriate business model design for their research. The programme also offered the opportunity for the researchers to meet entrepreneurs and expand their networks in the digital startup sector.