Until recently, Laura O’Hare didn’t consider herself an entrepreneur. Just thinking about it made her laugh. As Youth Engagement Manager at the Children’s Cancer Foundation in Belfast, she sees herself as a leader for her young patients, her family and her community. But as she studied community youth work in college and grew professionally in the field, her entrepreneurial spirit never crossed her mind.
Anyway, she found herself at Babson College.
O’Hare University is part of the Ulster University 25@25 Leadership Program for young leaders in Northern Ireland. The program is a group of professionals and Ulster alumni brought together to celebrate the University of Ulster’s 25th anniversary in 2023.th Commemoration of the Good Friday Agreement. The program aims to look to the future of Northern Ireland and support community leaders in a range of leadership projects and social initiatives.
The group has met the last week of every month since September 2023 and visited Babson last month. The group attended his week-long entrepreneurship program with Babson Executive Education, which coincidentally resulted in his Rocket Pitch event being held on Good Friday 2024.
“I was a little intimidated[before coming to Babson]and thought, ‘Can I have this?’ Can this resonate?” O’Hare says. “By the second day, I could see how these practices would work in my environment and provide real-world practical solutions.”
Through courses on Discovering Your Entrepreneurial Identity, Design Thinking, Financial Modeling, Prototyping, and Leadership, O’Hare began to realize that entrepreneurship was about more than just starting a business. For all 25 @ 25 participants, her week at Babson brought emotional and professional progress and presented new ways to learn and think about what could happen in the future.
Bringing an entrepreneurial spirit to the workplace
The Ulster Program’s touchstone is to bring innovation and forward-thinking to Northern Ireland. For Babson, it’s about finding ways to apply his Entrepreneurial Thought & Action® (ET&A™) thinking across industries. Nigel Brannigan, a director at Factor Law, is aiming to legislate AI and language modeling, but has found that risk-averse industries are nervous about new technology.
“Professor Andrew Corbett, our model, taught us about managerial thinking. I took lots of notes, comparing precision thinking to entrepreneurial creative thinking.” says Brannigan. “I’m not a business owner, but I’m a leader in an organization. If I can change their mindset to a more entrepreneurial mindset, I can unlock that part of me in an industry that is completely resistant to change.”
Brannigan, a former lawyer who now works in client relations, joined 25@25 because he loved the job, but he didn’t have a passion for the profession. Taking his coursework helped him understand why he enjoys what he does and how he can enhance it.
“I realized that my ‘why’ was my role to influence others, help them build good careers, bring quality employment opportunities to Northern Ireland and attract investment. ” he says. “I love being able to help others.”
“We never had a tumbleweed in any of our sessions. I knew I was in it the minute a session started. That’s a unique trait we have here at Babson. Yes, and you probably wouldn’t have gotten it at home.” Michael Lynch, Ulster 25@25
Embrace new ways of learning
One of the reasons why sentiment and breakthroughs have become so widespread is the interactive and athletic style of teaching in the Babson classroom. There were no lectures on the schedule.
So students can work around the basics to get to that “why” and think creatively about how an entrepreneurial mindset applies to their lives and careers. For Michael Lynch, who works in sales at indigenous Belfast company Datactics and wants to expand access to integrated education in Northern Ireland, this meant everyone had to be on board.
“We didn’t have any tumbleweeds in any of our sessions,” Lynch says. “I knew I was in it the moment the session started. That’s a unique trait we have here at Babson that I probably wouldn’t have had at home.”
find your inner entrepreneur
Lynch also found her values being challenged in Babson’s classroom, which she called “a good thing.” Having a strategy for dealing with conflict will help him navigate the political landscape of the integrated education movement.
“People can object to what you’re trying to do, but I didn’t have the toolkit to deal with that,” he says. “Integrated education is a highly divisive issue politically, and we have worked with political parties that have traditionally opposed these policy areas… Sessions on values-based partnerships and social entrepreneurship; And Professor Wendy Murphy’s session on conflicts helped solidify my feelings about how I could deal with them in a constructive way.”
For O’Hare, one of the biggest advances has been the change in entrepreneurship and her role in it. “Before I knew it, an entrepreneur just meant someone who started their own business, and we certainly have people like that in our group,” she says.
During the Find Your Inner Entrepreneur session, participants used images to express their entrepreneurial spirit. After that session and others, she feels that being an entrepreneur is no joke for her.
“Every time I see what has come out of it, it shows me the courage and the need to ask for help and not be an island, and to be part of an ecosystem,” she says. “It was about seeing an opportunity and seizing it. Act and then learn. It really shows how elements of entrepreneurial thinking and action can be applied anywhere.”
She looked around at the visualizations of entrepreneurship on the walls of her classroom and realized it was real.
(Photo: Nick Czarnecki)
Categories: Community, Entrepreneurial Leadership
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