Find new markets and business opportunities for your creative expertise.
This practical course is for digital creative start-ups and entrepreneurs who want to explore how their products, services and skills could meet the needs of businesses in other sectors.
Across three workshops, participants identify where their offer could create value, assess potential opportunities and partners, and develop an initial collaboration proposal with clear next steps. Participants also hear from Skillnet Innovation Exchange about its industry challenge model, through which businesses can apply to respond to real business needs.
Before the course, participants have a one-to-one meeting with the facilitator to discuss their business goals and identify the opportunities you want to explore.
Friday, November 27
9pm – 4pm @ CREW
Creative Business Advisor
Olga Kizina is a creative business advisor and organisational psychologist and with 15 years of experience supporting creative entrepreneurs, startups, and innovation programmes. She helps founders strengthen their leadership, build sustainable businesses, and develop effective teams while staying true to their creative vision.
Through her work with Creative Business Network, she led global programmes, including Creative Business Cup, Foreign Mentor Weekend, and Creative Business Academy, supporting creative businesses across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa in entering new markets and building international partnerships.
Since 2011, Olga has been designing educational programmes for creative entrepreneurs and serving as an expert at investor pitch events, hackathons, and startup competitions. Her hands-on experience and extensive work with founders enable her to tailor her approach to each business, taking into account the founder’s personal goals and strength
By the end of the course, participants will be able to identify the skills, expertise and assets in their business that could address needs in other sectors.
Explore new applications and contexts for creative capabilities, products and services.
Compare potential opportunities and partners, and prioritise those with the strongest business case and practical fit.
Develop and communicate an initial collaboration proposal, with clear next steps.
Cross-sector collaboration can give a creative business new ways to reach customers, apply its expertise and develop revenue. This course helps participants work out where those opportunities may lie and what it would take to pursue them.
The course explores two ways for creative businesses to work with other sectors:
Apply your expertise to another sector’s needs. Use your creative skills to help address a business challenge, independently or alongside other entrepreneurs with complementary expertise.
Take an existing product or service into a new context. Explore how it could be used in another sector and identify organisations that may have a need for it.
The focus is on making a practical business case: what your business can offer, who might benefit, and which opportunities are worth pursuing.
A guest session from Skillnet Innovation Exchange, Ireland’s marketplace for innovation, will explain how its industry challenge model connects organisations with solution providers. Participants will learn how challenges are presented, what organisations look for, and how businesses can apply to respond to relevant opportunities.
By the end of the day, participants will have assessed their business assets, explored potential opportunities and developed an initial collaboration concept or partnership proposal, alongside practical next steps. The course uses individual and small-group work, peer matching, interactive whiteboards and creative problem-solving methods.
Workshop 1: Strengths, Motivation and Direction (1.5 hours)
Participants identify what their business can offer beyond its current market, where those strengths may be useful, and what kind of growth they want to pursue.
Workshop 2: Opportunities, Partners and Ideas (2 hours)
This workshop explores how to identify relevant cross-sector opportunities, understand the needs of potential partners and develop initial ideas for collaboration.
Industry Spotlight: Responding to Real-World Innovation Challenges (1 hour)
In this guest session, Skillnet Innovation Exchange will introduce its role in connecting businesses facing digital transformation challenges with innovative solution providers.
The session will provide a practical link between the opportunity-mapping work completed earlier in the day and the development of a partnership proposition in Workshop 3.
Workshop 3: Develop your Collaboration Proposal (1.5 hours)
Building on the opportunities identified earlier in the day and the guest session from Skillnet Innovation Exchange, participants will:
The course fee is €200.
This course is being offered to the SME at 20% of the market rate (the full programme is valued at €1000) with the remaining 80% supported by Enterprise Ireland Smart Region scheme. In order to avail of this discounted rate, all applicants are asked to confirm that they have the appropriate De Minimis balance to accept the support. More information on De Minimums State Aid can be found here: State Aid | Enterprise Ireland
This course is for digital creative start-ups and entrepreneurs who want to expand the commercial potential of their ideas through collaboration with businesses and organisations from other sectors. It will be particularly relevant to participants who want to:
The closing date for applications to this course is Friday 20 November.
