Ambitious Georgia at innovative event

Georgia Davies (right) from Newbridge Integrated College joined teenagers from 80 schools and colleges across Northern Ireland for the annual Generation Innovation Night of Ambition in Belfast. Georgia was joined by John Knapton from the Northern Ireland Science Park and Rebecca Beattie and Jenny Winder from Liberty I.T at the event in St Georges Market. Picture by Brian Morrison.

At the event more than 200 young people received a special, personal message from The Voice star will.i.am, as they gathered for the ‘Night of Ambition’.

This action packed evening aims to inspire 16-17 year olds to consider a career in the tech and creative industries by getting them “up close and personal” with some of Northern Ireland’s most influential startup entrepreneurs and tech founders. This year, company founders taking part included Kyle Gawley, the man behind event app Get Invited; Colin Williams from Sixteen South Productions; and Ian Scott of video-content tagging company Taggled.

This was no ordinary networking event – the teenagers were teamed up in small groups with these hugely successful mentors in an “Ideas Factory” to come up with innovative products, which they then pitched to the room in just one sentence.

The Generation Innovation event was hosted by BBC Radio 1 DJ Phil Taggart and was supported by the Creative Industries Innovation Fund, Allstate NI, Asidua, Core Systems, Liberty IT, SAP, Total Mobile, Anaeko, Coca Cola, Dow, Queen’s University and Ulster University.

Lorraine McDowell, Director of Operations, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, said; “Generation Innovation is a wonderful and important initiative from NISP CONNECT which gives young people the opportunity to meet and talk to local, successful entrepreneurs and hear their stories of how they turned their innovative ideas into commercial success. The creative, technology and science industries are all vital to the growth of the Northern Ireland economy and I’ve every confidence that this impressive event will have inspired some of our future entrepreneurs.”