ENTREPRENEURIAL THINKING How an MBA Can Set You Up For Your First Start-Up.


Have you ever dreamed of starting your own business? Is there a budding entrepreneur inside just looking for the confidence and skills to break out? Then a quality MBA can be the degree you need to set you up and inspire you.


The winner and finalists of the Association of MBAs annual MBA Entrepreneurial Venture Award all agree that their accredited MBAs helped set them up on their entrepreneurial journey and gave them the tools and the confidence to venture into starting a new business.


The winner of AMBA’s Entrepreneurial Venture Award, Cathal Brady established Ultan Technologies, a Dublin based start-up, which develops software solutions for device and sensor management. He had always dreamed of running his own business after seeing the freedom it gave his father, an independent farmer in Ireland.


Brady says that an MBA is a bit like many of the start-up incubators. “It gives a great overview of several aspects of business life and give lots of in depth knowledge of the more important ones.


The graduate from UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School came from a technical background professionally so says he found the experience he gained from his MBA in accountancy, strategy, business management and marketing invaluable.


Susan Cooper, Kriss Akabusi, Cathal Brady, Carlos Palhares, Sameer Hajee


“The knowledge I gained gave me huge courage when dealing with accountants, lawyers, marketing people and customers. I would not have got this in my working life at that time.”


Initially his MBA helped Brady move into a completely different industry for five years before he then started Ultan Technologies. ”I was far more confident about going for jobs outside of my comfort zone because of what I had learned and achieved in my MBA,” says Brady who moved from software to become business development manager in the retail industry after completing his MBA. This new insight about how people use software products helped him get back into software and spot a


business opportunity that he says he would not otherwise have spotted.


Susan Cooper, a Cass Executive MBA graduate, was a lawyer for a large city firm before undertaking her MBA.


“I got to the point in my career where I was at a bit of a cross roads. I wanted to take stock of what I was doing and make sure that anything I did was going to make me more marketable in the workplace,” she says.


Cooper, who knew from quite early in her career that she wanted to set up her own business says the MBA “gave me a really good insight into the different areas of business and in particular a good overview of the disciplines, which meant that when


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80