Talent Garden and DCU announce groundbreaking Innovation Partnership

Talent Garden and DCU establish first European Coworking-University strategic partnership in Dublin to service the needs of global tech leaders

Europe’s largest co-working network, Talent Garden, will launch a new hub for digital innovation, in partnership with Dublin City University this autumn. This will be the first collaboration of its kind in Europe.

Founded six years ago, Talent Garden is now the largest European co-working and digital innovation network, hosting hundreds of start up companies and working with large corporates, including the likes of BMW, Google and Electrolux, in 23 campuses across eight European countries.

Talent Garden will create a unique Irish facility, based in DCU Alpha innovation campus, which will provide flexible work space for freelancers, tech start-ups and corporate innovation labs, with capacity for 350 people. The co-working building will also feature Talent Garden’s Innovation School, a digital skills ‘bootcamp’ education platform, which will work in partnership with DCU Business School to upskill entrepreneurs and assist corporates on their ‘digital transformation’ journeys. Crucially members of Talent Garden Dublin can also avail of the platform anywhere in the growing Talent Garden network of facilities across 18 cities in Europe. The local partners of Talent Garden Dublin are Luca Ascani, Salvatore Esposito and Niall O’Connor, successful tech entrepreneurs based in Ireland.

Speaking at the announcement, Talent Garden founder and CEO Davide Dattoli said

“As Ireland will soon be the largest English-speaking member of the eurozone and is already the leading HQ for many of the Global Tech companies we work with, Talent Garden are very excited to bring our unique digital innovation and coworking model to Ireland. In DCU, we have found a University partner with the same entrepreneurial DNA and ambition as Talent Garden, which made the selection process easy. The existing DCU Alpha community of digital and IoT innovators is the perfect home for us, while the University partnership will help us to scale our Innovation School offering globally”.

Professor Brian MacCraith, President of DCU, said,  

“This exciting partnership with Talent Garden places DCU firmly at the epicentre of the technological transformation taking place in this country and across Europe.  The worlds of work and learning are rapidly blending together and Talent Garden Dublin offers a unique combination of innovation and education which will help start-ups, SMEs and multinationals, navigate the opportunities created by the burgeoning Internet of Things sector in particular. Through this unique DCU-Talent Garden partnership, Talent Garden Dublin goes way beyond coworking as it is currently understood in Ireland, and into the fields of accredited digital skills training, corporate digital transformation, as well as creating international connectivity for Irish startups looking to scale up in other markets.”

Talent Garden is an international innovation platform, with facilities throughout Europe, which provides spaces for the digital ecosystem to meet, work, learn and collaborate. Digital skills bootcamps delivered through its Innovation School in Dublin, in collaboration with DCU Business School, will focus on areas such as Digital Transformation, Artificial Intelligence, Growth Hacking, Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality, Coding, Blockchain and, in the future, more formal, accredited education offerings delivered in partnership with the University.

Talent Garden has also recently announced expansions into the Nordics through a strategic partnership with Rainmaking based in Copenhagen, which is a global co-operative of entrepreneurs that also runs the world famous Startupbootcamp accelerator programme. Talent Garden has also just announced a new facility in San Francisco, to stand alongside existing locations such as Milan, Barcelona, Vienna and now Dublin. Crucially, this will allow members of Talent Garden Dublin to gain access to multiple similar digital ecosystems across the globe, and avail of cross-subsidised, flexible space in key export markets.

It is anticipated that the Talent Garden Dublin space will appeal both to early stage start-ups and to larger corporate 'innovation labs', who will be attracted by the University-Coworking partnership model, as well as the existing established community of digital and Internet of Things innovators based in DCU Alpha.

Work will begin immediately on the fit-out of the Talent Garden Dublin building, with an expected completion date of September 2018.  The space will provide capacity for 350 desks, the Talent Garden Innovation School, multiple corporate innovation labs, a large event space and an Italian themed café/restaurant.