SPEAKERS

Bill
O’Gorman
Director for Research in the Centre Enterprise Development and Regional Economy (CEDRE)

Professor Bill O’Gorman is Director for Research in the Centre Enterprise Development and Regional Economy (CEDRE). As well as performing his own research and supervising others in the fields of entrepreneurial regions, regional development and entrepreneurship research he also lecturers in entrepreneurship, organisation development (OD), and change management at undergraduate, post graduate and executive levels. Bill is a mentor to a number of new and developing indigenous organisations. Prior to joining academia in 1999, Bill was Managing Director of his own electronics sub-contract business for nine years. Prior to that, he amassed over twenty years experience working in various multinational organisations at senior management and executive levels.

He has strong links with regional and national policy makers and implementers, and with indigenous and multinational organisations in Ireland. He is an advisor on several government programmes and participates in forums examining the development of policy for SMEs, entrepreneurial regions, and entrepreneurship education. He is a director of a number of local and regional enterprise support agencies and a number of micro-enterprises. Bill also set up the National Family Business Centre at University College Cork (UCC). He has also organised and managed several international conferences such as SME Policy Futures; Developing an Entrepreneurial Society in Ireland; Facilitated Networks – The Future for SMEs; Creating a High-Tech, High-Growth Economy; Developing Knowledge-based Competitive Regional Economies; A Practical Methodology for Regional Development: An Experiment in Creating a Collaborative Process; and Networks, Learning and Entrepreneurship. The areas of research he is engaged with include: defining and developing entrepreneurial regions, analysing the direct impact of MNEs on the creation of new ventures in their host regions, creating a framework for the growth of entrepreneurship, and examining the impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial activity. Bill was also the Project Leader for the successful EU Regions of Knowledge funded project CRIPREDE. One of the sustainable legacies from the CRIPREDE project was the creation and development of the Spirit of Enterprise Forum in South East Ireland, a forum involving all of the region’s key stakeholders in entrepreneurship and innovation.

e-mail: wogorman@wit.ie and wogorman@tinet.ie

Mobile: + 353 (0)87 2429537