Entering Ireland’s Best Young Entrepreneur (IBYE) awards helped to boost Fiona Edwards Murphy’s business even though she did not win the top prize. Indeed, she had no business at the time.
Edwards Murphy was a national finalist in the 2016 IBYE competition, which is run by Ireland’s 31 local enterprise offices. She won the regional round for Cork north and west in the category of best business idea.
Her path to entrepreneurship was circuitous. Edwards Murphy studied electrical and electronic engineering at University College Cork, and sensor applications for the health of honeybees for her PhD.
“I knew nothing about bees, but in 2013 the bee industry was in crisis with all sorts of news articles being written about things like ‘colony collapse disorder’,” she