Following five years in Australia, Gavin Cooney returned to his home town of Drogheda with a business idea which he knew could revolutionise education examination systems.

"I was in Sydney working on a web based examination programme for the New South Wales Government," explains Gavin. "The way students learn is changing. Increasingly students are given laptops on day one of school, they are educated using technology, and afterwards are handed a pencil and given a three hour written examination. We provide the technology to deliver computer based assessments on a large-scale, as we currently do for 60,000 students across Australia each November.

The eureka moment came when presented with the problem of doing oral language examinations. We went on to build an innovative mobile phone based solution to help the teaching and assessment of spoken language abilities."

Gavin returned to Ireland in 2006 and set about establishing his business, Learnosity, which provides on screen examination systems as well as a ground-breaking mobile language learning platform for government bodies and schools throughout Ireland and Australia.

“I met my business partner, Mark Lynch, whilst still in Australia and he remains there running the company’s technical operations,” says Gavin. “I had always planned to go home and wanted to launch the company from a European base. It was the right decision as on my return I contacted Enterprise Ireland and they steered me in the direction of Transform. The programme has been fundamental in moving Learnosity forward. Every element of it was tremendously helpful to me, particularly the sales training and the investor advice. Initially governments had been our perceived target market, but going through the Transform programme made me realise that the concept could be adapted for individual schools. That realisation has transformed the business model and made it more attractive to investors.”

Early reaction to the innovative systems offered by Learnosity has been so positive that Gavin and Mark will soon be expanding their customer base into the UK and US education markets and plan to patent their technology programmes.