Now in its 10th year, the Accenture Leaders of Tomorrow competition is firmly established as Ireland's premier platform for student start-ups and entrepreneurship. This year's competition attracted a record 240 applications from students and recent graduates who pitched their ideas and products in pursuit of a top prize of a €5,000 cash injection to their start-up enterprise, a coveted place on the NDRC LaunchPad start-up programme, and a leadership and innovation tour to one of Accenture's Global Innovation Centres.

The competition has changed and evolved quite significantly over the years, according to Eithne Harley, Accenture Leaders of Tomorrow business sponsor. "When we started out 10 years ago the competition was mainly aimed at fostering and nurturing leadership capability and potential. The commitment remains as strong today but the nature of the participants has changed. Originally there was a view that Leaders of Tomorrow was an opportunity for Accenture to engage with graduates and part of prize is internship with Accenture. But in recent years it has evolved into a student start-up programme and that's great. I believe Leaders of Tomorrow plays a role as a bridge between these start-ups and large organisations. We are helping to nurture a start-up ecosystem. The competition is now seen as a bridge to building a start-up rather than a path to employment. And this reflects the fact that students today see starting their own business as a viable career path."

This year's Leaders of Tomorrow winners are sisters Ailbhe and Izzy Keane, co-founders of Izzy Wheels, which offers customised spoke guards for wheelchair users. The business has its origins in the backgrounds of the two founders, according to NCAD graduate Ailbhe. "My own background is in art and design and my younger sister Izzy was born with spina bifida and is paralysed from the waist down. She has been a wheelchair user all her life and has always liked decorating her chair for parties and so on. But there was nothing available on the market to personalise her chair."

That’s quite a disadvantage. She points out that the first thing people tend to notice about a wheelchair user is their chair but that it isn’t in any way reflective of the individual’s personality. She used her self-directed final year project in NCAD to address the problem. “I came up with the concept of a spoke guard. It’s a decorative and stylish flat disk which allows the wheelchair user to match the wheels to their outfit, their mood or an occasion. It turns a medical device into a piece of fashion and self-expression.”

The sisters launched the Izzy Wheels business in the summer of 2016 and have been working full-time in it since January. "We started up with the motto that if you can't stand up, stand out. We got help from Enterprise Ireland including with business mentoring and office space. We had a huge response from chair users and their families and parents worldwide. People started asking us where they could get them straight."

Having two female founders as the 2017 winners is a reflection of other changes that have been taking place within the competition over the years. “This year, 48 per cent of the applications involved teams with female founders,” says Eithne Harley. “While we continue to focus on gender diversity we also want to ensure that the competition resonates with all communities. We want people from disadvantaged backgrounds to see that a technology start-up could be relevant to them so we partnered with the DCU Access programme to address that. We ran a series of workshops with the programmes to encourage applications and got a very good response.”

Izzy Wheels was a clear winner on its merits as a business. Harley says it possesses what she calls the four Ps of success – product, potential, partnership, and people. “They had a great product which they had tested on the market and already had sales. Design was at its core; they were bringing design and fashion into world of wheelchair users. It has great potential and is incredibly scalable and easy to ship through the post. We were very taken with the partnerships they have established with leading artists who are producing designs for the company’s different collections. And the people behind it are just great. Ailbhe and Izzy really are a dynamic duo. They have great business judgment and superb communications skills. They are both very ambitious but wear it lightly. They have great passion as well. As two female co-founders they are great ambassadors for female entrepreneurs and for the start-up community as a whole.”