In Sprint 1, the five X_Potential 2026 ventures defined the problem they want to solve. Sprint 2 was designed to answer the question every investor and every corporate board will ask next: is there a real market, and is the idea beginning to take the correct shape?
From 12 to 16 October, Tribe and our ecosystem partners delivered a week built around product-market fit, across Trinity’s Innovation Hub, Dublin Business School and online.
We opened with Thinking Big, a two-part session on market sizing. Each team calculated its Total Addressable, Serviceable Available and Serviceable Obtainable Market, testing whether the opportunity is large enough for ESB to back. Advanced Customer Discovery then pushed teams to define exactly who their customer is, how that customer solves the problem today, their willingness to pay, and where the interfaces with ESB sit.
An IP session gave teams the know-how to make sure they are not infringing anyone else’s intellectual property. A feasibility clinic with ESB experts then tested the practical side of every venture: architecture, data, safety and regulation, and operational fit. Teams left knowing who to speak to, inside ESB and out, to make their ventures technically feasible. Alongside one-to-one team sessions, they also worked on their pre-venture financials, building the numbers that will underpin their case to ESB.
After dedicated pitch preparation, each team presented to ESB’s Innovation Council, followed by a Hot Seat panel with ESB CEO Paddy Hayes. The aim was to put the ventures in front of the people who will decide what comes next, early enough for teams to act on the feedback.
The sprint closed with Experiment and Minimum Viable Product sessions. Teams identified their riskiest assumptions, designed low-fidelity tests and scoped a smallest viable prototype that can run within ESB’s constraints.
Thank you to Javier del Cid of BluSpecs and Dr Becky Sage of Entreprenastics for leading the pitch sessions, to Hugo Grattirola his session on IP, and to Catherine Joyce O’Caollai and the ESB experts who ran the feasibility clinic. A special thank you to Paddy Hayes, CEO of ESB, and the Innovation Council for their time and to Dublin Business School and Trinity’s Innovation Hub for hosting us.
