Announcement: Ruth Kearney Appointed Product & Commercial Director
I'm delighted to announce the appointment of Ruth Kearney as our Product & Commercial Director here at Nightingale HQ. Ruth brings a wealth of commercial and brand experience to the team and will be helping drive our commercial strategy and AI Learn product.
Ruth has held several key roles that will help us on our growth journey: She brings an award winning talent for programme development, and is also hugely experienced in driving growth and sustainability via innovative partnerships and European funding.
She previously established the Innovation School Dublin for the European co-working company Talent Garden, where she led a team to deliver courses in the most in-demand digital skills.
She worked in Trinity College Dublin for 7 years rolling out their innovation & entrepreneurship programmes, partnering closely with UCD and QUB. She spent three years working in Hothouse Technology Transfer & Incubation Centre in TU Dublin, helping founders and faculty spin out and commercialise their research.
Ruth loves firsts and seeing good ideas happen. She set up the first VC in Residence programme in Europe, developed Ireland’s first accredited Returners Programme in Trinity College Dublin, and proudly contributed to the first run of Fast.ai; the most internationally recognised data-science course for coders, originating from The Data Institute at the University of San Francisco (USF).
She looks forward to many more first's and successes in her new role with Nightingale HQ.
FAQs
What is Ruth Kearney's approach to commercial leadership?
Ruth Kearney brings an unusual combination of skills to the role of Product & Commercial Director. Her background spans academic innovation — seven years at Trinity College Dublin rolling out innovation and entrepreneurship programmes — and commercial startup creation, establishing the Innovation School Dublin for Talent Garden, one of Europe’s leading co-working networks.
This combination matters for a company like Nightingale HQ. Building AI products for manufacturers requires both the deep technical and product rigour to create tools that actually work in a production environment, and the commercial skill to understand what manufacturers need, make the case for investment internally, and build the partnerships that accelerate growth.
Ruth’s track record as a “first” person — setting up the first VC in Residence programme in Europe, developing Ireland’s first accredited Returners Programme — reflects the kind of entrepreneurial mindset that fits a company building something genuinely new in an industry that has historically been slow to adopt technology.
Her appointment as CEO of Nightingale HQ — following her initial role as Product & Commercial Director — reflects the confidence the company has in her leadership and her understanding of both the product and the market.