This week we caught up with the first female president of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. Naomi Climer is also the former head of cloud services at Sony. She has strong opinions on how technology and engineering is going to impact on ALL businesses.

“It's a really interesting time, the whole business dynamic is set to change. I would argue that some of the barriers to entry for SMEs and entrepreneurs are coming down, especially through the cloud; for example you can now rent out an infrastructure.
The balance between big corporates and smaller companies is going to shift. We will see big companies making partnerships with smaller firms as people need to be able to move quickly. It is a different business paradigm, more businesses will be running and generating revenue on a more pay-as-you-go basis rather than spend on big capital investment."

We're also catching up with Nuala Murphy, the founder of LeanIn Belfast. The Belfast Circle of the global organisation has just marked its first anniversary and it now has more than 100 local members. The group is aiming to support and encourage women to achieve their goals through peer support and mentoring. Nuala says “One of the key questions we ask women is, ‘What would you do if you weren't afraid? We need to encourage the female workforce into leadership roles."

Plus local coffee chain Ground Espresso is in growth mode. They have already taken on 80 new staff over the past 12 months, and by the end of this year they'll have 18 outlets. Regional manager Jonny Ross explains how and why they're growing.

Our start-up is Clinishare, it's one of the new companies that are based in the Start Planet accelerator in Belfast. Clinishare is involved in Clinical communications. Essentially they make software that helps link the sharing of health information between labs, hospitals and researchers.