Coming from a legal background, Irene fell into the world of entrepreneurship when she signed up to a startup competition by accident and won seed funding for her first venture. Since then, she changed her career path to innovation – firstly through helping government and large organisations adopt innovation as a management consultant, before moving on to helping entrepreneurs and researchers take their projects to the next level at the Canberra Innovation Network. Since then, she has worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs and researchers each year at different stages, including facilitating innovation programs, being the youngest facilitator of the CSIRO ON Program and helping companies scale up. She now has a focus in helping academics and researchers translate their research towards impact in ways that are meaning to the researcher.