A guitar and mandola player himself, Philip was heavily involved in the Music Business in the late 1970´s/early 1980´s. In 1977 he co-founded and organised the Boys of Ballisodare Festival which was Ireland´s first 3-day weekend music festival. The festival ran successfully for 6 years and attracted audiences of 20,000 at its peak. He moved to the tech industry in the 80’s and over the next 20 years held international senior executive roles with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) since acquired by Hewlett Packard, Visio Corporation which was acquired by Microsoft and Orbiscom which was acquired by MasterCard.
Philip then served as CEO & Board member of the Digital Hub Development Agency from 2002-2013. Under his leadership the Hub developed from a brown field site in the Liberties to a campus of eight new buildings housing 100 companies – and it is now the largest cluster of digital media, creative and tech companies in Ireland.
Philip holds a number of other Board memberships: I.NY Festival which celebrates the connections between Ireland and New York ‘one story at a time’, SligoMusicFest Ltd., (Chair 2005 – 2009) which runs the critically acclaimed annual Sligo Live Festival, Dublin Simon Community (Chair from 2004 – 2007), and LERO the Irish Software Research Centre at University of Limerick.
He holds an MSc. (Mgt.) from Trinity College, Dublin, is a graduate of Stanford University´s advanced executive programme and is a member of both the Marketing Institute of Ireland (MMII) and The Institute of Directors (IoD).
