It was intriguing to witness the likes of former-agronomist-now-state Chief Entrepreneur, Mark Sowerby; a Cloncurry railway man’s son-turned-shark, Steve Baxter; an entrepreneur award winner at the Telstra QLD Business Women’s Awards, Patrice Carpenter; and Charters Towers boy who sold his company to Twitter, Stephen Phillips – all on stage at the Goondiwindi Community Centre recently.
Intriguing not just because of their common rural backgrounds – they created highly successful careers using their wits and resilience.
Nor was it the easily relatable tales of humble beginnings with “just like you” narratives, reminding us that they too were once new at this “start-up” thing.
The trendiest corporate accessory you can have at the moment is a start-up ecosystem proudly shining around your company décolletage.
Qantas just launched one, the state government is making it almost derigueur in launching them and the PM trademarked the word innovation a whole financial year ago – was that what the Gartner hype cycle classifies as “the peak of inflated expectations”?
Intriguing because here was a good-sized country town crowd intently watching a stage that was not full of Broncos or locally-born Wallabies holding a World Cup; no these were highly original, thoughtful and successful people that would be pretty easily missed in the crowd at the Pluck-a-Duck B&S.
Intriguing because after the stars had flown on, the community stayed behind and discussed together about what they could do as a community, together, in this space. That actually wasn’t intriguing – that was heartening.
Not many of us are going to develop a web site called “wearehunted.com” and find ourselves working in some San Francisco company that has a little blue bird for its logo.
That’s not the point. For regional innovation to work, the approach must be just like Qantas, who are using their innovator space to solve operational problems they face every day.
Don’t get me wrong, collaboration is a hard word to deliver on, but if the focus remains on finding solutions to the problems regional communities face, like woeful internet connectivity, collaboration will always have a place.
On May 18, Food Leaders Australia will continue the innovation focus with the 400M Agtech investment forum conference in Toowoomba, hosting 12 pitches to address, and work to solve, agriculture problems. Find out more at 400Mforum.com.au.
- Ben Lyons, CEO Food Leaders Australia
