The Era of the Entrepreneur Entrepreneurs are transforming our world.
Introduction We ride in cabs and check into hotel rooms owned by ordinary people, a cool chip on our wrist tracks our health, our next loan might come from peers rather than a bank, everything from high fashion to groceries arrives at our door step, we video call across the planet for free and stay in constant social media contact with our friends. 3D printers are creating bones and organs, mobile phones are providing banking to farmers in remote parts of Africa and micro loans are transforming the lives of people across the planet. We already live in the era of the entrepreneur are you ready to join it? Entrepreneurs are as diverse as the ideas and enterprises they are creating. It is not a unique talent but a learnable process and teachable set of skills. Anyone ready to back themselves, take a few risks and combine rigor with creativity can join the exciting world of start-ups. Entrepreneurs will increasingly define the economies of the world. With a global market for low cost labour, ever falling trade barriers, low cost and ubiquitous mobile information technology, boundless data and cheap capital, traditional businesses will come under ever greater pressure and threat of disruption. The Wade Institute has been founded to create and empower the next generation of audacious entrepreneurs who want to create the new enterprises of our economies. The Institute will be home to the University of Melbourne s new Master of Entrepreneurship the MBA for the Entrepreneurial age a gateway to the entrepreneurial ecology of the City and University.
Entrepreneurship Matters Entrepreneurs are creating tremendous value. If the combined revenue of companies created by MIT and Stanford alumni (who together have founded 65,700 new ventures) were a single country, it would have the fifth largest GDP in the world. Israel, with a population of 7.8 million people, has more companies listed on the NASDAQ than all of Europe combined.
Entrepreneurship Matters Australia needs a new generation of entrepreneurs. While Australia has lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs, tech start-ups alone could create 540,000 new jobs by 2030. Australia is the 3rd easiest place in the world to start a business. We have the ideas with twice the citable academic papers per capita than the US. Melbourne has one of the largest research and university clusters in the world. We need 1,000s of new entrepreneurs to make this happen.
Melbourne: a rising star of entrepreneurial cities Melbourne is a great place to become an entrepreneur. The city is rapidly becoming Australia s most important entrepreneurial hub: Melbourne is an up-and-coming startup ecosystem that ranks high in terms of adopting new trends within the start-up world. Melbourne has distinct advantages that are driving its rapid rise. Abundant Ideas and Discoveries Melbourne s extraordinary education and investigative ecosystem that provides continuous supply of exciting new discoveries and ideas. With eight universities teaching more than 327,000 students, 13 major independent medical research institutes, 10 teaching hospitals, labs of the Defense Science and Technology Organisation, the Cynatron and a range of CSIRO divisions there are only a few other cities in the world with a similar density of universities, labs and researchers. Test Markets and Leading Sectors Melbourne is a city primed for testing new ideas and businesses. With its culture of early adoption of technology and new services, it is a valuable test market for new products globally. This, together with its research capabilities, has seen Melbourne foster dynamic biotechnology, medical technology, engineering and ICT sectors over the last three decades. The local ICT industry comprises over 8,000 companies with around $30bn of revenue in 2014; the life sciences and medtech industry has over 1,000 companies. More than 40% of the ASX listed life science companies reside in Melbourne: Melbourne is clearly the epicenter of Australia s biotech industry.
Incubators, Accelerators and Co-Working Spaces Vibrant inner Melbourne is home to a range of incubators, accelerators and entrepreneurial co-working spaces, including the Melbourne Accelerator Program (MAP), York Butter Factory, Queens Collective, inspire9, AngelCube and HUBMelbourne. Together they are creating a highly connected network of entrepreneurs sharing spaces, ideas and networks. Investors Melbourne s start-ups are supported by a growing network of Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists drawn to the market by ever deepening investment opportunities. This is a city rising to be one of the next great hubs of entrepreneurship around the world. Advisors Start-up and early stage businesses also need excellent professional services ranging from intellectual property and governance advice, through to strategies for their financial structure. Melbourne has long been home to leading professional service firms and a network of advisors, which start-ups can draw upon. Networks The strong networks generated by all this activity are nurtured by a range of organisations, public and private, committed to the success of entrepreneurship. Indeed, you can sense the connectivity and momentum of the start-up sector anytime you check into the oversubscribed sessions which run regularly across the city.
The University of Melbourne: turning great ideas into great enterprises Universities have a vital role to play in creating great entrepreneurial eco-systems. Universities such as Stanford and MIT in the US, Cambridge and Imperial College in the United Kingdom and Technion in Israel, to name just a few, are at the core of thriving start-up systems. The University of Melbourne aspires to be in the same league. It is already Australia s leading research intensive university producing an extraordinary stream of exciting ideas in every field: new drugs for Malaria, radar on a silicon chip, fin tech innovations and social sector start-ups. It is now creating a powerful eco-system to turn the abundant ideas of talented people and brilliant research into new dynamic businesses and social enterprises. If you are interested in being an entrepreneur or supporting the growth of entrepreneurs and start-ups there is no better place to be. Supporting generations of entrepreneurs The world has shifted. People don t just want to enter professions or work for established companies, they want to start businesses. Already around one third of university students say starting a business is a career aspiration. The University has multiple pathways to equip people to chase their passions and become successful entrepreneurs.
Masters: For those who want to embark on a career as an entrepreneur, whether as a founder or key player in a start-up, there is the Master of Entrepreneurship degree. Subjects: For those interested in how entrepreneurship fits with their wider careers there are entrepreneurship subjects in a wide range of undergraduate and graduate degrees. We close the gap between ideas and enterprise by creating talented entrepreneurs. Short-courses: For others who have a great idea that they want to get going on right away the Melbourne Accelerator Program and Wade Institute are offering a range of short courses to introduce people to the core process of starting a business. Turning ideas into enterprises Wherever a great idea comes from, there is path to market for it at the University of Melbourne. At the core of this process is the Melbourne Accelerator Program (MAP). The Accelerator provides an opportunity for teams with a great business idea to pitch for a place in the Accelerator is where they will get the initial funding and the support to build their business. The Accelerator is already developing a great reputation for the business it has helped kick-off. MAP has spaces in its program for people graduating from the Master of Entrepreneurship at the Wade Institute. Those Masters students can also access places in other hubs, accelerators and co-working spaces that the Institute partners with. Where ideas emerge in major university research programs, the University s commercialisation arm is there to support them. In all the short-course programs, which might be enough to get an idea moving toward becoming enterprises, assistance is available through the Wade Institute or MAP to connect them to the support they need.
something you can learn It is often said that people are just born entrepreneurs and it is not something that can be taught. Of course there are some personal qualities that are important if you are going to be an entrepreneur. If you are going to create something new and untried then it is going to be important to have: curiosity, persistence, a willingness to take risks, flexibility and resilience. But many people have these qualities. The rest can be taught, even creativity. What we teach are all those things that entrepreneurs say are the things I wish I had known. What we are doing is changing the success rate. People can always have a go but just having a go has a very high failure rate, somewhere over 95%. Creating a successful new business is a disciplined process that combines both rigour and creativity. Rigour When it comes to rigour our preferred approach brings together the closely related schools of Lean Start-Ups and Design Thinking. These schools of thought provide a rich set of very practical tools that have proven themselves in countless applications. They are all eminently teachable. These tools help people build businesses based on a deep understanding of their customers and provide real discipline around creating business models. Most importantly, they measure progress rigorously and encourage rapid, if necessary, fundamental changes to the business plan in the case where initial ideas are not succeeding. How you go on to build a sound organisation with good governance is well understood, but too often missed by those who haven t been shown how. Creativity Rigour also needs its entrepreneurial twin-creativity. Entrepreneurs are finding solutions others have missed and that takes imagination and innovation. We can all expand our creative skills especially when we recognise that creativity is not a gift but practice and a habit of mind. We can teach people to use analogies and metaphors to look at a problem in a fresh way, we can help people learn how to get novel insight by viewing a situation perspective of a customer or a user and we can train people to use different frames of reference to analyse a problem. Leadership and Management Entrepreneurs are leaders. A good learning environment will enable them to gain insights into themselves and how they work with others. With such insights and good coaching, leaders can become far more effective. But entrepreneurs are also managers because no matter how good a business plan is, if it isn t well executed it won t succeed. These are skills that are readily taught.
The Master of Entrepreneurship This is the course for anybody who ever had a great idea and wanted to do something with it. The Master of Entrepreneurship will provide students with the knowledge and skills they need to develop and launch new innovative enterprises. The course will help students to successfully commercialise products and services, and to help them to launch their first business or build the strength of their future businesses. This is a strategic, industry leading program for anybody who wants to build a career in the exciting and rapidly exploding world of start-ups. Students will learn how to design new products and services using the latest Lean Start-Up methodology and Design Thinking. They will learn about how to create an organisation the market needs, how to get funding for it and finally, how to grow that enterprise. Equip yourself with finance, marketing and dynamic skills that a successful entrepreneur needs. This is a strategic, industry leading program for anybody who wants to build a career in the exciting and rapidly exploding world of start-ups. The Master of Entrepreneurship is about learning by doing in a small cohort through highly practical and rigorous coursework. In the course of the year, students will prototype new products and services, develop, launch and run a pop-up business and develop their own start-up business idea to pitch for real venture capital funding. Along the way, students will meet a wide range of entrepreneurs who will mentor them and offer experience inside existing start-ups. We will introduce them to a network of funders, accelerators, hubs and advisors and propel the cohort into the world of networking and industry insiders. They will be immersed in a program enriched with guest presentations, which will introduce them to a wide range of people who they will need to hear from and get to know. Learn from their experience and through their teachings to find their own definition of success. The internship program to get handson experience.
THE PROGRAM 01 The Entrepreneurial Process and Being an Entrepreneur (February 2016) The program Start with an overview of the whole entrepreneurial process, so as the year goes on it will be clear how everything fits together. Begin the year long-course and learn the skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur. Subjects Foundations of Entrepreneurship 1 The Entrepreneur Within 02 Creating Value (Semester 1) The program Design a product or service that people will truly value Subjects Design Thinking Design a business model that will turn the product or service people value into a sustainably profitable business Learn the practical business acumen skills all entrepreneurs need Creating a Successful Business Model Business Acumen for Entrepreneurs Creating and running a pop-up business The Garage Project
THE PROGRAM 03 Managing Growth (Semester 2) The program Learn the basics needed, from creating the company registration to basic human resources management Subjects Creating the Organisation You will learn how to grow different types of successful businesses, from getting funding, to going global to managing regulatory issues Managing Growth and Pathways to Market 04 Getting Going (Winter intensive and continues across the semester) The program The program culminates in developing a fully-fledged start-up proposal and pitching it for real funding Subjects Creating Your Own Enterprise In each semester there is an elective unit so students can focus on content of special interest and apply that to their own entrepreneurial interests, from social entrepreneurship through to exploiting big data.
A Space to Innovate When you are learning to create, make and innovate you want to be in a space that invites you to create new things from the moment you walk in. The Wade Institute building will do just that. Rather than walk into a building full of classrooms and offices, students will enter a space with a kit of parts, from walls and screens to different desk parts and lights. This main studio workshop is a white canvas with colourful parts ready to become whatever students and staff need them to be from open plan classroom to office, customer lab or forum to pitch their business idea. Designed by architects Lovell Chen, industrial designer Joe Iacono and leading Australian structural engineer Phil Gardner from Irwinconsult, the structural system uses a metal lattice to support the building rather than heavy concrete piers. This lattice structure will enable the building to have green walls and to virtually disappear into its beautiful garden setting. Through the Institute s design, construction and relationship with the environment, this building will stimulate and inspire the creativity of a new generation of entrepreneurs.
Peter Wade Why I gave my gift Behind the Wade Institute for Entrepreneurship is the very successful, yet low-profile, entrepreneur and Ormond alumnus, Peter Wade. Originally from Geelong, Peter knows first-hand the changes that are sweeping though the Australian economy. He has watched the decline of manufacturing and heavy industry in and around his hometown of Geelong, which has reinvented itself several times to meet the challenges it has faced. Peter observes, We need to create jobs and opportunities to replace those being lost. Traditional manufacturing is disappearing. Even service jobs, whether they are in call centres or law and accounting firms, are going offshore. Technology is disrupting existing business from media firms to retailers. Even those who work for others will need to be more entrepreneurial and innovative to help create Australia s future. We are a smart nation but still too few of our great ideas are generating the future of our economy. Peter goes on to say, I have been involved in supporting education for a while now and it has given me enormous faith in the extraordinary talent of young Australians. Peter is keen to see budding entrepreneurs equipped with the skills they need to take that talent and use it to create value, opportunities and jobs for Australia s future.
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