Turning dreams into jobs
alister.thomson@news.com.au Bond has invested $2.5 million in a coworking space with commercialisation and data centres.
Industry heavy-hitters, including Virgin Australia director David Baxby and Queensland chief entrepreneur and Blue Sky Alternative Investments founder Mark Sowerby, have joined a Transformer advisory circle.
Vice-chancellor Professor Tim Brailsford said the program was “transformational” and an ideal fit for the university’s culture.
“Bond University was founded on entrepreneurial thinking so innovation is really at the core of everything we do – it is in our DNA,” he said. “Transformer is not a traditional business incubator or accelerator program.
“Our focus is on investing and developing our students rather than commercialising their business concepts.”
Mr Baxby, a former Bond University student, said the program’s strength was its collaborative nature, drawing students from a variety of courses to work on ideas.
“It is not like someone studying at the law school should know there is a student from the medical school that could help with a problem,” he said. “They can’t solve it on their own. It is about bringing students together in a structure that helps them solve problems.”
Mr Baxby said accelerator programs were often judged by the number of big businesses that were created.
However, he said the small businesses launched were important too.
“It is two colleagues that come together and solve a niche problem and they might have only 10 employees but for them it is their livelihood. Let us hope we get a few big ones but if we can get five or 10 kids to launch businesses then it will be a great outcome,” he said.
Third-year law and commerce student Christian Whitfield was the first student to sign up. Mr Whitfield wants to use Transformer to trial an idea for a new overseas budget airline.
“A book sparked the idea for the airline, which I want to bring to countries in emerging economies that haven’t had much attention from airlines,” he said.