How to use buy-in to build strong and productive teams

Welcome to the age of buy-in. Any company serious about keeping pace with a market that’s evolving faster than ever must create an environment where ideas can truly thrive. They must let go of slow and cumbersome models of leadership born in the industrial age. Managers must loosen the reins and ask people to think for themselves, generate ideas and find ways of bringing them to life, without waiting for someone higher up to tell them what to do.

This means exiting the world of leading by decree (top-down managing) and entering the world of ‘win me’ (using a collaborative approach), where people collaborate across teams and influence without authority.

Aside from its strategic importance, the emphasis on generating buy-in is something employees expect. Companies are asking more than ever of their people: more of their creative genius, more hours, more ownership, more initiative, more flexibility, more tolerance of ambiguity, change and chaos. In return, employees in this creative economy need and expect more – and that doesn’t just mean money. It means more autonomy and more freedom.

People who give more expect to have a voice. They expect to be heard and to be able to shape decisions about their work. They expect leaders to earn their support, not take it as a given. We want to work in organisations that match our own values; we want to be part of, and to initiate, company projects and initiatives.

We’re seeing a generation of people who are making decisions about where to work based on how their personal values map to company values.

David Noël, who heads internal communications at audio sharing service SoundCloud, sums it up perfectly: “We’re seeing a generation of people who are making decisions about where to work based on how their personal values map to company values. Today, more than twice as many employees are motivated by work passion than career ambition.”

It’s one thing to talk about the importance of getting people’s buy-in; it’s another to achieve it. In my own work, I regularly come across managers who are struggling to let go and give their team members the space to experiment, create and even (gasp!) fail. Often, these practices are at odds with the diet of management on which they themselves have been raised. It makes them feel uncomfortable. It seems chaotic and risky. At the same time, managers still need to manage, so how do they do that without managing by decree?

Some teams also struggle to embrace the degree of autonomy and entrepreneurship that is offered to them. Suddenly faced with a multitude of people they need to work with, and without a clear instruction manual from management, their mindset and skills are put to the test.

This is where teams and organisations can easily fall over: by failing to create a culture where people are able to influence and lead others, even when they’re not in a position of authority, and by failing to equip them with the skills to do so.

Well, there’s a new kind of power in town. It’s the power that comes to those who are able to cut through all of these challenges by engaging others and building buy-in. This is a skill that comes more naturally to some than others, but the good news is: it can be learned.

The gentle art of buy-in

To master the gentle art of buy-in you need a blend of the right skills, attributes and mindset. I use the term ‘gentle art’ because it requires patience, empathy and careful thinking. You need to know when to yield control in order to maintain it. You need a healthy dose of emotional intelligence. You need to be willing to go slow in order to go fast.

But even the best ideas in the world can languish in the hands of someone who doesn’t know how to engage and influence others – or worse, someone who simply puts people off.

Equally, buy-in shouldn’t equate to paralysis. Many of us have worked in a team or a company where there was so much consultation and committee-style decision-making that nothing ever happened. If that’s the case, your relationship with the idea of building buy-in might be a tad strained.

You need to know when buy-in is a function of gentle persuasion and dialogue, and when it’s a function of getting your train moving and asking others to jump on board.

The culture you’ve grown up in has a big part to play in whether you relate more to the ‘decree’ or ‘win me’ approach. For example, certain countries operate to a very formal, hierarchical norm, while others have a far more informal, egalitarian norm. Cultural norms can also come from your family upbringing, or your previous workplaces. All will shape your assumptions about the roles of authority and autonomy in the workplace.

Jim Collins: What the best leaders have in common

Jim Collins, leadership expert and author of the bestselling book Good to Great, is surprised by the findings of his latest research into what makes great companies successful, a topic he has studied for 25 years.

“To me it’s the most delightful bit of new research that we’ve done,” he says, joie de vivre crackling down the line from Boulder Colorado. That Collins and his long-time collaborator Morten Hansen found that luck does not distinguish the winners from the “others” was a huge surprise for him. “Our most successful leaders credit luck as helping them along the way. But luck itself doesn’t distinguish, it’s what you do with it. The big swing variable is return on luck. When luck hits you, whether it’s good or bad, it’s how the best leaders recognise it and are able to pivot on it in such a way that they get more out of that luck than anyone else would.”

CLIMBING MOUNTAINS

Collins is now “puzzling on this delicious idea” and wants to know the “alchemy of the ability to get a higher return on luck”. He’s also getting ready to head to this country for a series of presentations in Sydney and Melbourne and the long-time climber also wants “to test his hands on some Australian rock”. He sees close parallels with the approach he brings to his research and the vertiginous world of rock climbing – where he has scaled frankly scary edifices such as the 914-metre south face of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. The trick is to approach each challenge as if for the very first time. He declares: “I love to be a beginner and be pushed to expand my capabilities. The research journey has never been about finding what we expected to find. It was being open-minded and childlike about what the data would show.

The research journey has never been about finding what we expected to find

“In rock climbing I like picking the kind of climbs I’m not good at. I’ve been climbing for over 40 years, but every year or two I identify my two or three deficiencies as a climber. If I just did the sorts of climbing that suits me well, well that’s relatively dull.” Recently he’s been practising “off-widths”, a type of hold that’s apparently horrifying for a climber. “It’s a crack that is a really bad size – not big enough to get inside of, but it’s not small enough to wedge your hand in – it’s an in-between space. You feel like a victim of drowning when you try to climb up one of these spaces,” he adds quite gleefully.

To be able to lay down the foundations of mastering this hold Collins will have to go back to climbing basics. “There’s so much pressure, especially in the world that I walk, to always be an expert and I kind of like being a beginner and I hope I have that until the day I die.”

A GOOD LEADER ASKS QUESTIONS

Collins reads widely outside the business discipline and takes courses in esoteric subjects and believes managers can benefit from letting the outside in. “If you are a manager why not understand the history of China or biochemistry, you have the joy of learning which never ends.” Another tip a former Stanford professor gave him is to “rather than try and be interesting, be interested in others”. “It was a life-changing moment, you never know who you might be sitting next to at a dinner party or on an aeroplane, discover their passion or their inner life or specialist field.

“One of the things we learned way back in Good to Great was that these great leaders had a somewhat Socratic style. They were humble enough to know that they may not have the answers, but what they were really good at was asking the questions,” says Collins, who also rates detachment as a quality of a great leader.

“I think people confuse empowerment with detachment. The best executives that I’ve studied really know the details of what their people are doing. That doesn’t mean they are directing them but they are hyper aware because they are really curious. That doesn’t mean they jump in and are micro managers, it means they are micro aware.” He cites a former student’s experience of being a product manager at Microsoft in the early 1990s. He told Collins that when he was putting the packaging information on Windows 95 together, the person most interested in the process was Bill Gates. “In the early 1990s Microsoft was already a juggernaut and he was really engaged in this particular detail. He wasn’t telling, he was asking. If he could do that while running Microsoft then we could all do that,” he says.

 

PASSION AND DETERMINATION

Celebrity CEOs is another hot button issue for Collins. He’s adamant that his research shows no correlation between personality and leadership. “People confuse charisma and leadership. Being charismatic or not is as relevant as having blonde hair or brown hair. It’s about whether you are fundamentally ambitious for the company and willing to make the hard decisions. You have an incredible passion and determination for an organisation’s long-term role in the world. And it’s about your ability to get people to do what must be done rather than it being about you.”

But then what about the late and mercurial Steve Jobs, who was considered the messiah by Apple fanatics worldwide? “Steve Jobs was dedicated to doing everything he could to make Apple an enduringly great company. If he was a genius with 1000 helpers how do you explain Tim Cook or the designers or software writers? He is someone whose great successes were pretty boring – it was about getting the right people in to build the systems and organise them into an incredible culture. He was focused on building a great company that would last beyond him. And towards the end he was racing against the clock to do that.”

Collins believes that middle managers in not-so-great-companies can even make a difference with this attitude. He says take a leaf out of the military and focus on your “unit and troops”. “If you make it a pocket of greatness you are more likely to die of indigestion of too much opportunity for responsibility, than starvation for too little. Even if you don’t, fundamentally you owe it to your people to create a great place to work, if you manage six or 20 people, it doesn’t matter.”

JIM COLLINS’ LEADERSHIP GLOSSARY

Level 5 Leaders:

Level 5 is about really relentless extreme ambition but it’s channelled outside yourself. That’s the essence of level 5 – it’s ambition channelled into something that’s bigger and more enduring than you are – that often shows up in more self-effacing people but it doesn’t have to.

The bus:

To illustrate how people-smart leaders work, Collins uses the analogy of the bus driver. He says most assume that these “bus drivers” start the journey by announcing to the passengers where they are going, by setting a new direction or articulating a fresh corporate vision. Not so. Great leaders start not from “where” but with “who”. “They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus and the right people in the right seats. And they stick with that discipline – first the people, then the direction – no matter how dire the circumstances.”

Hedgehogs:

“What being a hedgehog means is that you are doing something so distinctive and with sheer excellence that if your company disappeared it would leave a hole that could not be easily filled by any other institution. In an uncertain global business environment being a hedgehog is even more important not less. Push yourself to the next big thing rather than worrying about what others might do. You still need to be hyper vigilant about outside market forces and changing consumer tastes, but to truly be a great hedgehog, you are not asking ‘what’s the next big thing’, you are asking ‘what’s the next big thing we are going to do?’”

Gender diversity means nothing without inclusion

Having a quota for women and minorities isn’t inclusion if you treat them as outsiders.

By Jane Caro
Jane Caro is an advocate of inclusion.

Many years ago I appeared on a TV panel show. There were usually four men and a chick on the panel – sometimes me, sometimes someone else. We used to joke among ourselves about rotating in the mandatory “chick’s spot”. I’d brought up the lack of female panellists with the producers on occasion and, one day, for the first time, I was sharing the desk with two men (plus the male host) and another woman. The producers had paid attention!

But I noticed as we sat waiting for filming to start, the three men had a very blokey conversation about footy. Me and my fellow female panellist sat silently as they talked over our heads. Did we feel included? No, we did not.

There used to be an annual advertising awards event dedicated to the year’s best newspaper ads. It was run over a weekend as part of a conference, and I was a regular on the panel. It was a lot of fun, mostly, but there was always tension between the women delegates and the men. Women were often the butt of the jokes. It was always made clear to me that we were there on sufferance, rather than our merits, even if we sometimes won awards. I noticed the same barely disguised aggression towards the few openly gay men in the industry, too.

The last year I ever attended, one of the very few female creative directors in the advertising business (there remain almost none) made a very moving speech about her day and how hard it would be to fit in having children with her incredibly demanding job. She was acknowledging that unlike her male counterparts, she had to choose between career and family.

With some honourable exceptions, the male delegates reacted to her speech with hostility. Having children was “a lifestyle choice” and entirely a woman’s problem, we were told. The fact that many of the men holding this view were frantically trying to bed as many pretty young creatives as possible, while they had a wife at home minding the kids, escaped them. For self-declared smart men, they missed a lot.

“Being included and feeling included are two quite separate things.”

I liked her speech but, as the mother of two, I wanted to let some of the young women delegates know that it was possible to combine a successful career in advertising and a family. I got up and said so, citing my own career and those of a few of the other women in the room.

I was cut short. “I don’t think we would say you’d had a successful career, Jane,” opined one of the men on the panel – a man, I might add, with far less of a track record than me. (Oh, for the towering confidence of a mediocre white man.)

After 35 successful (by any measure) years in my industry, did I feel included? No, I did not.

Being included and feeling included are two quite separate things. I suspect that’s why the majority of new businesses are started by women. Sooner or later we get the message we are not wanted.

Inclusion is not about grudgingly allowing a few chicks and/or Indigenous/Muslim/Asian/LGBTQI/people of colour a seat on the panel, the management committee or the board. It’s not about driving numbers, although that matters. You cannot feel included if you are not actually wanted.

Inclusion matters because those of us who are outsiders (basically anyone who isn’t white, male, Christian, under 60 and, probably, with a private school education) have different views of the world. That richness of diverse views and experiences matters. We’ve all heard the stats on how diversity in management increases a business’s profitability and even share prices.

Indeed, one of the reasons I won awards in advertising creative was because my gender and feminism gave me a different way of looking at things. I saw the world in a way the majority of blokes didn’t see it. My perspective wasn’t better or worse – it was different.

We need difference. It makes life more fun and interesting and it makes businesses better at their business. We just need to make a little effort to make the different feel, well, less different.

Jane Caro runs her own communications consultancy. She worked in the advertising industry for 30 years and is now an author, journalist, lecturer and media commentator. Follow her on Twitter: @janecaro.

Why lying is rife in the workplace and how to stop it

Even experts can fall for a lie. Leslie John is the last person you’d expect to have been duped. The Harvard Business School professor teaches negotiation tactics for dealing with liars, so she was blindsided when she fell for the oldest trick in the book. She found herself in a six-month relationship with a man who, unknown to her, was married. “To be fair, it was a long-distance relationship,” she explains on the phone from Boston.

John had been “catfished” – fallen prey to a person who uses technology to construct a false identity.

Some liars are so convincing that even experts are snowed, despite all their training, their psychological profiling and their lie-detecting technologies. While many people believe they can identify dishonesty through body language, research shows that people’s success rate at picking lies is no better than chance (50 per cent to 60 per cent). Trained police detectives fare no better.

Recalling her “catfishing” experience a couple of years ago, John says awareness of lies doesn’t make you invulnerable to them.

“This is someone who completely duped me. He just flat-out lied,” she says. “When you are motivated to believe someone and see what you want to see in them, it is amazing what you can be blind to.” They were talking every few days on the phone. “It is exhausting holding a lie,” she says. “I don’t know how he functioned.”

When is it ok to lie?

People tell one or two lies every day, on average, and half of all people in negotiations will lie if they have the right opportunity and motive, according to studies. However, some untruths are seen as more forgivable than others, says Mara Olekalns, professor of management (negotiations) at the Melbourne Business School.

“Withholding information is considered reasonably acceptable. Engaging in what would be considered competitive behaviours, such as an exaggerated first offer or misrepresenting what you are willing to accept, is considered reasonably acceptable because it is seen as part of the negotiation game,” she explains.

“And then you move down to things that are a little less acceptable, like faking positive emotions, such as liking the other person, or faking negative emotions like anger to try to influence them.

“Then we move one further step down to deliberately misrepresenting information in order to influence outcomes. That is actually perceived as not very acceptable at all and is possibly illegal.”

Lying in business

The business world is awash with untruths. Around 36 per cent of managers admit to telling lies every day, according to research by the UK’s Chartered Management Institute (Managers and the Moral Maze). Olekalns advises her students to avoid this ethical minefield of game-playing by moving to a problem-solving orientation, which requires them to be more frank and open with their information.

But she warns that first they must test the other party’s willingness to play by those rules, otherwise they leave themselves open to exploitation. “Try to be as honest as you can until you have evidence you are being exploited,” she recommends.

People tell one or two lies every day, on average, and half of all people in negotiations will lie if they have the right opportunity and motive.

Enterprise bargaining is one area of negotiation where distrust of “the other side” is almost a badge of honour and it is a field of engagement Clive Thompson knows well.

Thompson is a director of CoSolve, a consultancy that uses a non-adversarial problem-solving process called “interest-based bargaining”. These union-versus-employer engagements are full of theatre, he explains, with each side performing to their own audience (workers or investors). Old suspicions and hatreds die hard.

“Once or twice I’ve had cases in the union space, mainly on the union side, where a very dyed-in-the-wool, class-analysis person has come along with the attitude that capital/the bosses are the Devil. There is never a moral reserve about lying to the Devil.”

Yet although there may be congenital liars among employers and ideological liars on the union side, both cases are very rare in Thompson’s experience.

What to do if you’ve been lied to

So should you “call out” a lie? Perhaps… but Harvard’s John says it is better to take note of it as a “data point” and use it as a cue to probe further.

Thompson advises going down the denouncement route only if you’re confident the liar will be removed by the other party’s team as a result. If the liar is not removed from the negotiation, it opens up a whole new area of unpleasantness and debate about whether or not actual lies were told. “It is a high-stakes card, only to be played when either you are desperate or there is no other option,” he says.

If you don’t confront the lie, then you have to proceed on the basis that the other party can’t be trusted, fact-check everything that the other party divulges, and keep your own confidential information close to your chest, he says.

Because of the difficulty in identifying lies, a better strategy in a negotiation is to prevent any lies in the first place. Thompson, for example, asks that all announcements be made jointly by the negotiating parties. This stops them from misrepresenting each other’s position when reporting back to stakeholders.

An alternative is that an announcement will not be made until the other party has had it for 24 hours and has the opportunity to comment on it.

“In practice, that sharing of the draft typically does elicit comment. And that comment very regularly does move the first party to alter it,” says Thompson.

One of the occasions when it is often regarded as acceptable to stretch the truth is in a job interview, when people boost their successes (and sometimes appropriate other people’s wins) and exaggerate their current remuneration packages.

This crosses over to fraud when people claim qualifications they haven’t earned and concoct an impressive, but imaginary, work history. About 50 per cent of resumes include false information, according to research by both the Society of Human Resources Management and CareerBuilder.com.

Catching a liar

Liars will get caught. The Australian corporate world is, in reality, fairly small. It is more like a village, says Jannine Fraser, managing director of career management company The Career Insight Group.

“If you misrepresent the truth, people will always find out,” Fraser says.

Even gilding the lily on LinkedIn carries huge risks because former colleagues can read it and spread the truth. Fraser says when she hires for her own 200-person company, it is easy to do a police and reference check.

There is no excuse for employers to be caught out by the likes of Andrew Flanagan, who was sacked on his first day as general manager of strategy and business development at Myer in 2014 when it was discovered he had falsified his work history. Flanagan had falsely claimed to have previously held the job as general manager of strategy and business development for Inditex, which owns international fashion brand Zara.

The recruiter, in this case, had contacted two overseas referees supplied by Flanagan. According to one report, an email address for one of them was traced to the IP address at Flanagan’s home.

Flanagan had duped a list of big retailers into hiring him on false pretences (in Australia and overseas) before he was “outed” by Inditex, which had seen the announcement of Flanagan’s Myer appointment.

Fraser is still mystified how this could occur in such a well-networked industry: “In Australia, we use our networks. We don’t just rely on the candidate’s nominated referee. Nobody else does that,” she says.

As for habitual liars, Fraser says it can be a form of mental illness. “I think for some people it becomes a form of power and there is adrenaline attached to it. It becomes a matter of ‘What can I get away with?’.

“People kind of move into the zone of the hustle. We are all vulnerable to getting full of our own story.”

4 critical skills you’ll need in the future workplace

The workplace is changing, and with it the skills that workers need to thrive in a digital and diverse environment. Here are four skills that will be in highly sought after by employers in the future:

1. Emotional judgement

EJ, the new EQ, is now a top priority for many employers. “Emotional judgement is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and empathise with their position,” says Dr Marcus Bowles FIML, founder of the Institute for Working Futures. “It’s also about understanding the impact of the decisions you have to make.”

“EJ correlates strongly with the customer experience in service organisations. For technical experts, engineers and doctors, it’s about empathising with the outcome the client might want and being able to understand that the optimal solution may not be the best solution.”

2. Global citizenship

This encompasses cross-cultural work and diversity, says Bowles. “If you can’t empathise with different views of the world then it’s very hard for you to work in that context.”

Do you have the courage to put forward a solution no-one else has thought of – or to say there’s a problem when no-one else will?

3. Courage

“A lot of organisations don’t just want people who can innovate, they want people who can advocate for the customer,” says Bowles. Courage is a desirable quality that shows up among natural learning strings in organisations. “Do you have the courage to put forward a solution no-one else has thought of – or to say there’s a problem when no-one else will?”

4. Foresighting

Visionary leadership is about to take on a whole new meaning. “Can you see through the macro-trend to spot the business opportunity?” You’ll need to.

How creativity and innovation help make happy customers

Mark Wengritzky believes creativity is the greatest competitive advantage that humans have over machines, so he’s often puzzled why companies invest in innovative technology but don’t put the same money into innovative thinking.

“Too many companies think that being innovative is about building an app or getting the latest and greatest technology,” he says. “Technology is just an enabler. Creativity is the real source of innovation.”

As business development manager of Akqire, a Melbourne-based product development and innovation company, Wengritzky specialises in helping organisations come up with creative ways of reaching their customers and expanding their business. Rather than working as a traditional marketing company, Akqire helps companies cut through advertising noise to reach the heart of their customers.

“If you want to be at the forefront of change, creativity is something that needs to be celebrated.”

“A lot of companies are spending so much money on marketing without actually looking at what their customers want,” he says. “We help companies create innovative products and services by looking at who their customers are and what their pain points might be.”

Brightday, an online platform that aims to make it easier for people to make choices about their superannuation, is one example of Akqire’s work. Akqire’s research showed that people were looking for greater control over their investment decisions, so it worked with Eureka Report to design a new model for advisory services. The Brightday platform provides investors with research and knowledge to assist them in managing their own superannuation.

Sometimes a company’s culture is its own impediment to innovative thinking, says Wengritzky. “Companies know they need to innovate and they may have innovation teams and gather customer insights, but their culture often gets in the way. It may be that people just want to follow their boss’s ideas to keep them happy without ever saying what their own ideas might be. It just means that the breadth of ideas become restricted.”

Mark Wengritzky

Mark Wengritzky believes more companies should invest in creativity (Photo: Eamon Gallagher)

He adds that businesses may need to think beyond their traditional service offering if they want to remain relevant to their customers. He points to the challenges insurance companies face in engaging with millennials. “Instead of following a traditional approach to marketing or engagement, why not look at what is changing within the demographic, what they want now and what service they might need that’s not necessarily insurance in its traditional form,” he suggests.

It’s this kind of creative thinking that can lead to innovative solutions. “If you want to be at the forefront of change, creativity is something that needs to be celebrated.”

When I grow up I want to be an ethical hacker

The work landscape of the fourth industrial revolution, a term coined by Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, looks very different to the one we grew up with in the 20th century. Industry 4.0 is characterised by universal connectivity, technological breakthroughs and fast-paced disruption that are facilitating a widespread shift to automation at the cost of traditional jobs.

We hear a lot about the jobs that we have lost, but what about the new jobs created thanks to advances in technology? Once children wanted to be firefighters and astronauts when they grew up. Now they want to be ethical hackers and drone pilots. Here is a selection from the growing list of jobs that didn’t exist five years ago.

11 jobs that didn’t exist five years ago

  1. Ethical Hackers help institutions identify the vulnerabilities in web applications and networks.
  2. Chief Growth Officers are also on the rise, along with growth hackers, typically social media or viral marketers or product managers, who focus on building the customer base by running rapid experiments.
  3. Chief Listening Officer oversees all customer communications, from social media to face-to-face.
  4. Chief Innovation Officer encompasses both product development and strategic direction responsibilities.
  5. User Interface/Experience Designers focus on making technology instinctive to use.
  6. Cloud services architects oversee a company’s cloud computing strategy.
  7. Cognitive computing architects make machines “think” like humans.
  8. Drone pilots, once the preserve of the military, they’re working in utilities, mining and insurance with roles in deliveries and wedding photography ramping up.
  9. Autonomous vehicle operators remotely operate driverless cars, collecting data for engineers.
  10. Digital prophet: a trend predictor. AOL has one.
  11. Jolly Good Fellow is the personal and spiritual development adviser at Google. Where else?

Can Geelong be the innovation capital of Australia?

Innovation is more than a buzzword into one of Australia’s largest provincial cities, Geelong.

The Victorian city joins South Australia’s Adelaide in establishing an innovation hub in which tech startups are encouraged to set up shop amid a culture that encourages digital disruption in what is already a multi-billion dollar industry for the two states.

Replacing manufacturing with start-ups

Working with private enterprise is the startup initiative LaunchVic , nurtured by a state government $60 million investment. As in Adelaide’s Tonsley, Geelong’s digital innovation drive is helping fill an employment and industry void following the departure from the area of a major car manufacturing business.

It is bringing together leading-edge institutions and companies to connect with startups, business incubators and accelerators in a high-value industry, research, education and residential precinct, says LaunchVic CEO Kate Cornick.

Cornick says Geelong’s transition to an innovation district is integral to the state’s economic development. The shift involves creating an operating environment for manufacturers to innovate and grow through connections to research, education and collaboration.

“The Victorian economy is sound but needs renewal,” she says. “Over the last 30 years, Australia’s manufacturing employment has declined steadily with Victoria being the hardest hit losing around 30,000 jobs.

“Cities, regions and countries are aggressively seeking to unlock new sources of high-value jobs and have identified investment in startups and entrepreneurs as critical for a broad-based, future-proofed economy. Some of Victoria’s high-value jobs will be created by simply doing things smarter, for example by using technology to drive productivity and create value.”

Geelong manufacturing decline

Traditional manufacturing is in decline in Geelong (Photo: Bloomberg)

Cornick says LaunchVic will provide capital “and the right environment for entrepreneurs to develop, incubate and grow early-stage innovation businesses”.

“Startups create a pipeline of new companies and jobs. For example, firms like SEEK have grown to become multi-billion dollar companies, providing high-paying jobs and consuming many professional services.

“Startups also play a critical role in disrupting how things have previously been done and, as a result, they renew as well as displace traditional industries. By introducing new products, services and processes, startups contribute to a more competitive, innovative and globally connected economy forging new ways of doing,” she says. “Entrepreneurs tap the underutilised knowledge that resides in our universities and research institutes turning ideas into economic value and creating wealth in the process.

“LaunchVic’s objective is to launch a startup culture in Geelong that will establish the city as a global centre for innovation and entrepreneurship.”

“By introducing new products, services and processes, startups contribute to a more competitive, innovative and globally connected economy forging new ways of doing.”

The Runway project, led by CEO Peter Dostis, secured $1.25 million and acts as a catalyst for innovation in the region, creating new businesses and jobs through the provision of mentoring, networks, training and access to venture capital.

Entrepreneurship is not new to Geelong, Dostis says, with universities and local chambers of commerce having encouraged innovation as car manufacturing slowly declined.

“How to create an innovation environment starts in schools by teaching students about start-up principles and entrepreneurship, and Geelong’s universities have been doing that for years as traditional manufacturing has been lost to the region,” he says.

“Runway is more than an incubator or accelerator. It’s about how we create an entire ecosystem to support start-ups – how we attract them here, how we keep them here after exiting the program and establishing their businesses. We want them to remain in Geelong. We teach people how to transform an idea into a business, and that includes how to run a business.”

LaunchVic has also provided $450,000 to Dimension Data and Deakin University, an AIM Affiliate Member  to establish a cyber security incubator at Deakin’s Waurn Ponds campus. The incubator will accelerate the development of unique cyber security solutions and help address the skills shortage within the industry in Australia.

THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT

The Geelong Region Innovation and Investment Fund (GRIIF) is a joint venture between the Australian and Victorian governments, Ford Australia, which shut down its manufacturing operations in Geelong in 2016, and aluminium manufacturer Alcoa, which left in 2014.

The GRIIF allocates grants to boost employment and support innovation in the region. In November 2015, the fund handed out $11.2 million to seven local businesses.

Victorian Minister for Small Business, Innovation and Trade Philip Dalidakis says an Innovation Expert Panel will also help strengthen the state’s position as an innovation and tech hub. The panel comprises entrepreneurs, experienced in turning bright ideas into commercial reality.

“As a state, we can be the number one destination for technology and startups in the entire Asia Pacific region,” Dalidakis says. “In the past year alone, we have seen global tech leaders like Slack, Square, Stripe, Zendesk, Pocketmatch and GoPro all choose Melbourne as their regional headquarters. They’ve joined our local success stories – Nitro PDF, SEEK, Catapult, Red Bubble, CultureAmp and Appster.

“We have also done a lot of work to position Victoria as a cyber security powerhouse, so that we can capture a large slice of the global industry now worth an estimated US$71 billion and growing at a rate of 10 per cent per annum.”

Geelong aerial view

An aerial view of Geelong and Corio harbour (Photo: Getty Images)

As for Geelong following Tonsley’s successes, the minister says Victoria is already a major contributor to the nation’s $79 billion digital technology business, making tech bigger than traditional industry sectors such as agriculture and retail.

“Victoria’s digital technology industry currently generates annual revenues of around $34 billion and exports worth about $3 billion,” he says. “Currently, the state’s digital technology workforce comprises around 160,000 ICT professionals. By 2020, the forecast value of the Australian digital economy is $139 billion, and Victoria’s could be worth $50.8 billion.

“Digital tech employment is predicted to grow 70 per cent faster than Australia’s overall employment growth over the next decade. And, research shows that for each new technology job, five additional jobs are created in other sectors.”

Professional services firm PwC, Cornick says, estimates the Australian tech startup sector alone has the potential to contribute $109 billion or 4 per cent of GDP to the Australian economy and 540,000 jobs by 2033.

“Successful cities build on their unique strengths,” she says of Geelong’s future. “It’s about an active approach and supporting those entrepreneurs with ideas to be able to convert those ideas into businesses – so it is important to surround entrepreneurs who invest their own capital and sweat into building businesses with organisations and networks to help them succeed such as accelerators, universities and investors.”