UTS Director of Entrepreneurship Murray Hurps highlights how UTS is supporting and inspiring Australian technology-enabled startups.
As technology improves, the cost of doing business between organisations shrinks, and organisations get smaller.
You can see this everywhere - solo entrepreneurs using new technologies to develop and deliver solutions without an organisation around them, and students are increasingly choosing this style of work too.
Six years ago, 30% of students from the University of Technology Sydney wanted to pursue entrepreneurship - that number is now 57% and I expect it to grow further.
Universities need to cater to this changing industry and employment environment, providing the place for this tech snowball to grow, rather than being consumed by it. Industry engagement will also increasingly rely on being part of industry creation.
Entrepreneurial support can’t just be a program to find the best-of-the-best entrepreneurs and give them more support. While there is a place for those programs, the focus must be on improving accessibility at scale for Australia to realise the technology-enabled opportunities it has.
UTS Startups is the largest program to inspire and support technology-enabled entrepreneurship in Australia, focusing not just UTS students, but also tens of thousands of high school students, and all UTS alumni for life, all free of charge and without taking any ownership in the companies supported.
UTS Startups @ Schools visits 100 high schools each year in collaboration with the University of Newcastle, introducing year 9 and 10 students to tech entrepreneurs with a simple goal of measurably increasing their understanding and desire to pursue technology-enabled entrepreneurship.
I’m proud to say 62% of school students in this program have been female, and 42% of students say they want to pursue tech-enabled entrepreneurship for the first time, as a result of the workshops.
UTS Startups Summit will bring together a further 8,000 year 9 and 10 students on December 3rd 2024 at the ICC Sydney for a day of inspirational tech entrepreneurs and cutting edge AI demos, again designed to increase this understanding and desire. 53% of students in this event have been female and we're working to increase that for this year.
UTS Startups Rapid Value Creation program goes beyond the inspiration stage, with a truly unique deep dive into the large commerce platforms of today, the data sources to figure out what’s working, and the AI and other tools to make the most of these platforms. This isn’t your normal entrepreneurship curriculum - people create real market instruments to learn from on platforms like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, Etsy, Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest and Flippa.
Learners finish either making their first money from entrepreneurial pursuit, or with very current AI, automation and digital marketing skills they can apply to other pursuits. Designed by PayPal’s first investor and startup legend Pete Davison, this is a real-world entrepreneurship program unlike any other.
Currently delivered as a free program for the public, we are also trialling a customised version for year 11 students (and their teachers) in 15 schools, including one deep in the Northern Territory. Many more schools will follow in 2025, pending NESA approval.
Need free support for your startup? As long as you have a current or past UTS student on your team, UTS Startups provides 200 desks of space to help you share capabilities with our 500+ other startups, structured programming to bring you together, events to bring you together and direct introductions. We’re not here to tell you how to do things, we’re here to help you find the person who can, and to make sure you’re able to help other people as well.
Need seed funding on good terms? The UTS Startups Growth Funding program lines up startups with $50k in revenue who need early capital for growth, prepares them, then brings together groups of leading investors to offer $100k investments on some of the best terms available across Australia. We’re not encouraging high risk, but we are backing those that choose this path, and creating a watering hole where the best startups can come together with the best investors on the best terms.
Why do this?
Our startups created over 1,200 new paid jobs last year alone, all creating the kinds of companies that make sense today.
They helped 950 UTS students last year to learn through internships and in-subject projects, creating an unparalleled work-integrated learning environment.
70 PhDs are in these startups, transferring substantial knowledge into the commercial world in a way that typically doesn’t get recognised as “research translation”.
9.5% of graduating UTS students at all levels last year left running their own startup (another number that’s been increasing year on year).
And while these are great, the largest economic impact of these companies will be through productivity uplift for Australia. The new technologies learned inside these companies spill over into large companies. The new products and services they have help large companies adopt new technologies. And the competitive pressure they create keeps large Australian companies on their toes.
Australia’s future, and the future of our students, depends on Australia’s future universities. UTS is working to be that future university, today.
Don’t miss out
UTS Startups Summit: uts.ac/startupssummit (pass to your school before tickets run out)
Rapid Value Creation Program: for the public uts.ac/utss_rvc, for schools please email startups@uts.edu.au
UTS Startups @ Schools: uts.ac/startupsatschool
UTS Startups: startups.uts.edu.au
Stories from our startups: uts.ac/utss_vids
Anything else? startups@uts.edu.au