Follow up on the Research to Impact panel

On Thursday, October 10th, AFRAN partnered with the Canberra Innovation Network to organise a Research to Impact Panel. During this discussion panel, we had the pleasure to hear from Dr Nian Jiang (Jenny), Research Program Manager at the ANU Advanced Instrumentation and Technology Centre, and Charles Gretton, Associate Professor and TechLauncher Convener at the ANU School of Computing.

 Jenny and Charles shared their experience around entrepreneurship, commercialisation and industry-led research.       

Below are some key insights from the conversation:

·         Entrepreneurs compete for good ideas, not for VC. If you have a good idea, cast away self-doubt and go! There's more VC than good ideas, resulting in too many bad ideas being funded.

·         Having a multidisciplinary team is essential to best answer an industry problem, and best convince business people of the relevance of your innovation.

·         When building a startup, the primary factor of success is the company culture. Strategy only comes second. A key question to anwer is: what is your incentive and the one of your business partners?

·         Learning the corporate language is important to effectively pitch your idea. What do Venture Capital people want to hear, why should they fund your product/service ?

·         Every entrepreneur should take advantage of its innovation ecosystem, by being open, going to events, meeting people, joining hackathons, or finding a mentor.