The faces of innovation
UNE SMART Region Incubator’s Armidale programs and community were showcased in Regional Lifestyle Magazine’s Armidale feature, with a special insight into Back Stories of Innovation…
‘All businesses start with an idea. Those ideas must be inspired into plans, and plans into enterprises. UNE SMART Region Incubator (SRI) exists to nourish that process.
Using business start-up methodologies, the SRI helps aspiring business founders incubate their ideas, test concepts, find investors and pull together an enterprise.
Take Sam Duncan. When Sam and his family moved to Armidale in 2018 he had a business idea, but little else in the way of capital.
He took his idea into the SRI, and in that encouraging space with its environment of fellow innovators, he built FarmLab piece by piece. FarmLab takes the friction out of measuring carbon levels in soil – the ‘Uber of soil testing’, as Sam describes it.
He now has 10 employees, and was recently announced as a partner in $8.4 million in Federal research grants.
Through 2022, the SRI has supported 60 start-ups who collectively raised more than $4 million to bootstrap their ideas into reality, and created 225 regional jobs in the process.
Founders come from all walks of life and all ages, from High School, TAFE, University and the general community. To more widely support the start-up approach to enterprise, UNE has created units of study and in-school programs delivered by the SRI.
Over the past year, the SRI has introduced the wider New England community to the excitement and challenge of building a business through its community forum series, Back Stories of Innovation.
In these forums, a wide range of established business owners told their inspirational stories of enterprises made – and sometimes nearly lost, and remade again.
To more lastingly capture some of those stories, the SRI enlisted 23 passionate photographers who took the portraits of 23 contributors to the Back Stories series. Some of those images appear on these pages.
“When you look at these photographs, you realise that we all contribute to the success of our region” says SRI Director, Dr Lou Conway.
“We hope the images encourage our community to stop and think about the nature of business enterprise. It takes everyday people with ideas, and the courage and determination to nurture those ideas into reality.”
Perhaps you have an idea which, in partnership with the UNE SMART Region Incubator might flourish to contribute to the great way of life we enjoy here in Armidale.’
Text and images provided by UNE SMART Region Incubator; Original article published in Regional Lifestyle Magazine AUTUMN 2023. More here