Buzinga’s Pollinate Melbourne Innovation Event A Huge Success
Last night marked the first event of Pollination – Pollinate Melbourne – a series of events that aim to create an environment of ‘idea sex’ where we bring together groups of dynamic people like entrepreneurs, academics, enterprises and investors to talk and learn from each other and build businesses that push human evolution forward.
Join our meetup group to hear about our next event.
Pollination is about planting the seed in as many bright people as possible. The best technology have come from ideas that spawned from what’s now often referred to as “Idea Sex”.
And no, that doesn’t mean you’re ‘mind grinding’ the person next to you.
It means that two or more ideas come together to create an even stronger value offering.
Or your idea & industry background, and his business experience come together to form a solution.
Or his idea, her service and that guy’s capital combine to create an app that helps you reach peak vitality everyday by tailoring meal plans based on your unique genomes which later sells to FitBit for $750 million dollars…
As Matt Hallam, one of our speakers said last night, “IP IS DEAD!” Collaboration is the now and the future of innovation and creativity, with no great idea being able to truly succeed without a strong network and complimentary skill sets.
Australia’s startup community is thriving, with enterprises like IBM and ANZ embracing the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship that has been disrupting incumbent companies around the world. We hope that Pollination will become an anticipated calendar event, where learning and networking between innovators is a thriving occurrence.
With over 200 Meetup RSVP’s, we were blown away that over 100 people attended the event, and extend a huge thank-you to our clients and loyal readership database who came down to support the team. It was really fantastic to meet many faces who have been virtual connections for a long period of time.
For more images, head over to our Facebook page.
The event was held at the Revolver Creative co-working space in Prahran, hosted generously by Conrad Tracey, founder of the space.
These guys are doing great things for social innovation in Melbourne, we were stoked to be able to host our kick-off event here.
After my mind-blowing speech on the evolution of the modern human, (watch below) Tristram Cleminson, Founder of CMB Capital started the night with a presentation of the Key Ingredients To Business Success.
CMB Capital: Key Ingredients To Business Success
CMB Capital is a hands on corporate advisory and investment firm specialising in Telecommunications, Media, Entertainment, Technology and Health.
Their investment portfolio includes companies such as VMob, Genero.TV, MediRecords among others and earlier this year sold DIMMI to Trip Advisor.
They are also advisors to companies such as Ytango, MYOB, Cognizant, Open Universities, RP Data, NetRegistery and many more.
Speaker Tristram Cleminson, the head of the Melbourne CMB Capital office, shared with us the 9 ingredients for business success.
The audience was captivated by the insights he shared, giving us an understanding of what investment companies look for in a business.
The key takeaway was the importance that investment companies place on the team involved with the business.
The team must be:
a) Innovative
b) Open to change
c) Positioned as experts in their niche.
STARTUP HEALTH TECH: The Landscape of Health Innovation
Our second speaker was Matt Hallam, the co-founder of one of Australia’s most successful Meetup groups Startup HealthTech, who were holding their 2 year anniversary the same night as our event.
Matt agreed to speak at Pollinate Melbourne before the 2-year anniversary was planned, so we really appreciate that he still came down and spent the night with us. (Free beer and new friends, who wouldn’t.)
Startup HealthTech is a community of over 1700 digital health entrepreneurs, who provide a platform to advance knowledge, provide inspiration and build relationships between people using technology to re-define healthcare in Australia and beyond.
Matt has been involved with health technology for over 10 years and is currently the Managing Director of Oceania Merit Medical Systems.
Charismatic to say the least, Matt had us on the edge of our seats as he shared with us what is currently happening in the Melbourne ecosystem of health innovation.
A few stats to share on HealthTech in Melbourne:
- There are more than 8 Co-Working spaces in Melbourne today.
- There will be 60mil worth of government funding towards this sector by the end of 2015.
- 2 Melbournian’s have won the Microsoft Innovation Cup for health technology in the past few years.
- IBM and Telstra have come on board.
UBER: A data company
I thought I was passionate about data until I met Matt Denman…
Matt is the city lead for Uber, starting in April 2014 as the Operations and Logistics Manager when Uber was in around 90 cities.
Just over a year later, Uber are now in over 300 cities, valued at $50Billion, the quickest startup to reach a valuation of such a phenomenal amount.
Matt has also co-founded a restaurant in North Melbourne and was a management consultant at Deloitte.
Matt shared with us his passion for data, giving us an exclusive insight into the day-to-day operations of working at Uber.
Every decision made at Uber is based on data, stating that “Uber isn’t a taxi company, it’s a data company.”
The goal for Uber isn’t to use data to just improve transport for their own fleet, but to share their data with the whole world to make transport a smoother process.
Matt revealed that his morning ritual, whilst most of ours is opening Facebook, his is opening the Uber data dashboard with ecstatic anticipation to see the KPI’s hit around the world.
Key takeaways included:
- EVERYONE SHOULD BE A DATA ANALYST
- DATA IS EVERYWHERE
- 100 year old companies have no where near as much data as Uber has collected in the last year alone.
- GO DATA
We have videos coming late next week for those of you who couldn’t attend or would like a refresh of the event.
Thanks to everyone who came down, and to Quiet Deeds for supplying the beer for the evening.
Hope to see you all at the next event!
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