SA-licon Valley: Inside the Tonsley Innovation District, where local innovators making global waves
What could easily have been a monument to industrial decay in the heart of Adelaide has instead become a site that’s making the world take notice.
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The old Mitsubishi logo is easy to make out in the middle of the floor. It’s a little faded and the concrete around it a little cracked, but it’s unmistakeable all the same.
These days there aren’t too many other obvious signs to remember that this was once the epicentre of automobile manufacturing in southern Adelaide.
Now, rather than the buzz of machinery, there’s the hum of quiet conversations from the nearby cafes, where a group of students, workers and tradies line up for the morning coffee.
About 100m down, beneath the high ceilings and concrete floors that once housed production lines of car workers producing state-of-the-art Mitsubishis, TAFE students train on cranes and scissor lifts. A short stroll nearby finds a small group sitting around the indoor garden for what appears to be an impromptu meeting.
It’s a calm and relaxed environment on this very brisk winter morning. But it’s inside the walls of the nearby open plan glass and modern steel buildings, which border the wide open courtyards, where the real action is taking place.
A short stroll to a modern, glass-faced office nearby and you enter a business that’s making mobile X-ray units being used on the frontline of conflict in Ukraine.
The same crew is making cameras that can spot bombs through suitcases, has a contract to put mobile CT scanners in ambulances to help stroke victims, and has airport check-in technology so advanced that it has been picked up by the US Department of Homeland Security and will be installed in at least one US airport.
Around the corner and you peer into a pool used by Flinders University to test autonomous watercraft. Directly opposite is a company that controls the lights at the MCG with the flick of a button.
Keep walking and you’ll run into a company manufacturing the control panels used in self-service bag-drop at Singapore’s Changi Airport. The same technology controls the electronic lane-change sequencing on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Its automation also helps make Tim Tams. Across the way you enter a company with a sensory room, comprising a wall full of fish, with seats and cushions bathed in blue lights, or green, or red, or yellow. You choose. It’s being used to help neurodiverse people. It’s also being used in prisons.
Another company just a stone’s throw away is preparing blinds to be used for Roland Garros, home of the French Open. Another is testing devices for our rapidly ageing population, while also working in about half a dozen different countries on their next-generation strategies.
There are the big names like defence giant BAE Systems, mixed in with lesser-known brands, some still yet to be released. One is a start-up developing a business of high-end watches that will retail for anywhere up to $25,000 and last for at least 100 years.
A few doors down and a bunch of kids are learning how to build robots. If they’re any good they’ll probably have a job here in a few years.
When the Mitsubishi factory closed its doors in 2008 it was seen as a tragedy for South Australian manufacturing. At the time it was.
However, what’s replaced it holds a key to the strength and longevity of our manufacturing sector well into the future. It’s not a valley in northern California, but rather a giant and rather flat slab of land just off South Rd and a kilometre or two down the road from Flinders Hospital and the uni. But if you’ll indulge us a loose comparison to Silicon Valley, you could probably say it’s the closest thing we’ve got and it’s making some pretty big waves around the globe.
Welcome to Tonsley Innovation District. And it’s just turned 10.
THE GERMAN CONNECTION
Philipp Dautel lived in Munich, came to Adelaide for work, had his kids here and fell in love with the place.
He can’t see himself ever leaving. A big part of that is what he’s seen happening around him. As the long-time Tonsley Precinct director and now Renewal SA’s stakeholder relationships manager, he’s been at the coal face of attracting businesses and investment to the site, and ensuring the project meets its benchmarks for the first 10 years, after which the model will change a bit and be run by a board.
“We are ahead of where we thought we would be,” he says simply, before adding with a smile: “But I’m German, so nothing is ever good enough … I’m just amazed every day by the breadth and depth of the things I see here.”
There are a few keys to its success, he says.
Firstly, to get a gig you have to have a strong value proposition and be targeted towards high-quality manufacturing. “We can’t just let anybody in,” he says. “Otherwise, this place would have been full 10 years ago. So we are checking still every day or every week if businesses are suitable. The umbrella theme is high-value manufacturing.”
When Dautel first took the reins in 2016, there were some key anchor tenants but, likewise, enough space to fill more than a few basketball courts. “It was pretty empty … a lot of basketball hoops,” he says.
Today, it is home to 2000 workers across 140 organisations, about 8500 students, and upwards of 500 residents. Total investment in the site is about $400m, with a target of $1bn in a decade, when the 20-year plan concludes.
Secondly, people are paying attention. It’s scored international awards for being a benchmark for the successful re-use of a former industrial site and was recently inducted as inaugural member of the Global Network of Innovation Districts – a hand-picked group of advanced 21st century innovation precincts.
When its president and founder Julie Wagner came to town in March, she described Tonsley as a “phenomenal example” of a thriving innovation district, and one worthy of replication globally.
“We’ve been on the phone with many councils and state governments in Australia and abroad, because they all share a similar problem in having a site that is completely desolate, doing nothing following mass production in the middle of the last century,” Dautel says.
“And they come to see how it’s worked here. Globally, it’s quite unique.”
Finally, to come to Tonsley you need to be prepared to play with others, and bring something new to the table.
That means collaboration.
FROM LITTLE THINGS BIG THINGS GROW
Anthony Skeats knows all about the last bit. After their shift finishes, a few of his work colleagues will walk a few hundred metres up the road to host some robotics workshops for kids, ranging anywhere from fairly rudimentary Lego models to highly advanced technical models which may or may not compete at international events. One of these has gloves and can climb monkey bars.
“They get a real buzz out of doing it,” he says.
The students probably get a kick out of it too, given Micro-X is one of Tonsley’s higher-profile success stories, with a stated aim to revolutionise the global use of X-ray technology.
They’re not kidding. As we stroll through the rows of cabinets, machines, computer screens and robotics, Skeats, Micro-X’s chief operating officer, patiently tries to explain the basis of the groundbreaking technology, which involves terms like “nanotubes” and “field intensification” and “electrons” and “photons”.
Boiled down, it’s an idea they call the Electronic X-ray Tube, which is a scalable and repeatable X-ray tube that uses carbon nanotube technology to offer a more stable and smaller X-ray tube than ever before. This means more compact and mobile X-ray machines.
Skeats walks across to a device that to the (very) untrained eye, resembles a really big vacuum. It is, in fact, a mobile X-ray cart, the Rover DR Mobile System, that is being used on the frontline of the war in Ukraine.
“We’ve sent 14 of them over I think. I have videos and constant feedback coming back saying how much they love it, how it keeps working,” he says. “And it’s durable. It’s given them the ability to have an X-ray, (looking at) fractures and shrapnel, right at the front line.”
The fact they were all built locally, by former Elizabeth Holden workers, only adds to their allure.
“With our portable X-ray unit, there are no motors and it’s effortless to drive,” Skeats says. “It’s fully carbon fibre design and the design was done here. It’s all manufactured locally.”
Next up is their model to break into the $24bn checkpoint market, a miniature baggage scanner for which they have secured a $21m contract from the US Department of Homeland Security. It aims to more easily and accurately identify hidden threats, while also speeding up the screening process eight-fold. It has been earmarked for trial in a US airport.
“It’s a pretty cool concept,” Skeats says.
Then there’s another model he’s taking to Houston the week after we talk to show off to US bomb disposal teams.
“This gives you X-ray vision,” he says, pointing to Argus, a mobile X-ray camera to identify IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices).
“It’s very common in the terrorist environment for a device to go off in public space, not to harm many people, because harming innocent people is bad propaganda,” Skeats explains. “But then there’s a second device when the emergency services come in, and causes damage to them. So this is designed to eliminate them needing to walk up to it, even in the suit. They can just point and press and see inside the bag in a matter of seconds.”
Skeats’ enthusiasm is infectious but you can see he holds a soft spot for the final stop on our tour, the CT brain scanner. “Eighty five per cent of strokes are clot-based ischaemia,” he says. “And they can be treated within the golden hour, which is the first few hours really. At the moment, a lot of them aren’t.”
The mobile scanner would allow much faster point-of-care diagnosis and earlier treatment, which would be vital in metropolitan areas but quite possibly the difference between life and death in rural and remote settings.
Their goal is to have one in every Australian ambulance – road and air. At this point they have $8m towards a trial.
“And we want the first trial of our stroke ambulance to be here in SA,” he says.
Skeats is busy and the clock is ticking for his next meeting. Which seems the right time to go and meet Tonsley’s resident watchmaker.
TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE
Richard McMahon was studying and working part-time in a jewellery shop in Adelaide and trying to work out what he would do next. He wasn’t that taken with the job, but he did strike up a rapport with the watchmaker who would frequently come in and pick up repairs and deliveries.
“And I always gravitated towards a cabinet that had some vintage second-hand watches in there, along with the new things,” he says.
They got chatting, they were looking to expand, so he scored an apprenticeship. That was 1989.
He finished the four-year apprenticeship, moved to Sydney, London, back to Sydney and finally home to Adelaide in a working adventure where he fell in love with the intricacies of his craft, mastered the art of restoration, and worked with some of the best and biggest names in the business.
He recalls fondly his time at the renowned clock and watch workshop Clocks of Distinction in Sydney. “That was where if you had an antique clock or a pocket watch that had a part that was worn out, rusted, whatever, you learned the ability to make things from scratch, using old materials, old machinery or new machinery,” he says.
He moved to London where he worked with some of the biggest brands in the business: Rolex, Cartier, Jaeger-LeCoultre. He worked for the Royal family on a small clock collection.
Now he’s in his 50s and about to launch his first start-up, Tonsley Watches, later this year.
These will be worth anywhere from $5000-$25,000.
He says demand shouldn’t be an issue and the price is at the lower end of the market; overseas custom watches can start at around $100,000. “I see watches in here, pocket watches, that are built correctly, from 250 years ago. And if they’re looked after properly, they’ll just keep going. There are a lot of watches on the market today that are very expensive. They’re lucky if they will last five years,” he says.
YOUR AGE IS ONLY A NUMBER
There is a line of tradies queuing up for a hot brew as we walk up the ramp to our next stop at the impressively titled Global Centre for Modern Ageing (GCMA).
After a warm greeting, Julianne Parkinson walks us into a living laboratory. The room appears reasonably nondescript. There is a small kitchen and a living space. There is a special kettle designed for people with tremors. There’s chairs and a table. A panel on the wall lights up – it’s for people with hearing loss who might not hear the doorbell or the fire alarm. A voice activated system controls most of the things we can see. But, despite modest appearances, the purpose-built studio, called the LifeLab®, is cutting edge; 19 sensors and cameras (with night vision capabilities) monitor everything that is happening.
Here, the GCMA research team test what works and what doesn’t for our ageing population, be it a product, a service, or an experience. Questions might range from the big: How can things be improved? Where are the gaps and shortfalls? How can technology be made relevant? To the very specific: Why are the power-points so low? How can this vegetable peeler work for people with right-hand arthritis?
“People are living longer but they’re not necessarily living better,” says Parkinson, the GCMA’s chief executive. “We realised that people want to age well and maintaining wellbeing throughout all of life’s stages is crucial. And that means we need to change the way in which society and supply chains understand the changing needs and wants, for the largest and the most compelling consumer market on the planet.”
Parkinson is well known in Adelaide business circles as a director at Ernst and Young and KPMG, and then a member of the state’s Economic Development Board. So why become a start-up founder in this particular sector?
“Because never before in human history have we witnessed such a substantial population over the age of 60,” she says.
These days, Parkinson is on a mission. She wants to disrupt conventional thinking. To research, to challenge, to test and validate, and test again. Always with people at the centre of the frame. And, ultimately, drive change in the emerging “AgeTech” sector.
“The reality is, most products have never been designed with older adults at the centre of the frame,” Parkinson says. “And that’s especially true for technology-enabled products.
“However, people are living longer and more than 94 per cent of Australians over the age of 65 are living at home and often want to continue doing so. This is creating an enormous growth in demand for all types of products and services to be delivered into the home setting.”
The GCMA’s work is internationally recognised and has taken them across Australia, to the UK, Singapore, Israel, and Hong Kong (where they were part of an international consortium designing a blueprint for how people age at home in a vertically dense, challenging environment). Japan is envisaged in their future. “Across the world, people want to age well with more choices around the breadth and depth of inclusive products,” she says.
SMASHING START-UP STEREOTYPES
It becomes apparent the past two interviewees were each start-up founders in their 50s, hardly the annoying (and lazy) cliche of the 20-something in a hoodie, hunched over their laptops with earbuds and designer sneakers. (Parkinson says the highest number of entrepreneurs in Australia and the US are people aged over 50)
Verity Kingsmill says there is not one-size-fits-all model when it comes to start-ups. What you really need is a really good idea and a lot of commitment. And as the director of the Flinders University New Venture Institute (NVI), which acts as an incubator for entrepreneurs of the future, she’d know better than most.
She reels off some of the institute’s success stories, names like My Gigsters, which has attracted international investment for its simple tax management system and has moved to Lot Fourteen; PREPD, a hydration formula; AICRAFT, which creates smart sensors, tailored systems and electronic boards powered by artificial intelligence; and TAV Systems which retrofits old bicycles with an e-bike solution.
“The last guys were Indian students, studying in India, who came up with an idea, saw this entrepreneurial migration visa opportunity and now they’ve got an office here, and one in India,” she says, with a fair bit of pride.
Kingsmill talks excitedly about a newly joined medical start-up Cardiovasc.tech, which is working with university staff, PhD students and also another start-up to use simple gestures to operate equipment.
She is at any one time working with as many as 30 start-ups, helping develop their plans, accelerating their growth and linking them in with business partners, students and academics.
“We find that NVI has been a very good launch pad for lots of start-ups,” she says. “A number of them now, once they get to that next stage of growth, have gone to more central spots, such as Lot Fourteen.
“The ones that have stayed are because their space is similar to advanced manufacturing, technology, energy, climate and medical and that’s really what this whole Tonsley space is about. And they also say they want to have their vision broader than the state.”
A SENSE OF FREEDOM
The wall becomes a forest, green lights stream through the room, a chair gently buzzes. The scene changes to an underwater reef, the lights turn blue, the buzzing continues, and “magic carpet” on the floor responds to touch. Then some fireworks appear and the lights turn red. It’s not a rational feeling, but the room feels warmer in an instant. A short while later and we are back to the forest scene. Cool again. Calm. This is a sensory room and is used to help people with neurodiverse conditions, such as autism, to regulate emotions and calm down if heightened.
It’s a fully functioning room and an example of what Link Assistive is placing across the country in schools, therapy providers, respite facilities, aged care and mental health services, and even prisons.
“We started doing the sensory rooms because we thought we’d be going into areas like autism and so forth,” general manager Sunny Prosser says. “We’re actually selling more sensory rooms now in the areas of criminal justice and mental health. There’s a lot of push away from physical restraint, which can also refer to chemical restraint. We’re finding the sensory rooms, and there’s clinical evidence for this, you put them in a sensory room, and they chill out a bit, which is wonderful.”
Link Assistive has been building up its business in Adelaide for the past 15 years and set up their national HQ in Tonsley about 12 months ago. Prosser says it wasn’t a particularly difficult decision, despite the group having bases in the other capital cities and looking to expand into Singapore and New Zealand. “We were looking for somewhere where there was a connection, where you could easily link in with like-minded businesses and somewhere that had a vibe to it,” he says.
Link Assistive also specialises in communication devices for people with disabilities. The most well known is the Eye Gaze devices for people with cerebral palsy or severe motor neurone disease. Using a retina tracker, it allows people to communicate through eye movement. “It’s impressive tech, it’s pretty cool stuff, and it’s life changing,” he says.
AN OFFER LEN PIRO COULDN’T REFUSE
Len Piro lets out a small chuckle when it’s put to him that he’s often referred to as the “Godfather” of Tonsley.
It’s not a title he chose for himself but one that seems apt, given he was pretty much the key bloke who pushed for the then state government to do something very different with the site, given most people thought it would simply roll over into a residential development, or a transport hub, or a whole lot of warehouses.
Piro was the state government’s executive director of manufacturing at the time and remembers the southern suburbs had been hit particularly hard; it wasn’t just the closure of the Mitsubishi assembly plant at Tonsley in 2008, but also the Lonsdale engine plant in 2004, and the mothballing of the Mobil refinery at Port Stanvac in 2003.
Thousands of jobs were lost, not to mention the brutal hit on supply chains, all in five short years. Piro knew the state had to take a risk. “All was a move to ‘de-industrialising’ the south,” he says. “And we needed to do something at the site to ‘re-industrialise’ the region. But importantly not to just have the same, same kind of things, but something that was technology driven and competitive.”
Which was a clear message he passed on to then premier Mike Rann, whose government took the leap of faith, nutted out a reasonably complex deal with the Japanese owners of Mitsubishi, then Piro and his crew tested the site for environmental problems, built a business plan and, significantly, decided to get creative: “We always wanted a walk-in development, where people would walk around the site and hopefully test things together and collaborate.”
Piro, who works as a consultant, says he is thrilled with what has been achieved.
“It’s one thing having a vision for something, but it’s another thing making it happen, and a lot of talented and committed people have been involved over the journey” he says. “I also think it is one of the most innovative approaches that we’ve seen globally as to how you adjust to a big economic shock, the closure of total industry.”
A KIND OF HOMECOMING
Verity Kingsmill’s brother Tim did his apprenticeship at Mitsubishi. She brought him back to Tonsley a few years back. At first he was a little disorientated. “He was kind of looking at the ceiling, and he was a little confused,” she says. Before long, however, he found his bearings. “He followed the lines around and said, ‘This used to be here, and this is what we used to be here’,” she says.
It meant a great deal to him that the place he once called home had not become an industrial wasteland, or a carpark, or a warehouse, or a derelict site, but rather something that had value and meaning and ambition.
“I think we have a really beautiful story to tell,” she says. ■
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