Stockland planting seeds with series of start-ups

Spooner’s week. Cartoon: John Spooner

One of the ventures that excites Stockland’s Mark Steinert most is an AI-based hydroponic vegetable farm, POD Farm, to be based in his Maitland town centre.

That’s a long way from what you may consider would excite the diversified property company boss. The start-up was uncovered in the accelerator program Steinert ran two years ago with Blue Chilli aimed at growing Stockland through innovation. The farm will grow hydroponic vegetables that will supply the centre’s restaurants and, in the process, serve as an example to other start-ups that may be able to tap into the town centre infrastructure.

A shopping centre can become a hi-tech incubator just as his residential villages can spawn new ideas. A base in the local town centre means the start-up is working with the community that potentially will be its market.

POD Farms produces leafy greens and microgreens, but the indoor garden produces them in a fraction of the time and uses excess solar power in the process.

AI helps to cut down on water use and all in a space that had no other use in the centre.

Steinert is passionate about its prospects, albeit with modest ­ambitions of increasing his profits through the new ventures by 2 per cent a year.

He follows Australian-educated academic Peter Weill at MIT, whose work aims to teach companies how to create value from digitisation. The aim is to move the company from being part of a value chain to being the centre of the value creation through better knowledge of customers and serving them what they need.

Companies create their own ecosystems.

When CEOs talk about needing to connect with a wider group of stakeholders, that is part of the movement.

It also comes down to basic survival — disrupters target part of the value chain, potentially destroying value — so the best way to combat this is by companies developing their own value creators.

Steinert argues every company is 75 per cent technology-dependent and an effective digital ecosystem is critical to future success.

The company believes it ­creates great places for people to live, work, shop and play and works from the theory “there is a better way to live”.

His strategy is “find the intersection of digitally enabled opportunities and what customers value and then experiment and iterate”.

“Leverage the earnings to inform and accelerate new opportunities and be prepared to stop or pivot when something isn’t going as expected,” he says.

There are now some 30 people working in the digital team known as Lab -52, which is an ideas portal from staff.

The company started in 1952.

From this the company has developed things such as BindiMaps, which is an app that enables ­vision-impaired people to navigate a shopping centre.

Stockland has invested in the concept of fractional ownership or Bricklet, which allows people to invest in a portion of a new house rather than buying the complete property. Instead of buying a $750,000 property, you can buy units of $25,000 and sell them ­accordingly as a way of boosting your income.

Other ideas being investigated include IMBY, a platform to track planning applications on land around the country.

Rental Heroes is a chat box that allows renters and landlords to connect better and for renters to share experience.

Parachute is an app that promotes carpooling so you post your travel plans and see who else is heading the same way.

Early Match is a way owners can test the market without the need of engaging real estate agents.

Stockland chair Tom Pocket also gives an annual award, the last being to an application that tracks the land settlement process and tells you what to do when.

The list shows the aim of the program, which is to “turn disrupters into business opportunities”.

But the ideas go wider to new arcade alleys in shopping centres to provide more reasons for people to travel to the centre.

At the same time, the town centres (also known as shopping centres) are trying to own the so- called “last mile”, which is the distance between the shop and the home. This includes providing click-and-collect services for the centre and providing Amazon lockers. These ideas show you where Steinert’s team is thinking about how the company can grow earnings.

 

Focus on innovation

Today’s item on Stockland is the first of a series aimed at showing how mainstream companies are using innovation and technology to defend their patch and grow earnings.

The series is aimed at focusing on ideas and strategies that may not attract the daily headlines but show corporate Australia is actually doing better than many ­realise on innovation.

Whether this is enough or compares with international peers are other questions and obviously some are doing better than others.

The focus is not to make those judgments, but just to present the progress for you to reach your own conclusions.

 

Smart engineering

On this theme, as noted earlier this week, RMIT chancellor Ziggy Switkowski presented the annual Australian Unity Australia Day speech in Melbourne last month focusing on our digital lives.

He noted the US National Academy of Engineering in 2000 looked at the top 10 achievements in the last century, with electricity winning the day, followed by the car, planes, water supply, electronics, radio and TV and computers.

Today’s list would include much the same but with the word “smart” in front and, of course, after coming in at 13th in 2000, the internet would rank No 1. There are now smart cars, drones delivering pizzas, smart computers, and smartphones. All of which tells you the future will be a switch from the Internet of Things to the intelligence of things.

In 1900, people worried about malnutrition and they still do, while in the rich world the concern is obesity.

 

Earnings season starts

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Corporate earnings season starts in earnest this week with a slew of big-name reports and the market is now a little more upbeat as shown by the accompanying table.