10,000: the magic number to build entrepreneurship at a university

UNSW is Australia’s top entrepreneurship university. It’s no accident that its entrepreneurship programs reach 10,000 people a year.

The spectrum of UNSW entrepreneurship: Vijay Sivaraman (left), Saxon Dean, Nioushasadat Haji Seyed Javadi and Himanshu Singh. Photo: John Feder

Entrepreneurship comes high on the list of priorities at the University of NSW and every year about 10,000 people – mainly students, but also alumni and academic staff – filter through its Michael Crouch Innovation Centre to learn more about business ideas and starting companies.

David Burt, UNSW’s director of entrepreneurship who runs the centre and the university’s founders program, calls it the curiosity and awareness stage. There are events to meet successful entrepreneurs, as well as skill-building workshops and networking experiences.

“See a successful entrepreneur on stage. Get to ask them a question. Build people’s self-belief,” says Burt, describing the activities.

“A big part of what we do is help people see themselves as having agency. You know I think we have a great secondary education system in Australia, but what it doesn’t do is do a great job of building up people’s self-confidence.”

About 8,000 of those who come to centre events each year are students, and the aim is satisfy their curiosity about entrepreneurship and get them thinking about whether they want to go down that path.

David Burt

The next step is the idea stage, in which students, alumni and university staff come to the centre with an idea for starting a business which needs to be tested.

“We’ll teach you how to gather evidence. We’ll mentor and coach you. And then we’ll run a pitch competition, and the best of you will win,” says Burt.

The big prize is the annual Peter Farrell Cup – competed for by teams of students and higher degree by research candidates – a pitch competition with $20,000 in prizes. But there are many other pitch competitions to help people refine their ideas and get them to the investment stage.

Each year about 50 ideas get to the third stage of being funded by investors, mainly ideas from alumni rather than students.

“Everything we do in the founders program maps to these three steps,” Burt says. All of the services are free, funded by philanthropy and by the university.

UNSW is already the leader among Australian universities in both the number of its alumni who are founders of funded companies and the number of companies founded by alumni, according to data from Crunchbase (adjusted for the overall number of alumni). And that is before the long term impact of the centre, and the founders program, is clear.

Burt says that a mark of UNSW’s commitment is that it has made entrepreneurship a major goal of its strategic plan.

One outcome is that the university has successful entrepreneurship at every level.

It ranges from successful start-up companies such as Canopus Networks, founded by engineering professor Vijay Sivaraman. Canopus, which has raised over $10m and uses AI to measure traffic on high-speed digital networks. helping telecommunications companies to keep the internet working fast and efficiently.

One step down from that is Nioushasadat Haji Seyed Javadi, a UNSW doctoral candidate whose industry-linked PhD is in using waste plastic to enhance asphalt. She is a co-founder of a start-up company, Sonia Green, which uses technology she helped develop in her PhD to use waste plastic, instead of the virgin plastic currently in use when roads are laid. The technology also saves energy because the waste plastic is pelletised, which can be transported at air temperature instead of being kept as a hot liquid.

Himanshu Singh, in his final year of his bachelor of information systems, is the founder of Teach Flows, an AI-driven education start-up which creates resources for school teachers to deliver lessons. Singh founded the company in his first year at UNSW and says that 9,000 teachers worldwide are now using the product.

In 2021 Teach Flows won first place in the early stage idea section of the Peter Farrell Cup, a prize of $8,000.

The lure of entrepreneurship is now attracting students to the university. First year advanced science student Saxon Dean says the focus on entrepreneurship “tipped the scales” for him in deciding to enrol at UNSW.