G'Day Chengdu - Five Startup Lessons Learned from a Week in China

When I was going through the muru-D accelerator in Sydney's class #2 as the co-founder of Caitre’d, our class’s overseas trip was a whirlwind tour of China. At the time, our business (a catering marketplace) was hyperlocal, so we opted to stay in Sydney. But ever since I have been intrigued about the business potential of collaboration opportunities in China.

Fast forward and I am now working heading up operations at the Michael Crouch Innovation Centre, under the Division of Enterprise at UNSW. Last year, the Torch Precinct, a $100 million collaboration initiative between UNSW and the Chinese government was announced, with the purpose being to facilitate unprecedented collaboration between UNSW-led Australian research teams and major Chinese companies with the capacity, capital and market access needed to translate Australian research breakthroughs into new products, processes and services. Brian Boyle, UNSW’s deputy pro vice-chancellor (enterprise), championed the Torch project as “delivering a return on investment for Australia through our outstanding and competitive research base”.

Last week, I was privileged enough to represent the UNSW Division of Enterprise as an Innovation delegate for the ‘Innovation Leads the Future’ Forum in Chengdu, China, as guests of the Sichuan province government. The contingent from Australia included:

• Myself, the Operations Manager at the MCIC at UNSW;
• Melissa Ran, whose Startup China initiative seeks to give UNSW student entrepreneurs the edge when it comes to creating a business that will be successful in the Chinese marketplace;
• Duco von Breemen, the GM of Haymarket HQ, Australia's first startup hub supporting entrepreneurs to grow into Asia;
• Abdur-Raheem Bulbuliya from Startupbootcamp Melbourne;
• Katherine Kawecki from Respia;
• Sarveen Kandiah from Open Learning.

We headed to Chengdu to understand more about collaboration opportunities between the Chinese government, UNSW, and the global future of work.

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Here are five lessons I learned whilst spending a week in China:

1) What struck me initially about Chengdu was although it felt youthful, vibrant, and progressive, it was continually referred to as a "second-tier" city. This "second-tier" city was 16 million people, with the population forecasted to double over the next 5-10 years. This will be more than the current population of Australia. It won’t be long until the “second-tier” city of Chengdu makes its mark on the global stage.

2) Another observation is that while China has infrastructure and resources, what they are looking for is knowledge, expertise and creativity. There is a massive collaboration opportunity here for Australian entrepreneurs looking for funding for ideas, or advanced amenities. The local governments have made significant investments in initiatives designed to help ideas be brought to life. For example, we visited “Hong Tai”, otherwise known as Angel Plus, a smart hardware accelerator and makerspace. They specialise in rapid prototyping and manufacturing the first 1000 units of your smart hardware. It was similar to the maker space that Michael Crouch insisted be part of the facility that bears his name, except our makerspace is more for experimentation, whereas the Hong Tai space was about manufacturing.

3) On the 30th of November, I gave the presentation on UNSW’s vision of entrepreneurship, led by the Division of Enterprise under Dr Elizabeth Eastland. Topics of relevance to the Chinese - Australian collaboration included:

• The future of work and what business may look like in years to come
• How UNSW is solving these problems by leveraging current research capabilities, and current results
• The introduction of our Founder journey, the funnel of talent at the uni and the different stages at which we support these Founders (Foundation Programming, Founder Programming, Founder Acceleration and a Founder Fund)
• The collaboration opportunities for China and Australia through the Torch Precinct, located at Australia’s Global University - UNSW.

The key takeaway here was how successful the Torch Precinct has been and how this collaboration has been of great benefit to UNSW. Being the first to bring a proven model to Australia demonstrates the university's forward-thinking and willingness to innovate.

4) During our visit, we met with Michael Zhang who runs Walnut, a coworking space that has the western feeling of a WeWork, and visited the Alibaba Group incubator and coworking space. We visited the Consul General’s office, headed up by Christopher Lim, the Australian Consul-General in Chengdu, met with Austrade, and learned about the Landing Pad initiative in Shanghai to understand Australian ties on the ground in China. We even ate with the locals, experiencing Sichuan cuisine in a car park. What these experiences taught me was, that in China, relationships are key to success. Doing business in China is competitive, and you need boots on the ground who know the right people. Above all, you must have a willingness to collaborate and learn. And that can really only be done if you are there in China to build those relationships.

5) China is moving fast. What I've come away with from this experience is that there is enormous potential for Australia to collaborate with China. I believe UNSW has made the right decision to be involved and take advantage of this opportunity. For the uni, we have an opportunity to commercialise research; for startups, there is massive potential for growth. For Aussie startups especially, the user base of a successful startup launched in China has the potential to be 100x of what it could be domestically, and nascent markets are rapidly emerging. The Chengdu I saw was very progressive, but even Chengdu will look differently in 2 years than what it does today. Things are changing so rapidly that there is a real opportunity to be involved, and the reputation of Australia is very strong in China, so there are abundant collaboration opportunities, and the time is now.

The future of Australia is bright, but with the inclusion of China in our future, there is the opportunity for it to be even brighter.