TechLauncher: helping Canberra’s entrepreneurs with their tech
ANU TechLauncher convenor, Dr Charles Gretton
We chatted with the convenor of the ANU’s TechLauncher program, Dr Charles Gretton, about the Canberra program that matches students with real-life clients.
Got a great startup idea and need a tech team? Nearly any startup these days has a tech element, which can be daunting if you don’t know how to code. But the good news is that you may be able to get support from students at one of the world’s best universities through the TechLauncher program.
Tech and entrepreneurship
“Everything has a bit of computing under the bonnet”
TechLauncher is an initiative that enables Australian National University (ANU) students to develop and exhibit research and professional skills – all while bringing great ideas to life. Simply put, TechLauncher takes students out of the classroom and gets them working on projects. It brings a group of students together to work with a real client (maybe even you) and allows them to test different ideas, try different things and get a much better idea of what their future career could look like – without making an enormous commitment.
The program has been around since 2000, with client-student projects, including bringing a solar car project to life and tasks with the Australian Bureau of Statistics. In 2015, the program rebranded as TechLauncher, becoming larger and focused more on startups and creativity. ‘Entrepreneurship became more prominent with the rebranding as well as the student-led project focus,’ said convenor Dr Gretton.
‘Pretty much any business that you hope to have nowadays, whatever it’s doing, there’s going to be some technology component in there. Everything has a bit of computing under the bonnet.’
Matching students with real-life clients
Most TechLauncher students work with a ‘client’ for the first time in the program. Some students may have done internships; software engineering degrees, for instance, include an internship requirement. With TechLauncher, it’s not about having a boss tell them what to do. Instead, the students work in teams that operate like small to medium-sized enterprises (SME). As part of this, they need to manage relationships in a professional context, which involves negotiation around roles and deliverables. Dr Gretton said he often sees the moment when the penny drops and students begin to understand their roles and responsibilities within the process.
According to Dr Gretton, while most of the students involved in TechLauncher are (as you might expect) from computer science backgrounds, a small proportion are studying another discipline such as marketing, physics, computing, archelogy, computer, or law. ‘Occasionally, we’ll say have a music student from physics who’s studying nothing to do with computers – usually, it’s a project that has a specific intersection with their discipline,’ said Dr Gretton. ‘So it could be an archaeologist working on archiving or creating some evidence for a particular site and particular dig.’
Dr Gretton believes that, increasingly, education needs to be delivered in a public-private partnership. He believes it’s important that students work with their own clients. ‘TechLauncher is kind of a flagship,’ he said. ‘I like to promote the model where students select and engage with a client of their choosing and, as much as possible, own the relationship as they will upon graduating.’
And he encourages more people with good ideas to apply. ‘You don't necessarily have to be a computing expert, and the value you can give to the students with their professional skills, focus and the value that the students can get out of the interaction with you doesn't have to be improving their deep technical expertise,’ he said.
Projects that make a difference
Being selected as a TechLauncher client is a competitive process. While it’s an inclusive program that welcomes applications twice a year from the public – and from ANU students – the program receives high-quality project proposals. The TechLauncher team shortlists these proposals and then invites prospective clients to pitch at a Team Formation Night.
“I believe they are attracted to the wild new sort of blue-sky science”
I’ve been through several Team Formation Nights as a TechLauncher client. I’m always amazed and astounded by the creativity and complexity of the projects. As prospective clients pitch, students form teams of between 4 to 7 people and choose their preferred project to support. Not all projects will receive sufficient interest from students to form a quorum; projects need to excite potential students to be attractive. It’s fast and furious, with students listening to pitches and signing up – or not.
‘The students have their own ideas about what’s important and what they want to do,’ said Dr Gretton. ‘They can also attract their peers to work on something with them as well.’
According to Dr Gretton, potential clients are also competing with startups or companies that have serious commercialisation behind them. Several larger companies participate in TechLauncher and use it as a recruiting ground for trialling the best students. Many TechLauncher students end up securing jobs with their clients on graduation.
And there’s a diverse lineup of projects on offer, including ANU researchers who are seeking TechLauncher teams to work on attractive projects in emerging areas. ‘What typically attracts students to work with researchers is being at the edge of human knowledge, and I believe they are attracted to the wild new sort of blue-sky science,’ said Dr Gretton.
TechLauncher’s fantastic outcomes
The fierce competition for forming a TechLauncher team leads to quality Canberra projects receiving support. Dr Gretton said he finds it ‘quite astonishing’ how much value startups can build with a relatively small TechLauncher team.
‘Especially now that we are globally connected – there's that ability to have enormous impact and scale up quite quickly,’ he said. ‘You can get some really substantial outcomes. People can move into operations from these things – you can get some fantastic outcomes.’
When I asked him for standout examples, he paused before rattling off several, including:
PentaQuest: a gamification startup cofounded by Dr Kerstin Oberprieler, who at the time was a University of Canberra PhD student working on gamification;
Track-a-bull: an undergraduate student-led project that built an app for helping track cattle on a large cattle station;’
Tennis Neutral: an app that can be used by competitive tennis players to anticipate their future ranking based on game outcomes – it is distributed by the Nick Kyrgios Foundation and helps reduce anxiety in tennis players, especially younger players; and
Homeless Cash project: supported by the Boston Consulting Group’s Social Impact Committee with the projected IP assigned to the St Vincent de Paul Society, the project addresses the program of people in need seeking cash in an increasingly cashless society.
An entrepreneur with a love of research
Dr Gretton has served as convenor of Techlauncher for five years. During that time, he has seen 1,300 students come through the program. He’s not just a convenor: he’s an academic, researcher and a startup founder.
In 2015, Dr Gretton was one of five cofounders involved in setting up Hivery, a company that uses artificial intelligence to improve the profitability of retail organisations. The company was spun out of CSIRO’s Data61, which was then known as National ICT Australia (NICTA). Hivery was a collaboration between NICTA and the Coca-Cola Founders program, which provided seed funding.
‘We did some work to prove out the value of various AI technologies in the retail and supply chain space. And then it got to the point where it made a lot of sense to actually create a business around this,’ Dr Gretton said of the experience.
Hivery went onto secure substantial startup funding and has a range of clients – including a project working to optimize vending machines in Japan. Last month, it was named one of Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies for 2023. Hivery was named the 2022 Premier’s NSW Exporter of the Year and has been named as a finalist in the 2023 awards for the fifth year running.
Why leave a successful startup to go back to university?
‘I am very much about the research and dearly missed it,’ he said. Dr Gretton’s eyes lit up as he talked about some exciting research projects at ANU that opened up in 2017. ‘There were some really new and interesting things happening at ANU with respect to computing and artificial intelligence,’ he said. ‘Nowadays, I get to play with algorithms that may run on these multi-billion dollar instruments for us to do astronomical sensing and other things.’
Mentors and tutors
This semester, there are 255 students enrolled in TechLauncher, and the number is expected to rise to 350 by semester 1, 2024. In addition to clients, Dr Gretton is also looking for people who are passionate about mentoring and training the next generation.
Techlauncher also welcomes people with relevant skills to get involved in facilitating weekly team meetings as a volunteer or paid tutor. The minimum requirement is two hours a week (with an hour prep) over 12 weeks. Staff from larger firms regularly volunteer their time to engage with the next generation of technology superstars and share with students their knowledge and experience.
Clinics
Techlauncher is now doing a series of clinics where clients and their students can learn about entrepreneurship and teamwork together. Things like managing complexity and psychological safety. ‘It provided some interesting questions for the students, and sometimes the answers surprised them.’
One of the problems the clinic is designed to address is providing an avenue for teams in trouble to talk. ‘When a team is in trouble, historically the only person they have to talk to is the person who is somehow involved in their examination (such as me, the convenor, or their tutor),’ said Dr Gretton.,
‘Some students are not prepared to expose what’s happening as widely under that condition. One thing we do with the clinic is to offer total amnesty. The clinicians have nothing to do with marking and can work one-on-one with projects. So people can really just go back to basics – suspend disbelief – and think about the project, the resources, the timeline, and what interactions are occurring and where.’
ANU Computing showcase
The semester 2, 2023 ANU Computing Showcase will take place on 1 November. The event will showcase over 50 industry projects making a positive difference in the world. The event also provides an opportunity to network with early-career computing professionals. And yes, TechLauncher will be present at the event, although it is much larger than the program itself.
The event will be held at the Kambri Cultural Centre. Attendance is free with prior registration required.
Dr Gretton hopes that many TechLauncher teams and clients will attend, as well as prospective clients and facilitators. If you are interested in TechLauncher, it’s a great way to check the program out.
