The University of Western Australia’s graduate school of management has just completed its annual venture capital program, which brings together teams of MBA students looking for real-world experience and inventors looking for smart commercial brains.
The University of Western Australia’s graduate school of management has just completed its annual venture capital program, which brings together teams of MBA students looking for real-world experience and inventors looking for smart commercial brains.
The 12-week program culminated in five student teams pitching for venture capital funding for their start-up ventures.
The selected start-ups, all based on real-life technologies or innovations, were in fields as diverse as electronic engineering, ethanol production, software and biotechnology.
The program delivers benefits for all the participants.
The inventors, including UWA electronics professor Lorenzo Faraone, received a detailed business plan to help with commercialising their venture.
The students got a grilling from a panel of venture capital investors, including Foundation Capital directors Rob Newman and Matt Callahan, who had a knack for looking beyond the slick presentations and challenging the fundamentals of each venture.
Potential investors were exposed to a cross-section of bright new ideas.
Business plans have been prepared for 41 WA ventures during the past six years since the course commenced.
Nine of these companies, including Dimerix Bioscience, Xemplex and DCN, have raised private equity, and Advanced Nanotechnology has listed on the Australian Stock Exchange.
The course is co-taught by Venture Positioning Services principals Andrew Duff and John Simmonds, who have designed it to be as life-like as possible.
This included having the final presentations in the boardroom of program sponsor, Freehills.
The course aims to show talented MBA students how to build a world-class career based in Perth while delivering practical services to inno-vative WA companies in their infancy.
Professor Faraone said a major challenge he constantly faced was the task of turning smart ideas in the laboratory into investor-ready commercial ventures.
He said the VC program helped to tackle this challenge and also helped to educate academics and engineers about commercial realities.
The students in this year’s VC program developed a business plan for just one of his technologies; the use of infrared spectrometry to achieve improved production control in the pharmaceutical industry.
Professor Faraone said a related challenge was obtaining funding for commercialisation.
He said the state government’s centre of excellence funding program was one solution to this problem, hence he has lodged an expression of interest to obtain funding for a centre for “adaptive multi-spectral optoelectronic sensing”.
The venture capital program was the second big challenge this year for four of the participating students.
Andrea Ford, Jeff Keating, David Pearson and Andrew Strika were part of a six-member UWA team that won this year’s Boston Consulting Group business strategy competition in Sydney.
