The Victorian Minister for Small Business today announced LaunchVic, a $60m fund aimed to accelerate the growth of Victoria’s start-up ecosystem.

“We want Victoria to be the location of choice for start-ups worldwide, and LaunchVic will make it happen. The recent moves to Victoria from leading tech companies Zendesk, GoPro and Slack show that it’s within our grasp,” he said.

“We want to work with existing organisations in the start-up ecosystem to collaborate and build together a successful start-up sector that will help boost jobs, grow private investment and exports and further strengthen Victoria’s economy.”

As part of the announcement, we were lucky enough at Collective Campus to host Minister Dalidakis as he visited several of Melbourne’s hotbeds of innovation and entrepreneurship. We’ve been home to the likes of local and international startups such as Uber, General Assembly, Zomato, Coinjar, Drawboard, Parent Paperwork, Metaverse Makeovers, Suppertime, Booktopia, Seed Digital, Jobbop,Digital Affair and industry bodies such as Startup Victoria and Startup Grind Melbourne and it was a pleasure to have some of our successes acknowledged.

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Collective Campus was singled out given that we not only provide an inspiring, collaborative space for Melbourne’s startups to work from, but also play host to more than 150 educational, innovation-centric events each year, most of them free, across topics as diverse as IoT (the internet of things), 3D printing, virtual reality, data science, software development, digital marketing, enterprise innovation, design thinking, capital raising, women in tech and more.

We regularly run educational business building workshops to help sow the seed of entrepreneurship, helping budding entrepreneurs not only learn how to get their idea off the ground, but also how to quickly and effectively validate market appetite for an idea before over-committing time and money to something that doesn’t solve problems or add any value. This helps newfound start-ups avoid falling into the trap that most failed start-ups fall into - building what nobody wants to buy. More importantly, this approach conserves their resources and morale so that they can spend more time finding what works!

Leveraging off the success of this philosophy, we recently began working with large organisations by offering corporate hackathons and incubators, where they can not only learn how to move and act like a start-up, but accelerate the exploration of new business models and potentially disruptive innovations in a safe to fail incubator environment, free from the corporate bureaucracy. This also gives large organisations an opportunity to drive cultural change and tap into the resources, talent and unique perspectives of the broader start-up ecosystem, facilitating connections between start-ups and large organisations that prove to not only be complementary but deliver mutually beneficial outcomes for all.

This start-up ecosystem extends beyond our walls of course. Our partners and friends at collaborative spaces and hubs such as York Butter Factory, inspire9, The Hub and The Cluster have also worked tirelessly hard over the past few years, having played an absolutely pivotal role in helping to develop the local start-up ecosystem and provide conditions under which entrepreneurs are given the best chance of success.  

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The team at Collective Campus is excited by the growing appetite the Government has demonstrated for strengthening Victoria’s start-up ecosystem, and both welcome and applaud today’s LaunchVic announcement.