Larissa Hursthouse
Areas of Expertise: R&D Tax Incentive claims, advising on optimal R&D structuring and assisting with Advance and Overseas Findings.
Larissa Hursthouse is a Manager in Deloitte’s Global Investment and Innovation Incentives team. Larissa assists companies with all aspects of R&D tax compliance and consulting including; preparing R&D Tax Incentive claims, advising on optimal R&D structuring and assisting with Advance and Overseas Findings. She has experience working with start-ups and small to medium size technology companies, through to large ASX listed entities developing novel software and cutting edge technology. Due to Larissa’s academic background in Law and Science, and her extensive experience within the biotechnology and technology industries, Larissa has the requisite knowledge to enable her to fully comprehend R&D projects undertaken.
Karl Dittko
Areas of Expertise: Intellectual Property, Patents, Registered Designs, Mechanical Engineering, Fluid Mechanics.
Karl is a registered Patent Attorney and Trade Marks Attorney working at Davies Collison Cave. His background is in mechanical engineering, specialising in computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Karl completed a Ph.D. at the University of Sydney and has experience lecturing in engineering and working as an engineer in the automotive industry. Karl now prepares and prosecutes applications for patents and registered designs, as well as providing advice on patentability, patent validity and infringement.
Frederik von Briel
Company: UQ Business School
https://www.linkedin.com/in/frederikvonbriel/
Caroline Yassa
Areas of Expertise: R&D tax incentive, Government grants, Investment
Caroline is an engineer in the EY Government Incentives and Investment team. She has extensive experience in assisting a range of companies, from early-stage startups to large multinationals, access funding to help accelerate their growth. She specialises in assisting startups with:
- The R&D tax incentive,
- Early Stage Innovation Company incentives (ESIC),
- Export Market Development Grants (EMDG)
- Commercialisation Grants
- State and Federal grant opportunities.
Neil Davidson
Areas of Expertise : Industrial Design, Commercialisation, Manufacture, Mechanical Engineering
After 15 years serving in the consultancy battlefield Neil has shifted campaigns to explore new opportunities in design and business. In 2014, Neil founded Clandestine Design Group, took over the Design Manager role for Innovan Caravans and Campers, and enjoys inspiring and challenging the next generation of product design graduates with AUXILIARY Design and Innovation School.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-davidson-55291024/
Anton Ruckman
Areas of Expertise: Product Strategy, Design Thinking, Market research, Materials research, Concept development, Industrial & Product Design Development with manufacturing in mind.
Anton is Founder and Design Director with over 18 years of experience in different fields of product design and creative industry and spent over 10 years in Hong Kong and China working and creating innovative design solutions for a variety of clients (start-ups, Fortune 500 companies- Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, Logitech and more).
Anton is a multidisciplinary designer with a holistic approach, who developed products across a wide range of sectors including Consumer Electronics, Mobile device storage and accessories, Wearables, Medical, Defense, Security, Appliances, Housewares, Toys, POS, Outdoor and Sports Goods.
He has extensive experience in both creative and managerial sides of the business along with a strong knowledge of mass production, materials and established manufacturing contacts in China.
Bruce McConnel
Bruce McConnel is the General Manager of Food Leaders Australia, bringing with him a wealth of experience in agribusiness management. Bruce holds a Bachelor of Agribusiness and Diploma of Export Management, and has spent the last 17 years in a range of roles across the Australian finance industry.
Before joining FLA, Bruce was Regional Manager (South West Queensland, Regional and Agribusiness Banking) for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and a driver of business growth across the Toowoomba and Surat Basin region.
Bruce has expertise in beef, horticulture, grains and cotton industries and their respective supply chains and export markets. Through his previous roles he has experience in Domestic and International Trade and led the Queensland agribusiness growth strategy for Commbank. He also spent time with the National Australia Bank, including working as their Agribusiness Strategy Advisor.
Bruce brings with him an extensive client base, expertise in business development, innovation and growth, and a broad knowledge of export.
Food Leaders Australia (FLA) is a sister entity of TSBE, and exists to support the growth of food and agricultural businesses to allow them to capitalise on new market opportunities, innovation and export.
Shaun Restorick-Barton
Area of Expertise: private and crowd-sourced capital raising and managing co-founder, director, and shareholder relationships
Shaun has been with Law Squared since early 2017 and oversees our Brisbane office. He draws on his broad corporate and commercial experience to assist, mentor and guide our startup, entrepreneurial and high-growth business clients to their full potential. He spends most of his time at Law Squared helping his clients to navigate the exciting world of private capital raising and managing their director and shareholder relationships.
When not working directly for his clients, Shaun can be found presenting to entrepreneurs at various co-working spaces and universities.
Having previously worked in general corporate and commercial roles, Shaun provides his clients with commercially strategic advice, with a focus on positive outcomes – he dislikes that often lawyers are dubbed as the ‘handbrakes to happiness’ and works hard to make sure he never slows his clients down.
Sara Pontoppidan
Areas of Expertise : Industrial Design, Commercialisation, Manufacture, Mechanical Engineering, Design Strategy
For the past eight years Sara has been working with leading Australian design consultancies to push the bounds of innovation. Drawing from a passion for future tech, cognitive psychology and emotional design she balances user, market and business needs to turn ideas into purposeful products and joyful experiences.
https://au.linkedin.com/in/sarapontoppidan
Campbell Newman
Campbell Newman is the Chairman of Arcana Capital, syndicating commercial property investment opportunities for sophisticated investors, a Director & adviser to a number of start-up technology companies and a regular commentator on SkyNews Australia.
He previously held the role of Lord Mayor of Brisbane from 2004 to 2011 and Premier of Queensland from 2012 to 2015 and was involved in the conception and delivery of major infrastructure projects.
Before politics, Campbell worked for six years as an executive for Grainco Australia in the grain storage, handling and logistics industry and also for four years as a management consultant.
He also spent 13 years in the Australian Army and served as an officer in the Royal Australian Engineers.
BE Hons (UNSW), MBA Financial Management (UQ),
Graduate of RMC Duntroon.
FIE Aust.
Peter Nink
Commercialisation, Manufacture, Electronic Engineering
www.linkedin.com/in/peter-nink-7850226
Peter Nink has been applying his engineering skills and unique way of finding solutions to a wide range of applications and situations. Frome locating a priceless sensor under the inland ice in Antarctica to finding the most efficient solution for a product design problem, there is hardly an interesting challenge that is not worth pursuing. The main focus however is to apply his skills to help his customers achieving commercial success through developing durable and reliable technical products.
Paul Hodgson
Paul Hodgson is General Manager, Innovation and Stakeholder Engagement (East Coast) for the National Energy Resources Australia industry growth centre. He works with stakeholders to increase the productivity, competitiveness and export potential of the energy resources sector, including innovative suppliers.
He has a Bachelor of International Business, a Master of Sustainable Development and has recently commenced a part-time PhD in Small to Medium Enterprise Succession.
He has spent over 20 years driving the global competitiveness of businesses, industries and regions, and designing and implementing strategies to improve growth performance through innovation and collaboration.
Tiah Goldstein
Areas of Expertise: Training, Facilitation, Entrepreneurial Education, Strategy development and implementation, Stakeholder Engagement, Sustainability Community Economic Development, Team Building, Social Enterprise Development, Business Development.
Tiah Goldstein is the founder of Yaazam, a consulting company focused on community, startup, and founder education and strategy creation. She currently runs a pre-accelerator program on the Gold Coast for first-time startup founders, as well as hosts the popular GC Fuckup night. Tiah has over 25 years of international experience in developing, facilitating and evaluating educational and professional development programs in the startup and business world.
Mike Avey
Mike is Managing Director of Pachira Capital Pty Ltd, a corporate advisory firm.
Best described as a “deep generalist”, Mike’s domains of expertise encompass: Commercialisation of innovations; Management and Governance; and Investment banking.
Mike completed the UWA Advanced Management Programme and has an AdvDipMgmt and GradCertBA.
He is an Advisory Board member of, Padmore City, a learning platform; Advisory Board Chair of Watch Smoke Alarms, an advanced fire-safety system; and Advisory Board member of Real Serious Games a virtual reality systems developer.
Mike is a long-time mentor to businesses, volunteering to the Qld Government’s Mentoring for Growth, Investment and Export programmes and to accelerators such as QUT’s Bluebox; Unearthed; and UQ’s iLab.
Mike took an Australian 3-D digitising innovation global, disrupting the aerial-surveying industry and setting up 25 distributors in 20 countries to deliver a CAGR of well over 75% per year for five years.
Over the last 40 years, he has founded and co-founded innovative ventures and provided advice to innovators, taking them from ideation to commercial reality. Not all were successful! However, the lessons of failure are very valuable too.
Mike’s governance experience includes having been Chair of three public-unlisted companies, and Director of several private companies.
Mike was CEO of Brisbane Angels Group and maintains strong links to the Queensland Angel Investment community.
Rowan Lamont
Areas of Expertise : Industrial Design, Design Thinking, User Centred design
Rowan has been referred to as a “design thinker who is good with a spanner” an Industrial Designer who cut his teeth developing products for the consumer tech, medical, and FMCG markets. Enjoying the creative challenges wrangling projects across these industries lead him to develop his expertise in Design Thinking and business strategy. As head of strategy at Designworks Rowan leads clients through user centred discovery to identify and implement meaningful business opportunities.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rowanlamont/
Cambell Smyth
Areas of Expertise : Industrial Design, Manufacture
I’m interested in the intersection of people + technology + product. Leveraging the tools of the designer to engage, discover and design with a user focus and a commercial mind. Primarily skills are in industrial design and product development, with experience in user engagement and opportunity validation. I enjoy working with hardware startups by focusing on and assisting with their product development phase from seed to scale. To help them manifest their ideas and contribute to their growth.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cambellsmyth/
Alex Gilmour
Areas of Expertise: Electronics design, electronics manufacture, product design lifecycle, medical devices and ISO 13485/ISO 14971/IEC 62304 compliance.
Alex Gilmour is an Electronics Engineer with more than a decade of expertise in electronics design and manufacture, ranging from rugged consumer equipment to implantable medical electronics. He helps startups to get their product from proof-of-concept through to scaled manufacture, with an emphasis on designing for low cost and high yield, and following quality and risk management standards.
Jason Hampton-Taylor
Areas of Expertise: High Strength Composite 3D Printing, Metal 3D Printing, Autodesk CAD Packages, 3D Scanning and LiDAR, 3D Print Farms, Digital Warehousing
Jason started his career in Graphic Design and Art over 30 years ago before moving to London in the 90’s. He became a technical sales specialist in London representing brands like Apple, Canon and Epson. Moving back to Australia in 2003 he started a giclee print gallery in Byron Bay. For the last 6 years, he has been heavily involved in the 3D printing and scanning space where he is currently evangelising for the commercial adoption of 3D Print Farms.
Sylvain Josserand
Energy & Resources professional supporting organisations in program delivery, advisory and mentoring capacities, Sylvain provides executive leadership and management support to businesses ranging from start-up’s to multinationals.
His passion resides in connecting the dots between industry domain knowledge and technology, engineering and mathematics/data science, strategy and targeted actions to enable the delivery of key business goals. He held a range of Drilling & Wells Engineering functions in the Middle East, South Asia, Europe and Australia, managing projects & operations in large scale developments and complex exploration campaigns, in onshore and offshore environments, for conventional, HPHT (High Pressure High Temperature) and unconventional oil & gas reservoirs.
Sylvain joined Origin in 2014 to lead the drilling engineering team through the delivery of the APLNG project. He then took on a Project and Program Executive role with a focus on delivering value in Field Development, Operations and Integrated Planning functions via innovation, business improvement and digital transformation.
Chris Conway Lamb
Chris is the founder of fabrikCNC, who make CNC machine tools for small businesses, enabling them to make precision parts in-house fast and cost-effectively and to get to market faster.
Chris is also a Director of ShapeLabs product design consultancy and Engineering Advisor at Iridium Dynamics, who are developing a unique long-range VTOL drone.
Talk to Chris about commercialising hardware, product design, mechanical engineering, assembling design teams, aerospace, mechatronics, CAD, machining and advanced manufacturing. And to buy a fabrikCNC milling machine!
Brian Hurley
Areas of Expertise : IP, Commercialisation, Manufacture
25 years experience taking design concepts through to mass production in startup and multinational companies. Experience in managing customer expectations in automotive, military and commercial grade electronics.
Ruth Drinkwater
Areas of Expertise : Marketing, Fund Raising, Commercialisation, Strategy
Ruth has 20 years’ experience in investment, product development and commericalisation of products and services where strategy – marketing, capital raising, business and product – is critical. She is a member of of Brisbane Angels and a founder of the Australian angel investor community. She is an experienced director and sits on several start-up boards. Ruth has managed investment funds, worked in Government, universities, and the private sector internationally.
https://au.linkedin.com/in/ruth-drinkwater-33a3612
Ben Wood
I have a broad range of experience in assisting clients with issues relating to corporations and securities law, with a particular focus on public and private capital raising, mergers and acquisitions, restructures and capital governance. This includes working with companies across the capital raising life cycle from start up to listing.
I have assisted clients across a range of sectors including technology, financial services, life sciences, food and agribusiness, health, and resources. This has included acting for ASX listed and large unlisted public companies, small to large proprietary companies, and early stage companies.
I am an active supporter of the start up community, mentoring and providing legal support to a number of Queensland’s incubators, including River City Labs, Creative Enterprises Australia and Fire Station 101.
I am a regular contributor to The Chairman’s Red Book Blog which is written for chairmen and directors of listed and unlisted public companies, providing an overview of relevant laws and regulations applicable to their roles (see below in publications).
I am originally from the UK and also admitted as a lawyer in England and Wales.
https://au.linkedin.com/in/benpwood
Alistair Smith
Alistair specialises in the preparation and prosecution of patent applications in the areas of physics, computer software, business methods and electronic devices, including their application to the medical, biotechnology and cleantech areas. He is experienced in providing advice on patentability, patent infringement and validity, as well as conducting IP audits and providing strategy advice to start-up companies. Alistair also regularly presents seminars on advising on issues surrounding IP protection, and its role in commercialization.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alistair-smith-b10413
Vibhor Pandey
I am a data culturist and a practising academic with more than a decade of experience in growth consulting, economic & behavioural analysis, and business process engineering.
Skills:
Marketing Research, Meta-data Analysis, Storytelling, Business Strategy, Economic Analysis, Digital Economics, Data-driven Decision Making, Machine Learning, and Visual Communications.
Technical knowledge:
Big data analysis using STATA, Python and R, Statistical analysis using SPSS, Q, STATA, R, Data visualisation using Power BI, Tableau
https://au.linkedin.com/in/vibhor-pandey-794a4b15
Christopher Biggs
As the principal of Accelerando Consulting, I help businesses transform problems into products. We apply the Internet of Things (IoT) to help your business run faster and smoother. We can help you plan your IoT product, select IoT technologies, or create custom solutions tailored for your situation.
I bring a rare perspective to IoT – I’m as comfortable with a soldering iron as a business plan. With over 25 years experience as an IT professional, I have been involved with the Web and Internet of Things since their inception, having been part of the team that made one of the very first web-enabled network appliances. I’m based in Brisbane, but travel the world to learn, teach and trade.
https://au.linkedin.com/in/chrisbiggs
Yaser Darban
A Business Development Executive with extensive international experience. With more than 12 years of experience in the ICT and technology fields including the Middle East, Southeast Asia and China. In consultation with my clients, I have successfully provided technical solutions in the fields of railway automation systems, security and building management systems, software and hardware for the banking industry. During these years, I have travelled almost 120 times to different countries for closing negotiations and participating in exhibition and conferences.
With my proven ability to gain the trust and confidence of clients quickly, I manage to establish reliable communication channels, assist with sales and contracts both commercially and technically, and establish new business and markets for my clients.
I was involved in different aspects of sales cycle, project management, quality control as well as logistics and payments. I have opened new pipelines for public listed companies to enter Middle East and South East Asian markets for the first time.
My qualifications include Bachelor of Information Technology majoring in Information System Engineering and an MBA, majoring in Human Resource Management.
https://au.linkedin.com/in/yaser-darban
Angie Hammond
Garnish Marketing is the Marketing Consultancy of choice for Manufacturers and Distributors in Australia.
Angie started Garnish thirteen years ago because she saw a gap in the market for small businesses to have access to a complete marketing service without the massive headaches and without having to hire an army of contractors to make their businesses work effectively.
Some 9 years ago we realised that we serviced mostly manufacturing and industrial types of companies and so this is now our niche target.
Angie offers herself out as a speaker, marketer, mentor and facilitator to large companies and industry groups who need some thought provoking guidance and support in regards to their marketing.
Angie’s no-nonsense approach amuses most and cuts through to deliver a powerful message that imprints on the audience. With over 18 years of experience working in the marketing field, thirteen of them on her own company Garnish Marketing, Angie has the experience and the stage presence to entertain, educate and make your audience think. Armed with a presentation that includes notes and worksheets, you can be sure that your audience will go home with a full brain, new ideas and work to do.
With a specialty in Marketing for the Manufacturing Industry Angie has some great stories to tell and can draw on experiences from this field. As a woman speaking about manufacturing you will find that her casual manner is welcomed by the male dominated audience but also has an ability to make the ladies feel included at the same time.
Whether you need the room warmed up or a keynote speaker, Angie has the ability and adaptability to fit the program, no matter where you need her.
Happy to MC or facilitate workshops as required, this versatile speaker, marketer and mentor really is the full compliment.
https://au.linkedin.com/in/angie-hammond-3311b14