2021-10-12 P&E Agenda - Item 10 - Attachment 1 - Social Return on Investment Evaluation

Digital network facilitated through the Digital Hub



 Digital Hub members – anecdotal information (free text field)
 Would you like to provide any additional information?



 The Digital Hub bas been a welcoming community for me since my company was awarded an Accelerating Commercialisation grant in 2018. I regularly attend
 professional development events there and Chris Boden has been an amazing facilitator to intro me to opportunities within the community. In fact, Chris was
 alerted me to the Boosting Female Founders grant opportunity In 2020 and my company Champion Life Education was successful in receiving a $95 000 grant.
 It's my firm belief that the Digital Hub is a contributor to the infrastructure that will allow my company to stay Noosa based as we scale nationally and
 hopefully internationally.

 Excellent opportunity in Noosa to attract staff who want work and lifestyle in high tech industries. Much more likely to attract Overseas Candidates as well.

 I am a former founder, and I came up here after exiting in Melbourne. I intend to found another business, but I don't need to and I don't have time to yet
 since we are designing and building our house in Peregian Beach among other time sinks like investment management. However what time I do have, I spend
 thinking about what's next, another digital business (bigger than the last one). The hub offers hope that this is the right place to do it, that I can consult with
 the senior talent I need to get started. Once you are firing, once you have a core, the remote working changes accelerated by Covid make for some very
 interesting possibilities for starting a digital business. I also have potential space to do so at the hub. Noosa is great for very senior talent and Covid has
 accelerated that trend to remote work. In the interim, I have been connected up with other investors by networking events surrounding the digital hub. I don't
 invest often but working with others makes things more possible on occasion as there is a lot of work involved in any investment. I now own a portion of
 Australia's leading drone business due to networking with other investors at the hub. That drone business has considered setting up training facilities at the
 hub, we have held key conference calls at the hub. I still meet up occasionally with the same investors and talk about what we might consider next.
 I don't interact as regularly as I would like with the hub (because we are in the process of building our house in Peregian Beach), but the occasional
 interactions have been valuable. Besides connecting up with other investors, I get opportunities there to talk to technically skilled people, who assist with
 consideration of future business ideas. I see the hub as an important centre of gravity, and without it and the networking surrounding it, it's hard to hold
 enough people in orbit around an idea for long enough for it to gestate. Ideas can start out very fragile and often uninteresting, they don't have their own
 gravitational force to hold people together so that they can gestate in the minds of a potential team. However, in a regularly networked environment those
 ideas can be raised and questioned again and again by different minds and over time they may coalesce into something that has a bit of gravity itself.

 So far, have been heavily focused around digital marketing. Would be great to see the events and initiatives expand to encompass the end-to-end 'digital'
 lifecycle/ecosystem


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