7 minute read
31 Sharon Hunneybell
from Cove magazine
WIRED TO INSPIRE
Sharon Hunneybell’s passion for Innovation and Technology is equalled by her commitment to helping others in the sector.
AS THE FOUNDER of the Gold Coast Innovation Hub and a driver of the Innovation and Technology sector in Australia, Sharon Hunneybell hopes to inspire others to forge successful careers in the IT industry, especially on the Gold Coast.
Having worked as an IT business analyst and a project manager in Melbourne, Sharon moved to the Gold Coast 12 years ago and soon discovered there was a gap in the market for people with her skillset.
“I landed here with a corporate IT background and realised fairly quickly that there just weren’t a lot of local jobs in that field,” she recalls.
“In response to that, I ended up taking a contract with a company in Sydney, working remotely from home and commuting down there when needed.
“Every couple of weeks I'd be on the Monday 6 am flight and what I started to notice was that the plane was full of commuters that were raising their families here because they wanted their children to experience the wonderful lifestyle but they were earning their money in Sydney.
“It seemed crazy to me that we had all these brilliant minds that called the Gold Coast home but Sydney was getting all the economic benefits.”
Around the same time, Sharon became aware of a growing global trend of startup incubators and accelerators that provide seed funding to early-stage, high growth businesses.
“I saw that and I started thinking to myself, ‘this is what the Gold Coast needs’,” she says.
“If we just had four or five of these globally significant software companies that were set up to bring in dollars from overseas and create good, knowledge-based technology and business jobs locally, then we could start to change the narrative that the Gold Coast was just a place for recreation and Sydney was the place for business.”
Sharon began running startup events and hackathons with a range of Gold Coast community organisations to build awareness and engagement with the technology and startup sector before taking on a role with a Gold Coast startup company called Opmantek.
“They had a freemium model, which basically means you have a free product that lots of people download and then you aim for a percentage of those free users to buy upgrades or add-ons,” Sharon explains. Words Rhonda Oxnam
“It was an amazing opportunity and a great learning curve.
“I’d helped lots of businesses go from an idea to getting their first few customers but there weren’t too many businesses on the Gold Coast at that time that were going from a few customers to hundreds of thousands of customers and international expansion, particularly in the tech and startup realm.”
Not only did Sharon learn from the experience, but she was also inspired to help other businesses to learn and grow from the journey.
“Danny Maher, the CEO of Opmantek and I would often talk about the idea of an innovation factory,” she says.
– Sharon Hunneybell
"When the Queensland government announced funding for regional innovation hubs that could help bolster the innovation ecosystems, we knew it was time to bring the idea into reality.
“We started bringing together the partners for the project and forming a collaborative action plan.
“We announced our concept for the Gold Coast Innovation Hub in April 2017 and we were recognised as the successful party for that funding in July the same year.”
Operating on an ethos built around collaboration and providing support for startups and innovators, the Hub now has thousands of members globally.
“When COVID hit we were in a very fortunate position because we’d noticed the previous year that there were quite a lot of companies around the Gold Coast that were opting to set up offices outside of the main business districts or were choosing to work from home, but still wanted support for their business so we had created an online virtual platform.
“We were able to move our entire member base across to virtual membership and it was basically business as usual … our workshops and networking events just moved to Zoom.
“We also had a number of businesses that pivoted due to COVID and created completely new but much more sustainable business models during that time.”
The Hub is now focussed on the Play accelerator, which runs across three themes the team believe the Gold Coast is best positioned to support from a technology standpoint … Sports, Hospitality and Tourism and Media, Film and TV.
“We work with different corporate partners across those industries to be able to support the startups that are working in those fields.”
Sharon has also co-founded a number of youth innovation and technology initiatives aimed at the younger generation.
“One of my colleagues, Sam Winter, and I noticed an increase in teenagers joining startup events, so we created Startup Apprentice, which we've been running for eight years now,” Sharon explains.
“We basically went into high schools and took over their Maths, Science or Business class for a term and worked with the students to help them come up with ideas, form teams around those ideas and build them up, then we’d have a Shark Tank style pitch event at the end of the term.
“It was amazing seeing the ideas that came out of the school students. Our programs are very hands-on and a lot of the kids that were not engaging well with the traditional curriculum delivery really reacted well to this practical application of the information taught in schools.
“Suddenly creating a spreadsheet and solving mathematical equations made sense when they were trying to develop a forecast for how they were going to sell their product.
“Delivering a presentation took on new meaning when they were trying to sell their idea to a panel of investors.
“It was a great way of translating what they were learning in school and showing how it might apply in the real world.”
In recent years Sharon has also been putting a lot more emphasis on trying to make IT interesting and accessible for girls who might like to pursue a career in engineering or technology.
“Only a quarter of enrolments in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) related subjects are female but when you look at the growth statistics and which industries are going to become more in demand and are going to have higher pay levels, they are the roles that are there,” she says.
In order to address this gap, the busy mother of two has also started to commercialise one of her passions.
“I am enormously creative as well as loving technology,” she admits.
“At home I have a studio with every type of handcraft and a couple of years ago I started playing around with wearable electronics, using conductive threads and sensors to make a garment interactive – you can have a t-shirt that lights up, a hat that sets off a buzzer when it’s time to reapply sunscreen, that type of thing. "Every school and every level of government has been trying for the past 20 or 30 years to drag girls into the computer labs and I started to think 'What if we bring the technology into the things girls love to do’.”
Sharon and Sam have now packaged up the idea and created Tech with Style, a series of workshops to encourage more females to experiment with electronics and programming.
“The girls loved the workshops, they found them engaging and it really helped them to reframe their perception of what electrical and programming careers might look like. I would love to be able to keep building out those programs.”
Sharon also has plans to introduce fashion-tech education for older people and other participants.
“I think that there's an excellent opportunity for seniors who may be prolific seamstresses to be able to learn a little bit more about technology and engineering in the same way.
“And I want to do mainstream workshops, like wacky Christmas shirts, for your everyday craft lovers as well.”
Having been named one of Australia’s 100 women of Influence by the Australian Financial Review in 2018, Sharon is not just growing and strengthening the Innovation and Technology sector in Queensland, she is shaping the future of many generations to come.
