FEATURE
Advocating for an enterprising future
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How do we shift the economic environment in Geelong from one that recognises that it needs to attract more investment to one that actually does attract more investment? That is the challenge before the newly appointed Executive Director of Enterprise Geelong, Dr Russell Walker, and we recently spoke to him about how he plans to met that challenge.
here is a tremendous sense of energy around Russell Walker and I walked out of his office with the very strong sense that this is a man who gets things done. Highly intelligent, focused, determined and a realist were other impressions of the man that has taken up the position of leader of Enterprise Geelong after an extensive recruitment process.
Whatever it’s past, the building is beautiful, and Dr Walker’s corner office has sweeping views over the bay – although at 10am, the morning sun made it so warm as to invite a morning nap rather than a business conversation. As we talked about Geelong’s economic development potential, Dr Walker waived his hand over the bay. “Avalon Airport – Sydney would kill to have a second airport like Avalon! We have so much embedded advantage here.”
While it’s true that Dr Walker is a Geelong local, his career has been both international and eclectic, and includes executive roles at the North Carolina Centre for Nanoscale Materials and Ireland’s National Microelectronics Research Centre. He has worked as a consultant to Singapore’s Gintic Institute of Manufacturing Technology and run laboratories for the United States Military. Having returned to Australia in the aftermath of 9/11 (he was in the States during the attacks and the Anthrax scare, a time he describes as bizarre) he became a Senior Program Advisor at the Victorian Government’s Department of Innovation Industry and Regional Development and most recently has served as Director of Strategic Partnerships at Deakin University. During his five years at Deakin, Dr Walker oversaw more than $160 million of investment, including the establishment of the Australian Future Fibres Research and Innovation Centre (AFFRIC), the Centre for Advanced Design in Engineering Training (CADET), the Centre for Automotive Steel Research and Innovation (CASRI), and the Sino-Australia Initiative for Automotive Materials and Technologies (iAMT).
W hile the City has evolved and grown in sophistication from the dark days of the Pyramid collapse and the recession years, the process of change has not happened quickly. That’s been okay, up until now. We’ve said it often and in response to a wide range of issues this year that the pace of change within the business world has picked up exponentially. With the operating environment for businesses changing so rapidly, all levels of government need to step out of the tangled bureaucratic systems of times past and be able to meet the market, and that includes local government.
Dr Walker brings a globally rare nexus of industry, business, research and academic experience to Enterprise Geelong, the entity that we first heard of as an election platform of Keith Fagg’s mayoral campaign. While it may seem like Enterprise Geelong has been around for many months, it has in reality been in operation for more like two months, but already moves are being made. First amongst these are streamlining the processing of business investment and development applications through the City. “I’ve seen some very successful regions around the world, and the majority of them don’t have anywhere near the imbedded advantages that Geelong has,” Dr Walker said. “A large part of what Enterprise Geelong will be doing, and should be doing, is articulating Geelong’s specific areas of competitive advantage and taking that message out to the world. We do need to be specific about it. There are a lot of economic development plans and waffle, which talk about engaging with global supply chains and being highly innovative, facilitating networking opportunities and that’s fine. But exactly what is it about Geelong? What specifically is it and what is the message that we need to be taking out to the world and how do we need to be taking it out to the world.” There is a sense of poetry in the fact that the body tasked with facilitating greater investment in the local economy is housed in the same building that was home to a body that once wreaked such enormous damage on the local economy, the Pyramid Building Society.
12 | BUSINESS NEWS
“From a City perspective, it’s not our role to generate jobs or provide investment, but we need Geelong to be an environment where those things can happen by themselves or through business investment. We need to make it easy for a business to increase its workforce, to make an investment or to come and establish in Geelong instead of any other region in Australia. To do that we need to be responsive and to let businesses be responsive. “We need to have the systems and the processes in place, whereby a business can be confident that if the external environment changes - if Ford Australia makes an announcement and a business needs to change its focus from supplying into Ford to supplying into the United States aerospace sector, for instance – that we won’t impede that. That gets down to a whole range of things that need to be in place that we don’t have in place at the moment. We need to be a facilitator rather than being an impediment,” Dr Walker said. “If you’re a business and you’re trying to respond to a particular market opportunity or specific client request and you have to wait five or six years for the practices to be put in place [at the City] to allow you to respond to that… well, how many generations is five or six years in the business world? The customer who made that request would now be set up in Guangzhou and they would have set up four years ago, dealing with a Chinese company.” Dr Walker said the City and Council is already moving to streamline business processes in what will be welcome news particularly for the city’s manufacturing sector. Geelong has long been a manufacturing city, it is still a manufacturing city and it needs to be a manufacturing city into the future. With a population boom looming, we need to be a city that makes and sells things to generate revenue. As transformative as the growth in health and education sector employment has been in the local economy, these service industries do not generate revenue, they largely just circulate it. This isn’t just a challenge for Geelong; it’s a challenge for the state and for Australia as a nation. “I absolutely agree. We need to stay a manufacturing city, because
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