Visions - Accelerating ideas

Hello there and welcome to another episode of Visions. We're just weeks away from the University of Melbourne's Open Day where students from across Australia will come here to the Parkville Campus to find out more about their future study options. But university is not just about classes, lectures, exams and essays, this week we talk to a student who spent his time here developing an interesting idea into an entrepreneurial enterprise. Home renovators know the problem well. You spend hours trying to match colours for your paint job and just when you think you've got it right, the first coat shows it's all wrong. So what if you had a way to get that perfect match, all via an app on your phone? George Dikic, with team members Rocky Liang and Paul Peng think they have the solution, and they're calling it SwatchMate. We had to come up with an idea for our final year project. The three of us so me Paul and Rocky had been friends for years at the university, since our first lab really and then we kind of sat around, threw a bunch of ideas together and then Paul realised that Summer before we'd started he'd been helping his parents renovate their house and they had to match a colour to a paint, I think it was a door frame that was chipped and they were trying to repaint it and then he went to paint shop and that typical process of finding a colour and that was quite difficult for him so that became the input for our idea so okay we thought "that's pretty cool". We've got about five or six painters working with us, a number of design studios in Melbourne, graphic designers, printing presses and that's been really crazy to hear their process and really understand what their workflows like in terms of colour and making a device that really works for them. So where we're at now is getting all that feedback in place and we're working on a kind of very miniature, tiny model with which we'll go to a crowd funding platform, most likely Kickstarter, and go directly to the public and the creative community at large and say this is a device that helps you interact with colour in the real world. We think it's great but we hope you do too. George and the SwatchMate team have been ably helped in their idea by the University's Melbourne Accelerator Program, now in its second year. The Melbourne Accelerator Program, or MAP as we call it, is a startup accelerator where we take six startups and put them through an intensive four month course to try and help them grow their business. So we provide office space, funding - twenty thousand dollars, mentoring and at the end of the program they also pitch to a room full of potential investors which includes venture capitalists, angel investors who tend to be high net worth individuals, corporations who look to invest in startup companies and other types of investors as well. Developed out of the Melbourne School of Engineering, and this year including the Faculty of Business and Economics, the program has taken it's cues from similar examples overseas. MAP is the first university run startup accelerator in Australia and there are a couple of other universities in Australia doing similar type things but not quite at the same level as what we're doing. We actually had a look at some of the universities in America like StartX program at Stanford and also privately run accelerators such a Y Combinator and Techstars and 500 Startups specifically in America and had a look at those startup accelerators to see what they were doing and try to incorporate elements of their practices into our program. When we were going to uni nothing like MAP existed and so coming out of university and taking a year and coming back to it because of the entrepreneurial pull back into the university that's been great and it's part of a bigger culture in Melbourne that's been growing and we're really, really happy to be involved in that and help kind of spur that on. George says that the program is a great example of what students can achieve outside of their usual study hours, and the outcomes can be truly amazing. Keep in mind that what you're learning shouldn't be applied to a particular job but potentially to something you've thought of that could really change things and help people.