Professor Rowena Barret, Pro-Vice Chancellor, on QUT Entrepreneurship, Radical Opportunity, and Innovation.

Earlier this semester, I sat down with Pro-Vice Chancellor of Entrepreneurship Professor Rowena Barrett. Rowena is responsible for QUT’s Entrepreneurship action. We spoke about the value of learning about entrepreneurship, her trajectory to her position and how much further QUT has to go.

We met at the Gardens Point Foundry space, in B Block. It’s an open-plan working space, which any student can use and also houses the QUT Entrepreneurship staff. The Foundry is not where Rowena started at QUT, however.

“So, should we start by telling Glass a little bit about yourself, your role, and how you came to QUT?” I asked.

“Well, I only became the Pro-Vice Chancellor a couple of months ago.”

I congratulated her.

“It’s literally a title change, but it recognises the priority QUT has around entrepreneurship, the creativity in entrepreneurship is one of the priorities in the Blueprint – Blueprint 6 – and will remain a priority. It definitely builds on QUT’s reputation as an industrious and entrepreneurial powerhouse, which is a manifestation of ‘real world,’ which is what we do.”

It’s interesting to hear someone use the phrase ‘Real World’ without a tinge of sarcasm, but it seems that she genuinely believes in the concept. Rowena came to QUT 7 years ago, as the head of Management at the Business School.

“I’ve been in academia a long time,” she said.

She’s also worked at the University of Melbourne, Monash University, De Montfort University in England, and Edith Cowan Univeristy in Western Australia. Even before academia, her focus has been on education and managing teams.

“I first trained as a maths and English teacher and went back to uni and did a PhD in industrial relations, trying to understand work. My PHD looked at small firms and the way that work was organised in small firms, and if anyone studies management they know we talk about big firms a lot. My interest is in small firms, which are the majority of firms across the country.”

We talk a little about Western Australia, close to both our hearts as it’s where our families are. I tell her how different I found WA university culture in comparison to my experience in Brisbane.

“Especially that uni (ECU) in particular. Very much first in family, very much about aspiration – and its quite small. QUT, what have we got, 52/53,000, which is much bigger, but completely different again to Monash, where I was, that’s a huge multinational organisation with like 90,000 students.”

“For me, coming to QUT – I was in Peter Coldrake’s office on my first afternoon being introduced, and I just got the sense that this place was different.”

She tells me about when she first came to QUT.

“For the first two weeks I walked to work, and each day for those two weeks, I had a conversation with someone before I got to my desk. And it was more than ‘hi can I have a coffee’, it was a proper, genuine conversation and that’s when I realised there was something different about Queensland, and there’s definitely something different about QUT.”

This carries on to how teaching and management styles – she cites “real world” again – differ at QUT from other universities, and she says that it’s very aligned with her style.

“So I’m not the kind that says, “I think you need to know this so sit down and I’ll tell it to you” – it doesn’t work like that. The real value is in what students tell us and what we can create together. So I’m very keen to work with others to create things that matter to them.”

“So you’re championing collaboration?” I ask.

“Exactly. And so, QUT entrepreneurship, it started, its genesis was with students. So about 6 years ago there were students who came to me in the school of management, because we taught entrepreneurship, and we had the research centre in entrepreneurship. So they came to me and said there’s lots of things happening out in the community with entrepreneurship. There are start-up weekends, there are hubs, there are meetups.”

Rowena gets excited when speaking about these things. There’s a clear and genuine passion here.

“And they said, where is it at QUT? Where’s the space and the place and the interest? We had lots of pockets of entrepreneurship. But it wasn’t cohesive in any way. So from that, we have built over the years. We’ve worked to build things that matter to students.”

I ask Rowena why she believes entrepreneurship to be so important in a university setting, and what students stand to gain from engaging in these programs.

“Look,” she says. “I think it’s incredibly important because the future is uncertain. There are many alternatives for your career than thinking about ‘A Job’. You all have amazing skills, knowledge, experience, and a range of attributes that can be used in different ways, so we know that the likelihood of you going out and getting a job is high and higher out of some disciplines than others. You are not likely to hold that same job for the next 30 years. Jobs will change, roles will change.”

“No, I agree. I think there’s something about 7 average careers?”

“So entrepreneurial skills, that mindset, is all about giving you an extra set of tools and giving you the capacity to be able to solve problems, seize opportunity, and put together pieces that address your interests but create interest for others. So, entrepreneurship amplifies what you do in your degree. People move and change and entrepreneurship gives you the thread along the side of your degree to help you do that.”

“So what I’m hearing is a focus on agility, it’s not just about being a startup CEO,” I tell Rowena. “It’s about a skill set rather than a position.”

“So we at QUT believe that entrepreneurship is about the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you control. That doesn’t mean you need to be Elon Musk, that doesn’t mean you need to set up a business. You might, but you also may not. You might just pursue a project of your own or in someone else’s organisation. You might find a social challenge you’re interested in. There are many ways that the outcome of being a part of QUT entrepreneurship can manifest. So we take that very wide view of what entrepreneurship action can be and part of the reason that we do it at university is you never get another chance like this. That’s not true, some of us go back to university regularly.”

We both share a laugh in this, thinking of the perpetual students in university life.

“But you never get an opportunity like university to do these kinds of things. It’s a very particular time and space, your maturity is growing, your interests are convalescing around who you want to be and what you want to create.”

When I ask her what makes the difference at university, she says, “you are surrounded by difference, it’s an unusual melting pot and an opportunity to explore.”

We speak about the Foundry, spaces on both the Kelvin Grove and Garden’s Point campuses. The space we were meeting, at Gardens Point, are open plan, with lots of meeting spots. We are sitting at the high-top benches in the kitchen area, and students and staff bustle around us.

“Now, you touched on this earlier, but what would you say about people who have a misconception that entrepreneurship is only for the Business School?”

“It’s for everyone, we are all naturally entrepreneurial. When you see a problem in your daily life and you think – I could fix that, I could do something about that – that’s entrepreneurship. That is not discipline-specific.”

What really strikes me about Rowena is her social understanding of entrepreneurship. What she believes in isn’t defined in a binary context of dollars and cents, it’s in success, social elevation, and radical inclusion. She tells me about how entrepreneurship at QUT has officially moved into the Education portfolio, rather than the Business School, and how that’s made this aspect of learning a central one to all disciplines.

“Entrepreneurship is a team sport, it is at its best when there is more than one person working alongside you. That’s when you get greater solutions.”

She continues.

“That’s why we have spaces like the Foundry, it’s about the opportunity to come together and create something in a unique space, with the resources a team needs to build a connection.”

We turn from connection to accessibility, and I ask Rowena what her program is doing to further accessibility and break down barriers to entry for entrepreneurship.

“I feel like so many people think ‘Silicone Valley,’ ‘tech-bro,’ ‘Elon’ when they think about entrepreneurship,” I start with.

“So what we’ve done last year, we’ve put in $24,000 scholarships, 3 years in any QUT degree. The scholarship is versatile, it can be used on fees, rent, your business, whatever the student wants really. These scholarships come with a mentor, who can help you through your degree. We had 17 applications last year, and we had two places, but we ended up offering four because the quality was phenomenal. The recipients last year were four young women. One wrote a book while in high school, one makes custom clothes to fit every individual she makes for, one is looking into sustainable fashion, and the fourth was in her robotics club at school, which was dominated by men. But now, she runs workshops with young girls to introduce them to STEM and robotics.”

These young women were all school-leavers, and it’s clear that Rowena admires them greatly. She goes into detail about their ventures and projects, at QUT and beyond.

“It’s not just a white boy’s game in technology. It isn’t.”

Beyond QUT, Rowena is also a newly-appointed member of Queensland’s Innovation Advisory Council, a group designed to grow Queensland’s entrepreneurial action sector. Echoing out from QUT, I asked Rowena what the university’s place in Queensland area was.

“The five stakeholders working on this are government, corporate, entrepreneurs, universities, and risk capital. So, QUT and beyond are full of people making wonderful strides in research, who can have that research be developed, commercialised, brought to larger tables, and so forth. So my role is to focus on talent development, to understand what’s happening, where it happens and where the gaps are in education in the start-up space.”

She’s working not only at a university level but with the curriculum at all levels of education, from primary up. She mentions how schools and universities are working to create follow-through, to create pathways to bring the innovation from school programs into universities and business.

“So, where are the roadblocks here? What’s challenging your development of these spaces?” I ask.

“Two and a half years ago, QUT Entrepreneurship didn’t exist. So the first year was creating the infrastructure, and the next was about the program, but then we launched our program and two weeks later we all went home and we didn’t come back to campus until the end of the year.”

Rowena says that 2021 has been about rolling out the program again, helping to reach students back on campus.

“We do, however, have an issue with engagement. Frustrates the hell out of me. But, we have plenty of time, and the value for those that do engage with us is clear.”

“In a university, there’s a lot of things that happen very regularly; courses, lectures, semester one and two, exams, the flow for students is very structured. But, because we sit outside of that, we’ve had to innovate with how we engage with students. Our programs are very front-loaded in the beginning of the semester and the holidays.”

“It’s interesting that your projects are non-linear to the academic experience,” I say.

“It’s also non-linear in that it’s not ‘job’ focussed. It’s not an internship or a clerkship, it’s about skills and creation. Maybe that’s why it’s quieter at the moment, because we need to work on communicating that value.”

“There’s endless potential in the empty seats. To students I would say; please, come and sit down with us. We’ve got so much we want to share with you.”

As I leave the Foundry after my chat with Rowena, I regret not discovering the Entrepreneurship sector at QUT before my final semester, but I am excited for the students that will.

Em Readman
Em Readman

Em Readman is a writer from Meanjin who lives in Boorloo. She has been published in Aniko Press, the Suburban Review, Bowen St Press, Baby Teeth Arts, and others. They were an editor of Glass Magazine in 2020 and 2021, and won the 2022 Blue Knot Foundation Award with the Hunter Writer's Centre.

Articles: 64

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