The digital economy is paving the way for the rise of Indigenous startups. They offer flexibility, can operate anywhere in Australia and they're 100 times more likely to employ Indigenous workers. Could Indigenous startups be the answer to closing the employment gap?
Mikaela Jade is a rising star in the Indigenous startup scene.
A proud Cabrogal woman with a background in environmental biology, her company www.indigital.net.au turns ancient cultural knowledge into augmented reality using drones, 4D mapping and image recognition technology as well as cultural law.
But it wasn't easy when Jade first started out being both Indigenous and a woman.
"That still happens now. Done a lot of investment rounds talking to people about investing in the company and there seems to be a lot of dialogue about the fact that I am an Indigenous woman. I have a tech start-up in a remote areas seems to create a lot of conversation around the risk value of my enterprise, which can be really confronting."
She decided to do a diploma in business and entrepreneurship so she could at least speak the same language as investors.
Back in 2013 when augmented reality was still a new thing, Jade had a hard time getting funded in Australia.
She ended up cold-calling companies in other countries to seek support.
"And I gathered together a list of 15 companies and I called every single one of them over a 2 day period, which was really terrifying. I was really lucky in the end that somebody said yes."
Jade isn't alone in her entrepreneurship journey. In fact, a recent joint UTS and Charles Sturt University research found that Indigenous women are playing an important role in Indigenous enterprises with four out of ten businesses surveyed owned and operated by Indigenous women.
Jade's app Indigital Storytelling uses augmented reality to tell and preserve cultural stories. Creating a new kind of cultural knowledge business in the digital ecosystem posed certain challenges.
"That really raised questions about how we manage data. What kind of data do we create? Who owns the data? Where does it live? How do people maintain ownership of the data in a custodial setting?"
Half of Indigital's profits goes back to Country. It shows how startups with a social focus can enhance the social, cultural and economic prospects of remote Indigenous communities.
Perth-based entrepreneur Leslie Delaforce says there is a strong perception you need to have certain qualifications to get into startups but that perception is now changing.
"When I first started out, I didn't have a tertiary qualification but getting into startups, it doesn't discriminate against in terms of not having that piece of paper. The more and more aboriginal people that are actually adopting and leveraging technology actually support social and economic activities as well."
A proud Gumbaynggirr man, Delaforce is co-founder of Covocate - a human resources platform using data science to identify candidates with a cultural fit to organisations.
Delaforce says the unbiased nature of the technology has significantly increased Indigenous staff representation in one company.
"The easiest way to screen people out is to see if they have a tertiary qualification so there goes most of Aboriginal people straight away. The higher level of the recruiter, the more experienced of the recruiter, the higher level of bias. So we removed that bias all together by using blind hiring so companies undertake an assessment of profiles of what they're looking for in individuals and their values. We found a lot of Aboriginal people have values of working with these companies but through removing that unconscious bias and enhancing the blind hiring recruitment process they naturally increased their Indigenous representation by 28%."
With 60 per cent of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population under 35 years of age, Delaforce sees huge possibilities for Indigenous entrepreneurs in the startup sector.
"A lot of us are actually digitally connected compared to the ageing population and within that we're starting to see a lot of Indigenous startups that actually have a social focus so its creating that awareness within community about the richness of Aboriginal culture and also supporting those strategies in terms of closing the gap."
Based in Kakadu, Mikaela Jade's Indigital proves that Indigenous entrepreneurs don't have to be in urban hubs to succeed.
"I don't see remoteness as a barrier. I think it really increases our ingenuity and the way that we have to think through problems. We really have to think hard about who we are going to reach out to who we are going to work with and how we are going to work with them - that's why I started looking overseas for people to collaborate with because I guess it's the same barrier for me to work with somebody in an Australian city as it is to work with someone in the Philippines or in India. In that way, the internet forces you to have a global mentality about what you are doing and who you can work with."
www.barayamal.com.au - a new business accelerator program for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander entrepreneurs ran the first Indigenous startup weekend in Brisbane last year.
Its founder Kamilaroi man Dean Foley says Indigenous startups need the right kind of support to close the gap in the rural areas.
"There's massive opportunities. The challenge is obviously you need the education, and the experience, and the support network to be able to execute. That is one thing coming up with an idea, the hardest bit is actually making it work."
Foley says the emergence of Indigenous startups could generate vast economic opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
"Like in China, when the manufacturing thing came along, it lifted a lot of people out of poverty. It helped fix a lot of social problems. Indigenous businesses are supposedly 100 times more likely to employ Indigenous people obviously [will] have the more same positive effect within the Indigenous community."
Mikaela Jade thinks the cultural knowledge of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander entrepreneurs is their biggest value.
"I think the way that we think about the world and the way that we think about our past and our future is vastly different to non-Indigenous people. We have real value which in the cultural and spiritual but we also have vast economic value and these knowledge systems that we've been maintaining since time began."
