What a great event, by the joint European chambers of commerce in South Australia. DutchSA and the other chambers welcomed nearly 200 guest at the National Wine Centre. A great event with guest speakers Susan Close, Deputy Premier of South Australia, Jessica Gallagher Deputy Vice Chancellor external relations from the University of Adelaide and Glenn Smyth, Chief Executive of naming rights sponsor Fragile to Agile. The event was further supported by the University of Adelaide, Oscar Hunt, Pernod Ricard Winemakers, Prohibition Liquor and a raft of companies providing great raffle prizes, like Flavio Outdoors! Check out the event photos below!

Join us for our annual Kingsday Celebration at the Belgian Beer Cafe and raise a glass to celebrate the King's birthday! Tickets for the event are $15 plus booking fee and include nibbles and a free drink for everyone dressed in Orange :-)

WHEN: Thursday 27 April, from 5:30pm
WHERE: Belgian Beer Cafe 22 Ebenezer Place, Adelaide (upstairs)

The third Euromix Event took place at the all new Luma Bar, at the Playford Hotel, where the joint European Chambers of Commerce, active in South Australia together with a large group of affiliated business people, academics and government representatives gathered for a successful evening of networking at the wonderfully upgraded LUMA Bar & Restaurant.

DutchSA's second Social Enterprise event was very popular with 76 attendees who came not just for great business networking and learning about the best known social enterprises in South Australia. The major draw card were the high profile CEO’s/founders from these social enterprises, who all happen to be young female entrepreneurs, awe inspiring self starters, brilliant communicators and magnificent influencers. Before we run out of superlatives we will give a brief summary of their presentations.
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First up was Taboo, the startup from Isobel Marshall (Young Australian of the Year) and Eloise Hall (youngest ever 40 under 40 winner) which sells female hygiene products online and through major retail outlets. Taboo donates its profits to One Girl’s education programs in Sierra Leone and Uganda that aim to keep young girls in school and help break the poverty cycle. When you are not the target audience, you can buy these products for girls who can’t afford them! Next presentation was by  Louise Nobes (also 40 under 40 winner) who started the 42 coding school in Australia. This school is free for students and brings an innovative collaborative, project based learning method that develops seriously good programmers that are in high demand. Louise credits the idea of starting 42 in Adelaide to DutchSA member Bert Verhoeven (Associate Professor Innovation and Enterprise). Finally, Carmen Garcia, who runs Community Corporate, presented about her journey that led her to combine her passion of organising community with helping refugees to land jobs in corporate Australia, and give them the full benefit of their skills, resilience and loyalty. We closed with a panel discussion, let by our own social impact warrior, John van Ruth and we learned that all of us can make a difference. Not necessarily by starting our own social impact initiative, but most certainly by engaging social enterprises in our companies, to take our corporate social responsibility and create lasting social impact.

This event was made possible by our event sponsors PWC (main sponsor) and Fragile to Agile.

That the 2020 global professional speakers convention was bound to bring some great speakers to Adelaide was to be expected. That two of them came straight from The Netherlands and willing to address the members of the Australian Netherlands Chamber of Commerce was a happy surprise. DutchSA joined forces with the Strategy Execution & Leadership Meetup to organise a breakfast seminar with Paul Ter Wal (The president of the international federation of professional speakers organisations and international human capital consultant) and Nienke Bloem (a certified Customer Experience consultant and international keynote speaker). 
We were delighted with 62 tickets sold for such an early morning event and attracting such a diverse group of company leaders, managers, consultants and interested people. It was a perfect mix for networking and discussion! Key take-aways from this Strategy Execution Seminar were:

• Talking about 'non-negotiables' in stead of the more opaque term 'values', when aligning employee and company needs, is a key driver for better employee engagement and creating business value - Paul Ter Wal
• Great customer experience only happens by design (because if it happens by accident, than bad experiences will also happen by accident) - Nienke Bloem

Many thanks to our presenters Paul ter Wal and Nienke Bloem, our DutchSA, the team at Stone & Chalk - Lot Fourteen, the Strategy Execution & Leadership team and Christo Photography for the event photography!

DutchSA initiated a Dutch event at the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge and co-organised this with the South Australian Tourism Commission, The Bridgestone World Solar Challenge Team, The Government of South Australia, the City of Adelaide and The Consulate of The Netherlands in Sydney.

​The focus of the event was fast tracking the renewable industry and all in attendance, not in the least the chief executive officer of SA Power Networks and the Minister for Energy and Mining, are fully aligned with this mission.

On 13 October solar power set a stunning new milestone in the renewable state of South Australia, reaching 80 per cent of total demand and accounting for more than 70 per cent of demand over four hours in the middle of the day.

​Design lead of Stella Era (Team Eindhoven) showing off the 4 time winner of the World Solar Challenge  Cruiser Class Competition.
Team Eindhoven also won the Smart Grid Pitching competition. Their car has 8 radars to allow itself to find a spot in the sun to recharge its internal battery using its 5 square meter (!) of roof top solar panels and act as a mobile charging station for EV cars running out of power without a fixed charging station in sight!

BARKUMA VIDEO
Below the video Simon Rowberry shared with us at the Innovation Series Event.

JOHN VAN RUTH's VISION
Finally, if you want to think this over and discuss with your political representatives, please find below a summary of John van Ruth's presentation.

We saw many familiar and new faces having a good time. The magnificent ​DJ Michael mixed all the Dutch hits and added to the great atmosphere. MC Nancy made sure everything went as planned and we hope the winners of the Dutch gift baskets will enjoy their prizes; Note to the Aussie winners: stroopwafels and appelmoes should not be mixed ;-)

​We look back at another exciting innovation event with a great turn out of roughly 70 people. For many attendees it was the first time they came to the Tonsley Innovation District and the tour of the facilities and the presentation by Tonsley chairman Terry Burgess answered a lot of their questions. It made perfectly clear why the award winning Tonsley Innovation District is nominated for no less than 4 Property Council of Australia awards, including national development of the year!

The company visit to Sage Automation showed how a company that loses its original manufacturing clients (like Holden and Bridgestone) can successfully reinvent itself as an international technology integration powerhouse. Andrew Downs, the founder and managing director of Sage Group, also explained how Sage staff was involved in designing their perfect workplace in the Tonsley Innovation district. A simple but not very common approach to mobilise all internal knowledge to make excellent collaborative decisions. We suspect this is a cultural trait that is at the basis of the success of Sage Automation.

Joe Thorp, the Chief Executive of TechInSA, the government incubator, gave a powerful overview of the capabilities and activities to create an ideal startup climate in South Australia and presented a large number of inspiring new ventures. Joe's presentation highlighted the 4 major capabilities driving innovation in the state, of which our DutchSA innovation event covered 2: the Australian Institute for Machine Learning and the Tonsley Innovation District. Joe mentioned taking a lot of useful learnings from his visit to Amsterdam which took deliberate steps to become a prime hub for startups and investors.

One of the most revered innovation districts in the world is Brainport in The Netherlands, centred around the Philips high tech campus in Eindhoven and now housing 100's of startups and multinationals like ASML, Intel, IBM, NXP, Bosch, Boeing, DAF, TNO.

• 90% of silicon chips worldwide are produced with equipment originating from Brainport.
• Brainport produces 7 times more patents per capita than the number 2 global innovation region (San Diego).

Tonsley is very similar in starting conditions and size to Brainport a few decades ago and it is a good idea to keep a close eye on the triple helix approach that made Brainport the smartest region in the world.

When Brainport set out the ambition to also create the smartest urban district in the world, they asked Malik Institute from Sank Gallen in Switzerland to help them with the complex decision making process to develop a holistic and effective smart city strategy in a few days. Dr. Nam Nguyen is the Adelaide based APAC director for Malik Institute and also a visiting research fellow of the University of Adelaide. Nam presented the Brainport smart district strategy development using the Malik Syntegration process.

The last talk was from professor Anton van den Hengel, the director of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning. Anton was born in The Netherlands and migrated at the age of 4 to Adelaide. He returned to live and work in Amsterdam a few years ago, but the summit of his career is the machine learning institute he is heading up based in Adelaide. in the old Royal Adelaide hospital building. The institute is one of the most renowned in the world and has a massive potential to spin off new businesses based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Anton's talk was about getting us to understand the basics and importance of machine learning, which was highly successful. Many are now considering a change of careers.

As always the networking section of our event was great and many new connections were made and old ones refreshed. Thanks all for attending and hope to see you back in the next edition!

Sponsors
This event was made possible by our event sponsors Mindavation and Malik Institute!

Flavia Tata Nardini and Suhit Anantula//Humanomics were the absolute stars in a sold out DutchSA event last night. A vast and diverse group of South Australians representing many industries and backgrounds had gathered in the Mayfair to enjoy a fantastic show, put up by Flavia and Suhit.

Flavia spoke about her journey as a migrant, starting up a space business and leading the creation of a new industry in South Australia and a national space agency for Australia. Flavia's business develops large volume low cost nano satellites for communication between devices (the internet of things), which will be a key driver for the 4th industrial revolution. We learned what it takes to launch and fund a successful startup and how their grand vision of affordable data communication at any place on earth, will ultimately impact the protection of the great barrier reef and reduction of waste in supply chains.

Suhit the showed how large organisations can find their ability to innovate again. We learned about structured ways of developing new business models by collaborating with your ecosystems and even competitors. Both stories of practice and theory combined brilliantly and the session was informative, fun, inspiring and uplifting.

It takes only a few people to change everything. It is all possible here in South Australia! We went home full of energy and new ideas.

We thank our speakers, volunteers, sponsors Mindavation and BusinessModelsInc, and our great audience to make this event possible. As one of the attendees summarised after the event: It was a fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable night, looking forward to the next one now!

The DutchSA Kingsday event was kindly hosted by the German Club this year and we must say their building never looked better. Orange inside and the red white and blue on the front!

Hosted in the newly renovated Mayfair hotel the DutchSA forum on Financial Planning for Migrants had a very good turn-out. The relevancy of the subject is clear: most migrants have little idea of financial challenges lying ahead in the different stages of life in Australia: housing, kid's education and retirement. But it will impact their lives hugely.

Three industry experts shared their vision and advice. 

Nick Reade, CEO of BankSA, drew the big picture laying out different strategies for different phases of life. He also touched upon the business climate in SA for the self-employed migrants. 

Arthur Kallos, Investors Direct, made clear in his presentation that for most of us our Super will be way too little by the time we retire. Key to his advice is cash-flow: how to get in under control and how to align your investments with your cash-flow. 

Glenn Sterrey of Bentley's Wealth Partners highlighted the challenges in finding a truly independent Financial Planner. His presentation then focussed on the pros and cons of securities versus property investments, and the importance of having an income insurance.

An open forum discussion with the three speakers concluded the event, leaving the participants with lots to digest. Financial planning and investments is a complex field that most people gladly avoid. But can really we afford to keep our heads in the sand?

This morning, DutchSA and BikeSA organised a breakfast seminar around the economic benefits of cycling. Many thanks go out to the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands for sponsoring the delicious breakfast. A select group of 20 influential leaders of both local business and government organisations gathered at Chianti in Hutt Street, where they were invited to learn more about why cycling is good for the economy.
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Dutch expert on bicycle infrastructure Arie Vijfhuizen presented about the benefits of cycling. Everyone probably knows that riding is healthier than driving, but few realise that cyclists spend more money than people in cars! Although cyclists spend less money per visit to the supermarket for instance, they make far more visits per week, spending more money overall. Due to the mobility that cycling brings, these shoppers are more inclined to make an impulsive purchase in the shop down the road.

The economic benefits of cycling are massive. BikeSA CEO Christian Haag pointed out that an average commute by bike equals a $21 benefit to society. A large proportion is due to the reduced pressure on the health system. Another significant contributor is the shopping behaviour of cyclists mentioned above. 
The Mayor of Prospect, David O'Loughlin, noted that they are well aware of the economic benefits of cycling over driving, and pointed out that on major roads they reduced the maximum speed from 60 to 40 km/h, making the roads safer for the many cyclists on their daily commute. The council now notices that the shops along these roads don't suffer from the unpopular speed restrictions for drivers. On the contrary the area has become a more social and popular shopping precinct.

A constructive discussion followed, with several guests acknowledging the benefits of cycling, but also acknowledging that some councils are more responsive than others in accommodating cyclists. The consensus was that the benefits of cycling make a strong business case for improving the infrastructure for cyclists. More time and effort is required though to convince the public and the councils of the economic benefits of cycling.