Please Note: This is an archived blog post from June 7, 2018. For more recent updates, view the latest REMIX news, Agency case studies or homepage
REMIX has been collaborating with ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) and State Library Victoria on a pioneering new creative industries accelerator, the first of its type in Australia.
The initiative has been supported by Creative Victoria and across the next two-years the Accelerator will provide 20 creative startups and entrepreneurs with $20,000 each of seed funding ($400,000 in total). Alongside this, they will also receive professional development and mentoring throughout the intensive 3-month accelerator process designed to help refine and grow their creative enterprise concepts.
The creative industries are significant to Victoria’s culture, economy and society. Victoria’s creative sector is worth more than $22 billion and makes up approximately 8% of the state’s economy. To support this ecosystem, Foundry658 seeks to support a broad spectrum of creative entrepreneurs and ideas in a number of areas. Creative businesses that have the potential to grow and scale, concepts that will disrupt the creative industries landscape as we know it today. The support can also be used to help make existing creative practice or organisations more sustainable.
If you have an embryonic stage that you want to test further then an additional 200 creative startups will get support through a series of Bootcamps (designed to be a feeder into the Accelerator should the ides show potential). There will be four of these (each with 50 participants) running for three-weeks. Provided free of charge to successful applicants, they are designed to test and support the development of a proposed business project. The curriculum includes lean startup methodology, development (or refinement) and testing of a business plan, essential skills including digital marketing, scaling strategies and building teams as well as access to mentors who can provide tailored business development advice.
The accelerator follows on from the strategy development work, REMIX undertook to help create ACMI X (the world’s first co-working space for the moving image) which opened in 2017 as well as StartSpace, a new hub to support early state entrepreneurs that will open in 2019 as part of State Library Victoria’s $88.1 million redevelopment.
More on ACMI X here. More on StartSpace here.
If you are interested in finding out more about Foundry658 there will be a series of roadshows that anyone can attend which will take place over the next few months. For info on dates and locations of the roadshows as well as more general FAQs about Foundry658 just head over to the program website.
Foundry658 and Creative Entrepreneurship will be one of the the themes at the 2018 Creative State Summit (on which REMIX are collaborating on with Creative Victoria). There will be a series of talks from leading creative entrepreneurs such as Edward Hartley, Co-Founder of Bluethumb, Australia’s leading online art retailer. There are a handful of tickets remaining for this. More info here.
And finally … Fun Fact! 658 is the Dewey Decimal number for ‘entrepreneurship’
