Of the many stories that can be told from our community of startups, I'd like to highlight three stories (names are fictitious to preserve privacy).

Blue completed her PhD in change management, aiming to improve her consulting career. After a workshop with UTS Startups she is launching a platform to provide the new approach she developed digitally to a large number of companies, instead of just giving her consulting work a boost.

Before joining UTS Startups Jose was working on a startup that, despite impressive efforts, failed. This took a toll on his emotional health to an extreme level. With the support of regular check‐ins from our UTS Startups team, and the support of our community, he has now launched a new startup focused on allowing Venture Capitalists to purchase insurance for the mental health of founders they are investing in. In doing so, the cost of some of this insurance is then spent on a program to support startup founders to receive preventative and intervention support.

Yasmeen was studying to be a neurosurgeon. In the course of this, she was diagnosed with a medical condition that would mean her hand tremors would prevent her from pursuing this career.

After engaging with the UTS Startups workshops and community, she is now instead pursuing a startup that provides customised 3D‐printed breast replacements for women who have had mastectomies, has been accepted into multiple accelerator programs, and is now in California for a Y Combinator shortlist interview.

The three surprising learnings I would point to are:

1: Entrepreneurship is not what people think it is.
For me, entrepreneurship is choosing what you work on for yourself, instead of being told what to work on for someone else. You can decide what to work on, and own what you create. You can be your own boss, set your own schedule, work on technology that excites you, and create the change you want to see in the world.
The world is created by entrepreneurs, but more people need to understand the true nature of entrepreneurship for its potential, and theirs, to be achieved.

2: Inspiring entrepreneurship is very different to teaching entrepreneurship.
Teaching entrepreneurship often results in a set of learning outcomes that are broadly applicable, but not particularly useful in inspiring people to pursue this as a career.
Inspiring entrepreneurship requires a different approach to teaching entrepreneurial skills, and both are needed for entrepreneurs to be created.

3: Individuals are smart, but systems are rarely designed intelligently.
Universities are full of intelligent and hardworking people, but rarely does someone have the opportunity to step back and design the ideal arrangement of components to achieve a new outcome for the university, and particularly someone that isn't subject to the normal incentives and career considerations that people inside universities typically are.

I feel that UTS Startups has succeeded because of this approach, and I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity and the foresight of the university in adopting this approach.

We have not made life easy for ourselves in 2020. The success and growth in UTS Startups has set a high bar from which to grow in the year ahead.

We have demonstrated a capacity to inspire and support student‐launched entrepreneurship at scale, and this now creates an opportunity to partner with organisations and individuals who would like to leverage and invest in this expertise to further expand our impact.

We can't yet talk about everything we have in store for 2020, but we are very confident that there is a lot of potential remaining in terms of the number of student‐launched startups we can help to start at UTS, and the proportion we can help to continue and grow.

We are also investing significant effort into a new program to engage with a large number of Australian high schools, in order to improve the understanding of, and enthusiasm for, entrepreneurship. In doing so, we hope to further expand the impact we can have to include those who are not currently studying at UTS, and who might never study at UTS.

2020 will be an incredibly exciting year for UTS Startups, and UTS as a whole as it continues to develop into the university for entrepreneurs, with entrepreneurs.