Goondiwindi businesswoman Julia Spicer OAM has just wrapped up her final week as the fifth Queensland Chief Entrepreneur after 18 months in the role.
SmartCompany spoke with Spicer in late November 2022, days before she was due to take over the voluntary position from then-outgoing chief entrepreneur Wayne Gerard, with the businesswoman sitting down with SmartCompany again this week to reflect on the past 18 months.
Back in 2022, Spicer said she would focus on building a sustainable and resilient innovation ecosystem, helping businesses to grow and scale at a sustainable rate.
Spicer has founded and grown several successful regional businesses, including Engage & Create Consulting which she launched in 2012 in Goondiwindi in Queensland and was awarded the Order of Australia in 2022 for service to the community through a range of organisations.
As well as an active member of Queensland’s Innovation Advisory Council (IAC), Spicer was elected as a Goondiwindi Regional Council councillor in 2024, with a water, sewage and local laws portfolio, and also sits on the board of Australia’s Economic Accelerator.
Spicer said Queensland has a diverse innovation ecosystem across the state.
“We have people working to solve really big challenging problems, which is really exciting because I genuinely think Queensland can solve global problems and I think we’re seeing that in areas such as food and climate tech,” she says.
“We’re seeing it in some of the social enterprise models of business that are coming through and I think we’re seeing it in some of the work that’s happening around space, you look at the work that Gilmour Space Technologies are doing up at Bowen and some of those places.
“So I think we’ve got a really diverse ecosystem and I think we’re really seeing that connectivity happening across the state where regions and southeast Queensland are working together to really solve some of these big global challenges that we’ve got.”
Spicer said there were so many highlights during her time as Queensland’s Chief Entrepreneur.
“Some highlights for me were some opportunities that we had through a climate tech project that we ran with Climate Salad and that was supported between Advance Queensland, Department of Environment, Science and Innovation, and Trade and Investment Queensland,” she told SmartCompany.
“So those three departments came together to fund a climate tech programme and there were three pieces to that.
“There was a regional showcase, so we got on the road and we went regionally to see what was happening in climate tech and allowed businesses to pitch and took investors to the regions.
“We had a female founder element to it. So we ran a programme specifically for women looking in startups looking at if their startup was linked to climate and sustainability solutions.”
Spicer said they also took delegations to overseas conferences.
“We took a group to the Verge Climate Tech Festival in America and we took a group to the Hello Tomorrow Global Summit in Paris,” she says.
“Climate change is a global problem and what we found with the research is that really our climate industry needs to be looking global straightaway. So connecting them at that global level, pretty much from the beginning, was really important.”
Another highlight for Spicer was some of the work that she was able to witness in First Nations communities.
“It’s really important to me, even though I’m not chief anymore, that we are inviting anybody to the table around this, that we’re inviting people into the innovation ecosystem,” she says.
“We did a lot of work with First Nations communities, and we also did quite a bit with multicultural groups to ensure that everybody felt welcome at events and everybody understood where they fitted into grant programmes.
‘So I think the other highlight for me was being able to work with communities across Queensland to make sure that we were including as many people as we possibly could.”
Spicer said one challenge is that Queensland is a really big state.
“The needs of startups and businesses are really different across the state,” she confirmed.
“Government programmes really need to ensure that they are testing their ideas with people in the regions. So, we always assume positive intent and so we have some really good programmes being considered or developed.
“What we need to always do is ground proof that and make sure it’s going to get us the outcomes that we want in the regions we think we’re going to be delivering it in.
“That’s a real challenge. We just need to be careful when we are developing any of our programmes, any of our incentives or any of our funding support.
“It needs to be developed with and by the people that it’s serving, rather than to and for them because what somebody needs in Brisbane is really different to what somebody needs in Cairns or Mount Isa or Emerald or Goondiwindi.
“So we are potentially missing the opportunity to support people, if we don’t ground-proof some of that activity.”
Spicer added that it was important to support women-owned and founded businesses.
“The other challenge I think we’re going to constantly have is there is still a massive imbalance between investment into female-led businesses and investment into male-led businesses,” she said.
“Some of the research shows it could add up to $1 billion dollars more into the Queensland economy and about $44 billion dollars into the federal economy if we invested in women-led businesses at the same rate as we do the men.”
Spicer said small businesses were still facing many ongoing challenges in the current economy.
“I think the needs of small businesses are still what we see in the newspaper, access to skilled talent, understanding their finances and that piece around financial literacy,” she says.
“Cash flow is still a challenge. It brings people unstuck.
“A lot of people want to sell into government. So this piece around procurement and people understanding how they can sell to large customers, whether that’s government or corporate.
“There’s still some challenges around a couple of those areas that we saw often.”
When asked about the future, Spicer said she has started a new business.
“It’s called the Connection Table and it’s about bringing regional, rural and remote Australian leaders to the decision-making table,” she says.
“It’s been amazing to be a regionally based chief entrepreneur and I think I brought some really different observations to the table when I’ve been working with government people.
“But I’m only one person.
“The connection table is about bringing all of the alumni and graduates of all of the leadership programmes from across rural, regional and remote Australia into a platform, so it’ll be a tech business.
“I’m looking at how we extend their reach, their profile and their opportunity to really be part of decisions that are getting made across Australia that impact all of us.”
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