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While Australians have a standout capacity for inventing new products and furthering groundbreaking technological innovation, all too often locally-grown success stories have not been acknowledged.
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That’s one of the key take-outs of a discussion between Defence Connect’s Phillip Tarrant and Amir Farhand, managing director of Perth-headquartered mobile geospatial startup Takor Group.
"I think unfortunately, the problem that we've got is we think if it's from Australia it can't be as good as some tech kid coming out of Silicon Valley," said Farhand.
"Surely, his one is better than ours, or some fintech high-security product coming out of Israel's gotta be better than ours."
"And people don't know this, but Google Maps is from Australia, it's from Sydney," he added, illustrating the fact that most people were unaware that a whole raft of household innovations and technologies such as Wi-Fi originated in Australia.
Farhand also described how Takor Group’s own origins were in the mining and gas and mineral industry.
"I was going out in the field with satellite imagery … with a handheld GPS and all these other gadgets,” he added. "I'm saying to myself: 'why do I need all these different gadgets when I could just leverage my mobile phone or my tablet?'
"And that's how we started. But that's why, because there's so many smart people working in these industries in Australia, we just have to find a way to get those innovations."
