UNE Business School launched the inaugural Nucleate program on 12 November, inviting students from across the university at both undergraduate and postgraduate level to take up an opportunity to enrol in a 6-week unit, boasting a 2 day intensive with the opportunity to work with industry leaders and help solve real-world business challenges.

The Monday evening event invited staff from UNE to join the 35 students, sitting in on a panel discussion around a real-life example from Oz Medicann Group. Students heard more detail around this year’s focus on the medicinal cannabis industry challenge: “How might we build this new industry in Australia so that there are maximum benefits for Australian patients?”

Students then took a design thinking bootcamp-style intensive for the following two days, learning invaluable problem-solving skills that formed part of their assessment tasks.

Medicinal Cannabis is emerging as a fast-moving industry in Australia with the capacity to create a major new export market and jobs within regional areas. OzMedicann Group is a patient-centred health care company at the forefront of identification, discovery and development of new technologies in the Medicinal Cannabis industry.  OzMedicann Group has a research relationship with UNE and is proud to be introducing students to a deep dive into this emerging industry through Nucleate.

At the evening event, students heard from a panel of experts that included John Leith, Founder and Chairman of Board of Directors, of Oz Medicann Group and Kerrie Field, EduCann, Leadership Team of Oz Medicann Group; Greg Lawrence, Service Leader Economic Development, Marketing, Armidale Regional Council; Dr Ian Kamerman, Principal, Northwest Health and member of the Board of the Rural Doctors Association (NSW) and Professor Lewis Kahn, Associate Dean, Research – Faculty of Science, Agriculture, Business and Law, UNE.

This variety of viewpoints equipped students with a broad understanding of their challenge question, a focus of the subsequent 2 days of design thinking intensive with facilitators Alice Howard-Vyse and Tida Tippapart. Students jumped straight into the design thinking process, learning about Lean Startup methodology as well as the importance of empathy to gain insight into the challenge being addressed. The class took students through the ideation process, developing Unique Value Propositions and the art of prototyping.

The transferable skill sets gained by students from a wide range of degrees across the whole university sees UNE growing a cross-disciplinary entrepreneurial mind-set with benefits reaching far beyond assessment tasks. We look forward to sharing more outcomes from Nucleate 2018 as the unit progresses.

Find out more about Nucleate via une.edu.au/nucleate