George Freney is fresh to the Flinders University council this year but an old hand at Flinders values, as a successful entrepreneur keen on encouraging an innovation mindset and growing SA’s business-building capacity.

It’s always interesting to understand how people get started as an entrepreneur. Can you describe your own journey?

I have always been entrepreneurial in the way I think and go about things, either in my own pursuits or helping people with their ideas. My chemical engineering degree was valuable in learning how to think, how to tackle large problems, break them down into smaller pieces and go about trying to solve them. But I never worked in the field. The moment I finished my studies I was busy either starting my own businesses or helping other people with theirs.

The first company I started was in spring water. We ended up in court with Coca-Cola. We had a small victory, so that was a good lesson that the big guy doesn’t always beat the little guy!

I then worked in furniture manufacturing, Marshall Furniture, as business analyst then general manager of the commercial division, where I helped them sell the business to a South African company. After that I worked for the Shahin family at the beginning of their On The Run journey. That was brilliant, a real experience working for one of SA’s most impressive entrepreneurs.

Then I moved to Sydney with a management consulting firm and met a guy who had an idea for a new travel technology application. This was in 2006 before the iPhone. He had this idea for large companies to track their travellers around the world. I seed invested, he was based in London, and I started to run the operations in the Asian region.

The next year the iPhone was released, which marked the beginning of a rapid acceleration in how technology impacts experiences.

We built and sold that company, and that technology now forms part of SAP’s (a German software multinational) suite of products.

There’s no real common thread in industries there, so it’s been more about the process of creating, finding opportunities and adding value – wherever that may be?

Probably, yes. With that whole entrepreneur mindset is not being afraid to fail – which is a normal part of the entrepreneurial journey but something that in Australia, and I think particularly South Australia, people are not comfortable with.

In America failure is far more accepted as normal, and part of my mission is to change that cultural view. Unless people feel comfortable trying and failing they don’t try, and if they don’t try they don’t evolve.

A common link to my work recently is understanding how consumers interact with technology to achieve outcomes more efficiently. We were right there at the beginning of a major shift in how people react with technology and I got really hooked on tech and entrepreneurship as part of that process.

What bought you back to Adelaide?

We moved back last year for family reasons. That followed a five-year journey founding a company called Booodl, which was focused on helping consumers with digital devices better engage with physical stores. We raised $10 million and reinvented that product maybe 10 times, but couldn’t raise the large amount of money needed to really launch it.

My wife and I have three children and decided to move back to Adelaide at that point, mainly for the great lifestyle here.

What interested you in joining the council of Flinders University?

I like Flinders University’s alignment with what Matthew Flinders stood for. I like the community of students trying to achieve better than where they currently are in life. The sentiment of Matthew Flinders, the whole university culture, reflects my own values and culture.

Flinders University plays an incredibly important role in South Australia. Our economy and society need more entrepreneurship, and in this context it’s necessary to consider how governance in large organisations can foster and encourage this.

Universities play a key part in helping change the culture of entrepreneurship. If we can get these things right and encourage more capital into South Australia’s eco-system, then we should start to mature and entrepreneurship will become a lot more prominent.

What does a normal day look like for you?

Outside of my board roles I have a boutique advisory firm called 11point2, named after the exit velocity, in km per seconds, to put something into outer space.

The philosophy behind that is if you have an idea you are trying to test, if it can’t reach that critical point – if it reaches say 11.1 in the space example – it fails. We help entrepreneurs and companies validate their ideas and help make them successful, or stop them before they expend too much time and resources on something that won’t hit the mark.