[00:00:00] Speaker A: My top tip to companies that are being acquired, think about it like a reverse takeover. Think about you and your smaller organization actually having an effect on the leadership and the culture and the behaviors of those executives and others that you're dealing with in larger organization.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: This is KDCAT as a primary target for ransomware campaigns, security testing and performance risk and compliance.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: You can actually automate that, take that.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Data and use it.
So joining me today in person is Toby Jones, founder of TJC and head of ACE Accelerated Capability Environment UK Home Office. And today we're discussing mission led innovation and the public sector outcomes associated with this initiative. So, Toby, lovely to meet you in person. Thanks for joining and welcome.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: Hey, great, it's great to be here and thank you for that. Welcome. I'm very excited about what we're trying to do in Australia.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: So let's start with ACE. Maybe give us an overview. And it's know ACE stands for accelerated capability environment. So give it a bit of a high level overview. What is, you know, your thoughts on how we can bring this to Australia?
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Yeah, sure thing. So ACE is a platform that we've created in the UK. We founded it. It behaves like a startup, although I'd say in more recent years, a scale up. It's a platform that we created in the UK back in 2017, working very closely with the government in the UK and with the private sector and academic institutions. The purpose of ACE is to find a new way. It's kind of in the name accelerated capability of being able to address really tough, critical public good, public service challenges in a way that takes advantage of the best contemporary ideas, know how, product, services, innovations, IP from across sectors. So from SMEs and startups, from academic institutions and research, from not for profits, that way of close working, bringing together public sector challenges and the best of what other sectors can deliver really closely in partnership, as we say, is novel. It's novel to do it at pace, it's novel to do it with impact, it's novel to it with value. My experience, our experience in the UK has generally been that we have a more conventional approach to working. When we bring sectors very transactional, quite slow moving, it's no good when the world is changing very quickly around you, when there are new ideas to be able to use, to be able to exploit, to be able to apply. And so we needed a different kind of platform to bring all those bright ideas and problems together, solve them and deliver the impact into public service. Could be differential.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: Okay, so there's a couple of points in there. I want to get into a bit more. So we talk about innovation and people in Australia talk know we need more innovation. The challenge that we have here in Australia is, hey, we'd love to bring this capability in, but, oh, you haven't been around for that long. You've only been in business for 5 seconds, but you need seven years of financial records or, yeah, I like your idea, but you've only got two people in your company, you're a bit small. So then it's like, well, people are coming out here and saying, hey, we need diversity, we need innovation. But then it's like when people sort of step up to the plate, it's like, well, actually you are not big enough. So how does that look like? Because I feel like it's contradicting what people are leading with.
[00:03:17] Speaker A: Oh, wow. I mean, that has so much resonance with what we've experienced in the UK. If I look back to five, six, seven years ago, what you'd very often see is large scale multinationals, established businesses, even larger small and medium sized enterprises. The orders of hundreds of people dominating the landscape in the public sector and the barriers that needed to be overcome to be able to participate and work with the public sector were very high. They could be, as you said, financial from a due diligence point of view. It could be to do with security and ability to be able to handle and share information in a meaningful and to be able to collaborate over that information. Part of our objective in bringing all the organizations together I was describing earlier on was to find a new way of lowering those barriers so that startups and SMEs could participate and work closely with the public sector. So if I look back to what we've done with this platform, one of the things we've done is to change the dynamic about how we manage contracting and collaboration in the supply chain, in the teams of organizations that address these challenges that we put through the platform.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Do you mean from a procurement?
[00:04:21] Speaker A: Yeah, that's definitely part of it. So let me give you some examples. So when an organization joins our ACe community to be part of our open, flexible community, to join in with this problem solving, of course we do conduct some due diligence, but we do it in a way which recognizes that actually we're really looking for is the smart new ideas, those contributions that can be made, that can be actuated that the public sect and public good won't receive unless we find a way of bringing that organization, those people in. So what that means is we take a very different look at, for example, financial standing we are not looking for issues that necessarily arise because you're only a two person company or any issues like that. What we're looking for is other risk factors that could affect your ability to be able to sustain a contract on the longer term. But that's nothing to do with what you've got to contribute now and today. So that means that what we're able to do is build a very strong community. Hundreds of organizations, in fact, three quarters of our, three quarters of our community are SMEs and academic institutions. And about the same proportion of work over the last six years has been delivered by those SMEs. Quite a bit of our work has been delivered by what we call micro SMEs. Those are people with 123456 people in their company, very, very small businesses. In fact, just recently we conducted a survey and some reviews of participation in our community and work that's been done. And one of the things that we knew, but it was great to hear juated, recorded said, was that some of those businesses feel a, that ACE as a platform is the best way they found of being able to engage on really public good missions, public good deliveries, that public service mission they want to contribute to. B Their company in some cases has been said would not exist if it wasn't for the fact of ACE existing as a platform, because we'd be able to find a way of chowing opportunity to those businesses to participate. So ACE is very different. It puts SME and startup friendly terms out there. It's realistic about due diligence and it's inclusive in terms of wanting to bring this diverse set of organizations together to work on our problems.
[00:06:16] Speaker B: You raise a couple of great points. One of the things that's interesting that I'm observing just with the nature of the work that I do, is we want to be able to be inclusive and include these smaller companies, which may have a really great fit for X problem, because the way in which the market's moving now, you have to have that agility and velocity behind you. Big companies don't necessarily have that. So the challenge that I sort of see, and maybe this is something you can talk more about, is the bigger companies that just keep getting fed because they have been around for so long, they've got the trust, they've got hundreds of thousands of people or whatever it is, but then it's like, well, I'm challenging maybe how genuine people are saying, oh, we care about diversity of thought and innovation, but do you really? Because we just keep feeding the same players that we can share it around, but this is the problem that I've seen in Australia. And how do you change that culture?
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. So I would say it can be a bit of a shock to the system. So we refer to the governments or agencies or departments that work with ACE and through our platform as customers of ACE, they're bringing these public sector problems and funding to us to be able to bring together these teams of organizations from our community and those customers. Yeah, it can be very different to experience than, but the, I wouldn't say buffer isn't quite the right word, but the convening and organization and teaming that we do as ACE acts as a facilitator for that public sector that isn't used to working with small organizations that have different dynamics to them. And what that means is that we team these organizations that are very small from private sector, academia and so on. We bring them together to focus and organize their delivery on a particular problem. Actually, just as a side point, of course, when you're a small business and you have a great piece of IP that may well be very powerful in the overall delivery that's needed in the public sector, say for public outcome, be that in health or be that in Homeland security or enforcement or justice or social welfare, maybe a very important piece of IP, but you probably don't have as a small business all the parts of the solution, the need for this to work. So one of the things AcE does to that diversity point is bring together teams of organizations in an integrated and organized fashion to be able to collectively deliver on the result that's needed by the customer or user of the ACE platform. That's brought that public sector problem, that encourages the diversity. But sometimes that experience, quite honestly, can be a bit of a shock to the system, to our public sector customers who come to us and they get used to working with us in our platform as a way of mitigating and addressing the behaviors that otherwise they're used to from those larger players. We give those smaller SMEs and startups a feeling of collectively resilience and contribution and confidence and stability by providing the platform and bringing people together. And that gives surety and confidence to the public sector customers that we're going to deliver the result. So that's the way we address that kind of difference between the cultural behaviors that emerge from being used to working with multinational, say, or global corporations compared with working with a wide range of smaller businesses, startups, SMEs.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: So what I'm hearing from what you're saying is think of it like a tech stack. So it's like, okay, you may have this company, but then this company dovetails nicely into the next company. So it's like you've got, I don't know, a cardre of like ten companies which you then sell as an overall solution, potentially.
[00:09:32] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: As an example.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: As an example. And what's really nice is, yes, sometimes in order to make sure that we can stand behind and facilitate the overall result, we do quite a heavyweight teaming to bring organizations together. But we actually encourage very strongly through events and activities that we organize business to business collaboration. So that could have wider effect for those businesses teaming and delivering elsewhere, not just within the ACE platform, but also increase their confidence and relationships to be able to work together to deliver the outcomes through our platform as well. So while there's a sort of tech stack element to this in terms of the map and the way we organize, the build of the integration of these teams, to be able to deliver what's required by the public sector, it's not just purely directive. We're looking for creativity and new ideas more than the sum of the parts. We don't know everything about these small businesses and their IP and what they do and don't know. That's why it's important for them to have the opportunity to actuate and team with other businesses and come forward with collective ideas as goal, because that could be more than we would realize they could deliver. And we really open our arms to that because that's where real innovation and creativity comes from.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: Totally agree. And you probably notice as well, even in the last five years, you could see a small startup that can overturn a company of 5100 years. So going back to our conversation before we could jump on this interview about rattling people, do you think that large companies feel threatened or a bit rattled that a company that gets born six months later could potentially overturn and dislodge a large player that's been in the game 50 years now.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: That's interesting. I think that large companies feel quite strong and stable in what they're doing because they're very confident the offering and they're often motivated and as a whole organized to really hammer that market offer they've got. And their teams are orchestrated around the market offer they've got. And I'm sure for some customers that can be very powerful and very important for what we're doing. We want a little bit more creativity and flexibility. And I think to the rattling piece, there are probably people within those larger organizations, if not the corporations themselves. Yeah, are a little bit rattled by what they see happening, for example, with the Ace platform, because they've got contributions to make their bigger business in terms of what they're doing. I'm not sure it's therefore the bigger corporations that are rattled from a corporate point of view. It's more that people within those organizations can see there's a difference in what's happening here and in the public sector.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: So it's like, well, you bring your capability in, then bigger player only gets potentially 70% and not 90%, for example.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: Yeah. And as the platform has developed, as the Ace platform has developed, we have seen a change in the dynamic between our relationship with bigger companies. Actually, I'll put it this way around, though. When we started the journey with Ace, we found it was more or less exclusively the smaller businesses who had the flexibility and agility to be able to respond to the pace that we worked at, the fluidity we work with, the ambiguity that we were comfortable working with in terms of bringing these teams together and delivering. And quite a number of our larger community members would say to us, well, Toby, we need six months notice if you're intending to bring a piece of work out to the market for us to contribute, because our business works in a way of requiring a six month lead time. I think a sense to what you're saying, which is that some people are rattled by this, is the fact that some of those businesses have, in fact, changed the way they work in qualifying opportunity and managing their pipeline so they can respond to us much more quickly. And I think that would be a measure of the fact that they do recognize they're going to have to adapt in order to be able to compete with a different type of platform and marketplace. How seriously are they all taking that? Which is probably the perspective I'm looking at it from. I can't tell what's going on inside those organizations. We just continue to focus on the value and impact that we can deliver through the community that we've built. We know actuates so well.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: The other thing that I'm seeing from my perspective in my space, which is cybersecurity, is large companies, they are just doing acquisitions off the charts now to acquire that innovation, because they know, hey, you're doing a great thing over here.
What's that whole saying around, you can't beat them, you got to join them, so they just buy them. So I'm seeing a lot of acquisitions at the moment. So I don't even know whether they'll just be ten key players, but own all these other smaller companies. But then the other question that I have, which is interviewed yesterday, is, I work a lot with cybersecurity startups. Are people now just building startups because they just want to be acquired? So it's like, are you actually solving a problem or are you just building something to then get 100 million dollar payout to then be acquired by a big conglomerate? That's the other thing where I don't know, again on Are you setting out to change the world? That's why I set out to do my business. There's a lot of people that I speak to, like, oh, I can't wait to get acquired.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: I'm going to right away say, let's do that in reverse order. Am I setting out to change the world? YES, no question about that. That's why we start in the UK and we're coming right to the other side of the world to work with Australia. And I'm sure we'll touch on a little bit why we're here in a second. Then going to the more specific points about acquisitions, the effect that has on culture and so on. I know, and we've seen it in the UK. I've seen it in relation to companies that work with ACE as a platform, acquisitions made by large multinational businesses, global businesses of smaller businesses, in order to tilt the balance in terms of the culture that larger business has. I haven't seen one of those acquisitions actually make a serious dent in the culture of the larger organization. If you revisit them six months, twelve months, 18 months after the acquisition or longer, you don't really see a change, a tilt in the overall culture, at least insofar as I've seen. I'm sure there are good examples like that, but not the ones I've seen happen around the Ace marketplace. It's very hard to overcome the cultural momentum of a corporate in terms of how it's been established. That goes deep. It runs into the entire organization itself and the people in the organization in terms of how long they've been there. I don't mean to be critical about those people. They're delivering very well for the corporate, but it's the corporate itself which has to make some very significant changes. Making an acquisition does not change the leadership of the corporate as a whole. My top tip to companies that are being acquired when the objective is to make a contribution to change in the culture of a larger organization, is actually to mentally think about almost like a reverse takeover. If you're the CEO and leadership team of a company that's being acquired by a larger organization. And the incentivized objective of being acquired is, yes, it gives you an ability, you would presume, to be able to scale and deliver more differently, but you're worried about the effect of the overall culture of the organization that's acquiring you and how that will affect you. Think about it like a reverse takeover. Think about you and your smaller organization actually having an effect on the leadership and the culture and the behaviors of those executives and others that you're dealing with in larger organization. Almost as if you're taking them over and thinking about how that culture that you need in order to be able to succeed as a business in terms of your offering, is going to have the effect of change that's needed in larger corporate that's not very often the way things are actually approached. Insofar as I've seen from a UK to the second part of your question, the way I'd look at that is control the controllables, insofar as I'm focused on what this platform can do to differentiate. So I know and my team knows, the behaviors and the tools and enablers that we need in this platform in order to be able to have it function effectively and deliver all the value that it's delivered. The world around us is dynamic and it's driven by a whole set of environmental factors that we cannot control. Some of those are positive and reinforcing environmental factors, which can be about things like government policy, corporate investments, other bits and pieces. Some of them can be negative in terms of the behaviors that are driven when it comes to people who wish to enter into the marketplace to actuate a capital return, who are not necessarily motivated by the specific mission that the business is undertaking that is going to happen. And I think to the extent that it might narrow the market, I don't think it can actually have an overall material effect on the marketplace, because there will always be a flow of people who do have bright new ideas. The entrepreneurs who actually are orientated towards specific subjects domains, know how, who do want to have success and make a difference with the know how that they've got. For example, many businesses that we work with when it comes to the IP that they're bringing to us as a platform, will talk to us about whether or not the terms that we will discuss with them when they become part of the ACE community and when they work on our work, are going to give them the opportunity to be able to actuate the value of the IP that's created through their work with us. Because what's the point of a small business who's really motivated by what they can achieve with the IPO and know how they've got, selling that to us for a quick buck at the beginning, for example, and not being able to take that and scale it to the global ambition they have for their product and for the know how that they've got. And so from my point of view, what I see in AcE is lots of small companies with know who actually want to protect their ability to be able to do more with the IP they're generating to that public good point of view, for example, actuating it in a really contributing and impactful way, not those that are simply looking for us to be able to give them a check that will name the growth, the point of, for example, later being acquired because they've got to prove the use of their technology in a particular area. There's lots of people in those smaller businesses who are very actuated by the effect of their work and the contributions that it can make to our work.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I hear your point. And when you said before, protecting their IP, like from a sense that another company would replicate what they do because they're bigger, they got more money, they got more capability, they've got more people, more footprint.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: Yeah, or even that, we're clumsy. So we act as TJC, as the agents of the public sector in having conceived, founded, mobilized, led, scaled ACE as a platform. And so we have to think about the effect of what happens when public money comes through the platform and is applied into these private sector companies. Obviously, there has to be sustained public sector value from that. Often conventional approaches can be somewhat clumsy when it comes to getting maximum value from that IP in the long term, which is for everyone's good, from a prosperity and from a public service outcome point of view. And so what we do is negotiate quite carefully with those businesses so that we really recognize where the value lies in the IP. Who is going to be able to actuate that more greatly, at greater scale in the future and sustain it. And very often, clearly that looks like the business itself, and that's maybe, well, very often a little bit different to what would normally be practiced from a public sector point of view. And that's an example of making sure those businesses are able to own and take forward what they've created, what they can do to themselves, change the world, rather than us just taking that at the beginning. So it's both the fact of larger companies with more people being able to rip off, we have to protect that, what otherwise be the IP, but actually what we really focus on is making sure the IP is protected in the right place and by the right organization so that they can, as you said earlier on, change the world in terms of what those businesses are doing.
[00:20:17] Speaker B: Yeah, and I guess my mind was going more towards that. I'm seeing now just companies creating companies just with the plan of, hey, I don't know if I care about the mission, and again, this is not all people, it's just more so I don't know if I care about the mission. I'm just more very keen on, I can create this thing and then X big conglomerate is going to buy me out for X amount of money.
[00:20:36] Speaker A: Well, let's put it this way. When you think about how ACE works, sometimes we use the word ecosystem, and what that really means is you're looking to create a win win between organizations and lots of different things motivate the people in those organizations, the organizations themselves motivate what we need to do for the public sector with the platform, what the customer who's bringing the challenge problem to a mission within the public sector needs to achieve for public outcomes the win for the business that's bringing forward its people and capital and opportunity cost of participating with us. They need a win from this in terms of the business as well. It is about the one hand public good. That's what we're instilling in the platform, because we can achieve results. We're not asking them to do that. Any cost in a way that unreasonably holds back their business, or in any terms does that. We're looking to do this in a way that generates value for everyone. We sometimes describe Ace in the way that we've thought about this, as a startup that's driving itself to be the best place to spend a public pound on creating a new capability, but also the best place to spend a private pound. That means we're the most cost effective. If you have a certain amount of working capital in your business resource available to you, whether that's actuated ultimately as people or as spender investments in product development or whatever it happens to be, we want to be the most effective place for those pounds to be used, no matter which organization you're coming from. And that's because of the way that we've constructed the platform to reduce otherwise frictional costs, transactional costs, inefficiencies, things that exclude organizations. So to your point of not everyone is motivated by necessarily the public good. That's okay with us if it means we can still get the value from the IP and everyone gets a win and we're able to demonstrate we're getting good value from money in terms of how we're teaming these organisations together. Everyone needs to win in this, because ultimately this is about making the most of what we've got within our nations to be able to deliver the outcome that ACE is trying to deliver.
[00:22:27] Speaker B: So with your plan around Ace in the UK, obviously in Australia, you plan to bring it out here. Do you think this is going to change the landscape, the playing field? Because what you're saying is it's going to give a lot of these smaller new players in the market a chance to do great things, to overturn, to dislodge these large players. Historically, I don't know, large companies. Again, there was no point of failure, whereas now there is potentially that option.
[00:22:54] Speaker A: So actually I would contest the fact that there's no chance of failure for.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: A larger company, but historically saying so like, I don't know, 50 years ago.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: 60 years ago, let me give some examples. And I probably oughtn't to point at specific names or programs of work in the UK because even in some of these cases there's been substantial litigation involving the government and those businesses. There are global companies who have been brought in by the UK government, matter of fact, over the last decades to deliver on very major, for example, technological change programs, implement major new government policies. Again, I'm slightly skirting any particular topic, so it's not to get myself in trouble, what I might otherwise say, but I think people will recognize what I'm about to say. Those programs aren't always successful. In fact, very visibly, sometimes those programs have real challenges. They can be years late. They cannot deliver, ultimately the value or impact which is needed from a public outcome, public service point of view. Ultimately, sometimes those big businesses end up in litigation with the government about who's responsible for those failures in delivery. That has significant reputational damage to those bigger businesses. I guess as I describe things like that, we can all, in this room probably think of examples where that's happened. And when it comes to bigger corporations, that's where they run the risk. When it comes to there's no chance of them failing. There is a chance them failing and there's also a chance, frankly, for the public sector to fail, because ultimately the public don't get what it is that they've otherwise spent money on or the outcome that's actually needed, even if there can be reparations for any mistakes that were made along the way. Because what we really want is we want the citizens in the country to have improved public service.
That's the kind of failure which can happen. When you look at the Ace model in terms of what are we hoping to achieve? Well, we know because of what we've done in the UK and even said by senior responsible owners, these are the government officials who own, with accountability to Parliament in the UK, the ultimate success and public value of the public money spent on very large scale programs. We know because some of them have worked with us on their challenges. They have said that ACE as a platform has accelerated their program by years, has assisted them deliver where other approaches have failed for them. So there is, for example, within law enforcement sectors in the UK, examples of programs which have now delivered to national capability which could not and had not delivered, in fact had failed to deliver under previous more conventional regimes that had involved much larger corporations. So this model that's been generated has made a differential impact when it comes to the ability to be able to deliver those public outcomes and where previous corporations who are those bigger companies had failed delivering costume, and in fact, in more than one case had end up in litigation. So it's quite interesting to me that this approach that we've created has not just some apparent value in terms of diversity, of participation in innovation, in acceleration, but is also able to deliver where conventional mechanisms with larger companies have not succeeded.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: So it's a little bit opportunity. So your plan is to bring this to Australia and you're lobbying for that at the moment. So what does that look like? Obviously, I've got a big audience in the US, UK, Australia.
What can people get from Ace? You bring that here in this country. What do the opportunities look like for startups?
[00:26:18] Speaker A: The first thing I want to start with is how we go about doing this. And it's interesting you also brought the US into this. So from our point of view, what we're looking to do is create a sister to what we've created within the UK. So the first thing to say about our approach here is that we're not looking to stretch, per se, our UK business into Australia. We don't think that's sustainable, we don't think it's the right strategic approach. My mind is always about how do things stick for the long term. You can have a flash in the pan, but how do they stick for the long term? And the best way we think we can create something that sticks for the long term that has real resonance in Australia. And I will come back to the US point a little bit later and if I don't, remind me, is to create what we're perhaps clumsily describing, but it motivates us as a sovereign capability here in Australia. So what we'd like to do is take the undoubted, proven talent of individuals and their skills and experiences here in Australia and almost train them up, develop them to be able to be organized and orchestrated in a way that delivers the same type of capability that we've delivered in the UK, but here in Australia, so that the nation can do this for itself. And that's what I mean by a sister enterprise here. Something that's not about stretching what we're doing into Australia, but it's about taking the experience that we've had in the UK to create dynamics between organizations, both, frankly, in hardcore commercial, contractual, technical terms, but also more importantly in behavioral leadership and other terms, create that, replicate that experience here in the UK and have Australia. Obviously, we're very keen to be able to guide that as we start up and get going. But this is to create an entity, a sovereign entity here in Australia, that Australia does it for itself. So TJC here in Australia will be an Australian business. Nationals from Australia in terms of what's delivered, and then to the fact of the difference it makes to those startups and SMEs and others within Australia. I would point back to the fact that over the last six years, nearly 200 million sterling's worth of innovation for 50 plus public sector bodies in the UK on mission critical programs, which you can read about in the annual reviews for ACE at Govuk AcE and on LinkedIn and so on. Plenty of case studies for those mission critical programs. I point back to that 200 million pounds of spend from the public sector. Just slightly more than three quarters of that has gone to SMEs and startup organizations and actually academic institutions as well. In terms of the work, it's brought them forward to contribute in a way that they hadn't been able to before. By lowering, as I said earlier on, the barriers to participation that has led to growth. So jobs created. There are numerous companies who've spoken about the fact they've been able to grow as a result of working with TJC's ACE platform in the UK, with the Home Office and others as government sponsors of what we've been able to do. Some companies, to your point of acquisition, they have been acquired, and that's enabled them to get the work and capital they've need in order to be able to scale and export. They've also been formed business to business relationships that weren't, I mean, people network all the time, quite relates an essential part of being an SME is being able to collaborate and network and find the sum of the parts with others. But what we're able to do is that in a way that immediately provides a route to exploitation of the mutual opportunities between businesses. They team with a purpose of being able to deliver on what we're bringing down the pipeline towards day. So that creates sales opportunities for new teams and experience of working together. We give them visibility of the challenges which are happening within the public sector. If you think about public sector working, very often it can be opaque, it can be difficult to penetrate. Certainly in the UK, exactly what materials and needs are coming towards the private sector in the way of problems, or academia in the way of problems that need to be addressed. Yes, there are tools, I know that they exist here in Australia, where the government publish prior information, notices about what's being, but that's not about an immersive experience of what it is the mission need represents. It's a publication of a notice. What we do with ACE is we bring those mission customers into the same environment as the businesses, the academics, and we run events which are all about deep engagement around those shared problems, hot housing, what's actually going to be needed to achieve a public result. And again, that's an advantage for a smaller business. We also give them access to secure spaces, we introduce them to accelerator programs. We do a lot of things to curate and energize what we refer to as our community of private sector, academic and third sector not for profit organizations, because we use the word community, because we want it to be something that feels very productive and is the best place for those businesses to spend the meager amount of money they do have on business development and winning new work in an effective way. So that's the promise we would make. SMEs in Australia, we've seen that in the UK, we've done it extensively, and we see no reason why it shouldn't be possible to achieve the same. Here. I want to just talk about academic work as well.
I find it really exciting and quite disappointing at the same time. There is so much amazing creativity and IP in academic research, peer reviewed and tested and examined and challenged across such a wide range of domains. One of the things that we're not really all as good, all as good as we should be at doing is being able to find and apply that research in really practical ways. And yet there are many businesses who need that IP in the research, who could do so much with it if it was available. And one of the things we found quite exciting in the UK when we've been able to bring forward opportunities in these public sector problems that really provide the possibility of this type of work is the ability to be able to join and team just businesses with businesses, but academic institutions and faculty and researchers with businesses. Now, a lot of this per se happens already, but without necessarily a route to commercial exploitation. What ACE is bringing is a set of funded challenges all the time coming down this pipeline of commissions, as we refer to them, that come towards ACE from the public sector, which means that there is a route to be able to commercialize and exploit and verify in a commercial, sustainable context, research implemented into commercial products. And that's about teaming between researchers and institutions, SME startups and businesses. And actually what we found is that attracts VC interest in those businesses to be able to develop those businesses got, you know, a small number, but an important number of examples where we've done that in the UK, which has turned some capability from the UK being a bit of a backwater in some research areas with, well, no, not a backwater in research, a backwater to be able to exploit research, so good research, but where it was, we had experts take ten years to commercialize some of that research. We were able to achieve that in 18 months by teaming with this platform in the way that we talked. And then the business that acquired the IP and implemented it became able to export and scale globally because of the additional capital that attracted. So that teaming across academic institution, private sector and bringing purpose in terms of opportunity to exploit through a commercial opportunity and A's really has been very powerful. So again, that's another angle that I'm very keen to explore here, is how to make more of the research which is in academic institutions. And the final thing I'd say coming back to the US, UK and Australia is we have an amazing opportunity. No one's saying it's going to be easy to make it work. We have an amazing opportunity in the common purpose of culture, the tying of nations, but also the very practical things like Orcus and the Free Trade Agreement, for example, which have recently been brought into being between Australia and the UK. Those are mechanisms which could help ease the flow of product and service and know how between nations, and also write a way of burden sharing between nations, particularly in terms of more strategic and challenging capabilities that we need to mutually deliver. What our platform can do, and we intend it to do, is become a practical realization. Some of the opportunities that are set out in being able to establish protocols for exchanging innovations and ideas, governments collaborating together, but enabled by the community that we've got. So we're excited about being able to use the tools that those nations are putting into the toolbox, to be able to actuate value from organizations across all those countries teaming and working together to deliver value in Australia, let alone in the UK, let alone in the US. Those tools in the toolbox, I think, are the things we're focusing on when it comes to being able to actually join. Almost like Clubbase, a network of communities and organizations that contribute and burden share deliver overall public outcomes. We think that could be quite powerful. The last thing I'd say is resilient supply chains. I from talking with people, listening closely to what's being said, understand that from a strategic point of view, Australia seeks to be a resilient nation in the geopolitical context that it operates in. There are quite frightening, challenging that face us all as nations. And the ability to be able to resilient and multiply the value of our own supply chains is really important by being able to bring together public need and private sector opportunity and know how as closely as possible and as efficiently as possible, which we believe our platform does and certainly has done in the UK. What we're doing, in fact, is lifting the resilience of supply chains within nations to be able to supply public outcomes. That finally is a good thing for everyone to participate in. It's good for Australia, it's good for SMEs and startups, and it achieves a bigger strategic goal in the long run. That would be about scaling of the ACE platform, multiplying the value. Once we've shown how it works in Australia with that sovereign capability that I described at the beginning, we're focused on.
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