The special event series on the topic of “Protect and Grow” brought the topics of Intellectual Property, Could Computing and Research and Development Tax Incentives to the forefront of business discussions.
Over 80 business leaders from the Greater Western Sydney region attended and participated in the engaging discussions and networking sessions.
The first “Protect and Grow” series was held on Wednesday, September 23 at Lily’s Function Centre in Seven Hills.
Adjunct professor and Jim Taggart OAM, one of Western Sydney’s most respected business leaders was the MC, and facilitated the session. He also talked about impression management and social capital.
Jim’s discussion centred on the non-verbal behaviour and the social exchange between people in business. Jim said one of the most important elements of a business is building relationships, how we package information to build that relationship is key to growing business.
Damon Henshaw from Davies Collision and Cave, an awarding winning Intellectual Property (IP) firm spoke about protecting intellectual property that has a commercial value.
Some of the assets Damon talked about protecting are copyrights, patents, trademarks and designs. The most important thing businesses should remember is to seek advice early on.
“Many people will ask the question – ‘is IP protection too expensive’. The real question a business needs to ask is how much will it cost not to do something?” said Damon.
David Newton from the Telstra team in Western Sydney presented on the change in business, and how consumers are driving the change up the line. With the technological changes, more consumers want to engage with businesses via a device.
“Most cloud services are device agnostic and can be accessed from any device, consumers also want automatic updates, and to be able to access information from anywhere,” David said.
While cloud computing and portability are important factors to keep customers and employees happy, the value of protecting IT assets is invaluable.
David said some websites and IT storage can be accessed in open Wifi spaces, or could be threatened by rogue employees.
“That’s why it is so important to have the right IT support to build the security and capability for a business.’’
He said cloud security is growing, and at the same time more than 43% of companies experienced a data breach last year. Still though some companies don’t have security policies in place and businesses are not using the right tools to do their job properly.
Paul Van Bergen, Tax partner at KPMG, talked about the opportunity for businesses to maximise its capture of R&D Tax Incentives. Paul said there were prospective ways for businesses to position themselves to access a range of grants, better manage innovations and protect intellectual property to grow businesses.
“Federal and state governments provide significant funding through hundreds of grant programs to assist businesses in a range of endeavours,” he said.
Grant applications are not always successful, but assistance can be sought from professional teams. Paul said some of the areas where grants are growing in Australia are Aged Care, Digital Economy, Logistics, Agriculture and Mining.
The morning session was supported by media partner, Western Sydney Business Access and branding partner, DMC Advertising.
A second event in the series is planned for Wednesday, October 21 at Novotel Parramatta To book cliick on the home page advertisemrnt on this webiste - www.wsba.com.au
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