The benchmarking and certification organisation EarthCheck this week opened Australia’s first Tourism Entrepreneurs Accelerator Program for tourism start-ups at the newly established The Capital co-working space in Brisbane. CEO Stewart Moore and General Manager Mark Olsen said the dedicated EarthCheck space would enable the organisation to share its global data, research and tourism development experience with tourism entrepreneurs. “EarthCheck itself is a start-up, originally created through intellectual property developed by the Cooperative Research Centre for Sustainable Tourism in the early 1980’s,” said Moore. Today EarthCheck’s benchmarking and certification programs for sustainable tourism serve clients in over 70 countries across 32 sectors in six languages.
“EarthCheck recognised a long time ago that as a company we need to continually review, refresh and reinvigorate our products and services. The only way we can hope to do this is learning to collaborate beyond normal company boundaries. Part of that learning is also a recognition that disruptive growth models need to be embraced,” said Moore.
Mr Olsen said The Capital was a smart collaborative space for investors and entrepreneurs interested in finding more efficient and smarter ways of doing business. “In a digital ecosystem companies such as EarthCheck can find ways to collaborate with entrepreneurial partners located anywhere from next door to across the globe,” Mr Olsen said.
EarthCheck will run strategy, sustainability and business development programs and one-on-one mentoring for emerging and evolving tourism enterprises from across Australia. “One of the defining differences in the EarthCheck network is that we already have corporate clients across the world who are hungry for new ideas,” Mr Olsen said.
An initiative of the Brisbane City Council, The Capital, a collaborative space occupying three levels in the Queen Street Mall and occupied by Australia’s largest startup space operator, Fishburners and co-working space Little Tokyo Two, is already home to 200 start-ups.
