Every innovation playbook I’ve read in the past two decades was written for a large city. The advice is usually the same: bigger is better, and small is something to overcome.
But after seven years chairing one of Australia’s most recognised innovation ecosystems, I have come to realise that the opposite is true. The constraints that make Canberra seem like an unlikely place to build an innovation ecosystem are, in fact, its greatest advantage.
Here’s what I have learned as Chair of the Canberra Innovation Network (CBRIN), and my advice for anyone building anything, anywhere.
When CBRIN launched in November 2014, there was no rulebook for a city like this, so we had to design our own model.
One thing became immediately clear: because of Canberra’s size, we couldn’t grow wide before we grew deep, or build programs before we built trust. There was a small number of people willing to do the early, unglamorous work, and everyone already knew everyone in the community.
While many people would have thought this to be a ceiling on Canberra’s innovation potential, it turned out to be the architecture of something genuinely rare: a place where government, universities and founders didn’t just coexist, but actually needed each other.
In larger ecosystems, that interdependence has to be manufactured. In Canberra, it was simply the condition of operating here. And in that way, the constraint became the design principle.
I think about the early years a lot. A demountable shed. A handful of people who believed in something nobody had asked them to build. The slow but steady work that happened for a decade before anyone outside Canberra was paying much attention.
Nobody was watching, so nobody was waiting for it to fail either. There is a freedom in that: figuring out what actually works for your part of the world, rather than performing what is supposed to work everywhere.
What that design principle produced over a decade is worth naming. More than 20,000 people have engaged in the ecosystem CBRIN built. Its cumulative contribution to the ACT economy between 2014 and 2024 was $900 million, with $195 million in 2024 alone, supporting 1,615 jobs that year. For every dollar of ACT Government investment, the return has been $57.
First Wednesday Connect, CBRIN’s signature gathering that encourages collaboration between local innovators, has now run 119 times, drawing more than 25,500 participants. That attendance is something I am immensely proud of, because it proves the value that people get from being in the room.
The community impact extends through the Innovation Connect grant program, which receives over 100 applications each year, and it’s where our growth team helps founders test, shape and pitch their ideas. Over the past four years, the companies we helped have raised over $400M collectively.
In 2025, CBRIN was named runner-up for Innovation Ecosystem of the Year at the Global Triple E Awards in Prague. The same year, it became the foundational case study in a global Handbook of Innovation Ecosystems. We became the model that editors built every other case study around, and we were in good company alongside Barcelona’s 22@, Boston’s Kendall Square, MaRS in Toronto, London’s Knowledge Quarter and Dublin Docklands.
These are the achievements of an innovation model that truly works because of its unique environment, not in spite of it.
My seven years as Chair turned out to be its own version of the same lesson.
The most valuable thing I did as Chair rarely happened in a meeting. It happened in the conversations before and after, where everyone else in the room had something to gain from the relationship, and I had only one thing to gain: CBRIN’s success.
A journalist asked me early on: “But what do you want to do?” The honest answer was: not much. Not visibly, anyway. The best governance, like the best ecosystem design, is invisible. It enables and gets out of its own way. It trusts what is being built.
Canberra had to learn to trust what it was building, long before anyone handed it an award to justify that trust. So did I.
And hand in hand with this trust in backing ourselves, I learned how critical it was to be consistent. Innovation invites daily adaptation and change but the environment for trust building needs to preserve a certain degree of stability.
We share our success with a number of committed and engaged partners from across government, academia, education, private sector and our local champions. Aligned partners are the most essential part of the fabric that constitutes the innovation ecosystem.
It really does take a village. If you are just starting out, this is where you should be looking first.
If you have spent years building in a place nobody was watching, doing the unglamorous work, I see you. I want you to know that the smallness was never the thing working against you. It may be the thing that was working for you all along, whether you could see it yet or not.
If you are a policymaker who has been directing innovation investment toward the same two cities for the last decade, CBRIN’s success is proof that smaller ecosystems are worth a second look.
If you are a founder weighing up where to build, smallness is not the liability the playbooks suggest. It can be the very thing that forces the trust and proximity that larger ecosystems spend years and budgets trying to manufacture.
And if you are in Canberra, building here, working here, investing in this place, the story you have been told about this city is smaller than the one you are actually living.
Our size was always an advantage, even if the books said otherwise.
- Hala Batainah is the outgoing Chair, CBRIN, the Canberra Innovation Network
