Abstract
Why is it important to "think big" and how is this achieved? How do you embrace risk and learn from failure?

Speaker’s biography
David Skellern does research, engineering and entrepreneurial activities in information and communications technologies. He is currently Chairman of Capital Markets CRC Ltd, a Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and an Adjunct Professor at Macquarie University, Sydney. He was CEO for ~6 years of NICTA, Australia's ~700 person national research centre for information and communications technologies, where he worked to build a strong culture of excellence in research and its commercialisation. During his time as CEO, NICTA saw its first seven spinout companies and granted over 40 licences to its  technologies. He was a Director of Smarts Group, which develops real-time systems for capital market surveillance, supervision and compliance, and was involved in its sale for close to $100M to NASDAQ OMX Group in 2010. Since 2001 he has invested in seven startup companies, five of which have been remarkably unsuccessful, while the other two are struggling. In 1997 he co-founded Radiata Inc, which produced the first IEEE802.11a WLAN chipset and was acquired for $565M in 2001 by Cisco Systems, where he was Wireless Networking Technology Director until 2004. He previously did research with HP Labs, was Professor of Electronics at Macquarie University, and held research and academic positions at the University of Sydney, including a decade radioastronomy. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2012, for distinguished service to science and engineering as a leading researcher and for the design and development of worldleading information technology.