Co-Labs is spreading its positive impact business model to two new Melbourne locations

Co-Labs will be opening two new Melbourne locations, with an aim to have doors open in the next six to 12 months.

The company first opened its doors in 2020 when co-founders Samuel Wines and Andrew Gray saw a gap for collaborative working spaces and laboratories in the biotech industry.

Not all researchers or biotech startups can afford equipment, and oftentimes even universities don’t have enough facilities and support for the industry. So the pair created it themselves.

“A lot of people who come to us are trying to do something innovative, trying to go from zero to one. There’s nowhere else to do it,” Wines said to SmartCompany.

Wines also points out that he’s seen a shift in Australia where there’s a correlation between innovation and the greater good in the startup space.

“It very much feels like it’s all positive impact and trying to make a difference. I don’t know if this is just because COVID-19 was a lovely little pre-apocalyptic situation that caused the unveiling,” Wines said. 

“I always say that COVID-19 was the greatest systems thinking educator that anyone could have asked for because it totally shows us the interconnectedness of all of our systems. It’s something that impacts our health and wellbeing, which impacts the health system, which then impacts the economy, which impacts global supply change. Suddenly there are shortages in food.”

According to what Wines has seen, this has resulted in more people wanting to help fix these issues that not only impact Australians, but the global population as well as the health of the planet.

Some of the businesses that have worked out of the Co-Labs space include Magic Valley, which is spearheading lab-grown lamb in Australia, as well as Auskelp, which created Australia’s first golden kelp farm.

They also house companies that, as a result of the pandemic, are developing sterilisation technology to remove airborne pathogens and using quantum dot technology to create rapid antigen tests for not only COVID-19, but STIs.

More Co-Labs room needed

It may have only been two years, but Co-Labs has already found a need for more space. So it will be expanding to two new locations across Melbourne.

Co-Labs also confirmed with SmartCompany that it is looking at expanding into Sydney in the next 12 months.

The first of the new sites will be close to the original Co-Lab facility in Brunswick. The team has partnered with Ethical Property Australia’s Brunswick Design and Innovation Facility (BRUDI) to create a new 500-1000m collaborative space.

According to the company, it will contain PC1 and PC2 labs as well as co-working labs and office spaces. It will also contain room for private offices, bookable meeting rooms and an event space.

The third site that Co-Labs will be expanding into will be at Monash in partnership with Spirit Super.

BRUDI itself is the result of a stranded property asset that has been transformed into a neighbourhood hub. After signing a 20-year lease, Ethical Property Australia developed a new business model with the local council.

In addition to financial sustainability for investors, the company wanted to invest capital to help regenerate the site and make it both an economic hub and a community asset.

“Every dollar of investment that we put into a site that we’ve reclaimed is offset against the rent that we pay back to the state,” Ethical Property Australia’s CEO Adam Trevaskus said told SmartCompany.

This system enables investors to get a return while also giving back to the local community.

“What’s exciting is that all of this has been done with public property. And so now we’re being approached by multiple councils, multiple councils saying, ‘Hey, we’ve heard about this, can we can we talk to you about what you’ve done with stranded assets, because we’ve got lots of stranded assets, and we’re coming out of a pandemic’,” Trevaskus said.

“What we offer is investment in capital. So private investment in the form of impact money, combined with a range of different economic and social projects that are geared towards providing benefits to local economy as well as benefits to local people.”

While some of the details are yet-to-be-revealed, so far Co-Labs will be getting $500,000 in funding for the BRUDI site and $300,000 in funding for Monash.

Co-Labs will also be exploring other funding opportunities and in some cases, startups moving into the space will pay for their own builds.

“It’s not a clear-cut sexy VC investor thing that most companies get. It’s just patching things together to make it work.”

Co-Laboration instead of competition

When it comes to business practice, Co-Labs aims to put ecological design and living systems thinking at the forefront.

“It’s bringing the biological and ecological wisdom of the last 3.5 billion years of evolution and applying that to the way which we do business, because nature probably knows best,” Wines said.

He goes on to say that the narrative that most of the world tells in regards to how business and economics works isn’t fit for purpose when you delve into the things like uncertainty and volatility — especially in recent times.

“Everything we do involves naturalising our metaphors, language and approach — and looking for collaboration not competition,” Wine said.

“We see other people in our ecosystem as people who we can support and nurture. We’re really trying to take that approach to everything we do for win win-win situations and trying to position ourselves as a keystone species in the innovation ecosystem.”

For Co-Labs, that support sits across three pillars — education, research and innovation — which it sees as being equally important.

“You have any musicians if you didn’t have a whole bunch of instruments for kids to play. It’s the same thing with science innovation. If you don’t have enabling infrastructure and support services to surround people who are curious, we’re not going to have many innovations see the light of day that can actually make a positive impact on society and the planet,” Wines said.

Samuel Wines will be hosting the Future of Foods panel at Sydney’s purpose conference. It’s running from October 19-20 and tickets can be purchased here.