A seven-year-old prediction, caught on video, now feels like a time capsule of the future.

In February 2019, I argued that the makerspace moment had arrived. That the divide between creativity and commercialisation was narrowing and the nations ready to bridge it would become tomorrow’s innovation leaders. I warned that simply having great ideas wasn’t enough. Without pathways to market, invention withers on the vine. The key, I said, lay in equipping individuals with the kind of advanced manufacturing tools once reserved for big industry, embedding these hubs in their communities and redirecting focus from resource extraction to talent retention.

At the time, these ideas felt urgent but unproven. Now, in 2025, they are reality and the forces I described are no longer ripples on the horizon but feel like waves reshaping every aspect of how we work, innovate and grow as a nation.

The talk I gave back then at the opening of Fab9 in Footscray, declared that the Makerspace Moment is Here. It felt obvious due to Fab9 and Space Tank’s presence in Melbourne. But I also warned that creativity and innovation without tailored pathways for commercialisation goes nowhere. And that purpose-built makerspaces are the bridge across the commercialisation gap, but only if they’re connected to their local communities. I noted how manufacturing is shifting from blue-collar to white-collar through the advent of computer aided design and manufacturing and giving individuals access to expensive corporate level resources would revolutionise innovation. I warned how energy parity between renewable and fossil fuels would force us to shift focus away from large mining lobby groups and onto small individuals (who I named Jennifer) with bright ideas. Why Jennifer? because technology is gender blind. Technology removes archaic gender barriers and does not require brute force, rather, it blossoms through the soft touch of empathy, creativity and alternative thinking. Giving a broader base of talent access to enabling resources is an idea that echoes through the lucky country idiom, where we move from being just a lucky country blessed with abundant natural resource to a smart country where we finally retain our talent onshore through better innovation policies. Beyond resource extraction, Australia’s next big export? Ingenuity.

Thanks to Silicon Beach at the time who recorded my entire talk and posted it on Youtube, you can watch the whole video here. I never knew they were recording it and only discovered the video this week when doing a search to find other content. Somewhat self-consciously, I watched the whole thing and cringed at hearing myself speak. But thanks to that video, I can now look back and see if any of those things I said have happened. While it’s noted that FAB9 did not survive the pandemic, seven years later, those predictions have landed.

Feel free to follow the link to the video, make a cuppa or pour a glass of plonk and sit yourself down for 34 minutes. Spoiler, because I am steeped in this kind of thing every day through what I do at Space Tank, I saw that the traditional divide between creativity and commercialisation was showing signs of reshaping itself. In brief, I was attempting to map the tectonic shifts we now take for granted in 2025.

The video aside, manufacturing’s revolution won’t be televised, it’ll be prototyped. From a personal standpoint, I saw that creatives often lacked the skills to bring products to market, while commercially minded people rarely have the capacity to invent. They needed a space with affordable access to equipment and appropriate mentoring and skills support. I argued that Business Makerspaces could bring these mindsets together and give the required support, provided they are deeply connected to their local industry, investment and startup communities.

I painted a picture of macro-economic factors that were influencing how the maker movement would play out. There was a global manufacturing transition underway: a rising middle class in China was transitioning from back-of-house sweatshop to front-of-house design/manufacturing bureaus while advanced, computer-controlled systems were transforming factory floors into white-collar environments staffed by engineers, coders and designers. This shift could open doors to a more diverse workforce and fundamentally reshape industrial culture. I also outlined the energy parity tipping point, when renewables outcompete fossil fuels on cost, that would weaken the political dominance of mining lobbies and play a role in redirecting subsidies toward innovation economies.

The analysis extended beyond technology to the social and economic fabric. Feeling the psychological recoil after our own automotive offshoring and the widespread pessimism that bludgeoned any enthusiasm for manufacturing, I cautioned against donut cities, the hollowed-out urban centres stripped of manufacturing capacity and brainpower, (like Detroit after its automotive collapse). I urged government representatives in Melbourne to create funding policies that target early stage manufacturing entrepreneurs in an effort to retain our brightest minds. I argued for affordable and accessible manufacturing infrastructure. I highlighted the Jennifer Effect, how small-scale individual innovators (like Jennifer), if given modest funding, could collectively outproduce large corporations in both volume and diversity of ideas. Equally prescient was the critique of tokenistic makerspaces: that just equipment in a room without tailored community integration would fail and give the makerspace movement an underserved bad reputation. I argued that makerspaces embedded in industry, collaborating with universities and tied integrally into startup networks could become engines of growth.

In 2025, these forecasts have materialised with striking accuracy. Renewable energy has surpassed fossil fuels on price across most of Australia, triggering a wave of product redesigns for electrification, modularity and circular use. New energy projects, solar and onshore wind are generally cheaper than newly built coal or gas facilities today. The cost advantage is significant and consistently affirmed by major global agencies and industry reports. However, when comparing to existing, fully depreciated fossil fuel plants, or accounting for system-level integration costs, the picture becomes more complex. Higher-level policies, grid infrastructure and planning play a major role in how and when we finally depart from a reliance on fossil fuels and begin to properly embrace an innovation economy.

As predicted in 2019, the paradigm shifts from relying solely on fossil fuels to the integration of alternative and renewable energy systems is having an impact. These ripple effects are being amplified into tidal waves by the arrival of AI and entry level computer aided manufacturing. As these waves of change wash through how we work, live and play, the Jennifer Effect is being felt in every industry and product segment.

The Jennifer Effect matters now more than ever because it flips the traditional innovation model on its head. Instead of concentrating resources into the hands of a few large corporations that produce a handful of predictable outcomes, it disperses opportunity across hundreds or thousands of independent innovators, each with the freedom to experiment, fail fast and pivot without the bureaucratic drag of big business. The math is simple: even with a modest success rate, funding 500 Jennifers generates exponentially more market-ready products, more diverse solutions and more economic resilience than any single flagship R&D program.

In a world where AI, advanced manufacturing and renewable energy have levelled the playing field, the real competitive advantage lies in unleashing this swarm of agile creators. The economies that thrive in the next decade will be those that understand the Jennifer Effect not as a feel-good policy, but as a hard-nosed strategy for building a future-proof innovation ecosystem.

This coincides with State and Federal government suddenly paying more attention to what Space Tank is achieving.

• Innovation Australia invited me to present the topic of how Business Makerspaces can bridge innovation gaps to Parliament in Canberra.

• FB IDEAs supported Space Tank’s consultations with industry, investors and startup community into creating better support infrastructure for manufacturing startups developing digital-physical products. (Article here)

• Federal and Victorian State Government representatives have visited Space Tank recently to learn how Business Makerspaces can bridge the commercialisation phase for startups pursuing digital-physical opportunities.

With software-only ecosystems in retreat, advanced manufacturing is no longer a niche; it’s the default in sectors from medtech, agritech, sportstech, mobility to cleantech. Becoming increasingly powered by AI-driven design-to-production workflows, these sectors are the new frontier for startups. Perhaps most significantly, the democratisation of manufacturing means that AI-powered Davids will slay more Goliaths. Small AI-enabled startups can now design, prototype and launch products more nimbly than larger competitors and directly challenge multinational incumbents.

The central message from 2019, that the infrastructure (like Business Makerspaces) to connect ideas to market is not optional but foundational, has proven to be not just correct, but essential for any economy determined to compete in the new digital-physical industrial era. International gold standard examples like New Lab New York and Unternehmer TUM in Munich bear this out. We need more Davids and Jennifers!

The lesson: In the new digital-physical paradigm, innovation infrastructure isn’t a luxury – it’s a survival tactic. If your region can’t make things, it can’t sell things. And if it can’t sell things, the economy becomes a donut: hollow in the middle.

Conclusion / Call to Action: Australia stands at a fork in the road. We can continue to treat manufacturing startups and makerspaces as side projects, or we can recognise them as the backbone of a modern, resilient economy. The Jennifer Effect proves that distributing resources to hundreds of independent innovators delivers more breakthroughs, faster than the old model of feeding a few corporate giants.

The data is in, the global examples are clear and the technology is here. What’s needed now is the willpower to follow through. Government policy that treats digital-physical innovation as critical infrastructure, industry partnerships that open doors for small players and investment frameworks that reward diversity of ideas over sheer corporate scale. If we want to be more than a lucky country, we must become a smart country. One that builds the tools, spaces and ecosystems where our brightest minds can not only dream but deliver. The next decade belongs to the nations that act decisively. Let’s make sure we’re one of them.