Venturetec helps Children's Cancer Institute with future-readiness
Innovation consulting firm Venturetec has supported the Children’s Cancer Institute with a pro bono project to help the organisation with future-readiness.
Melbourne-based boutique consulting firm Venturetec – a certified B-Corp company recently named among the organisation’s annual honourees for positive workforce impact – has carried out a three-month project for the Children’s Cancer Institute, which forms part of the Lowy Cancer Research Centre at UNSW. In line with its B-Corp status, Venturetec agreed to perform the consulting assignment pro bono as part of its Pledge 1% commitment.
Established in 1976, the Children’s Cancer Institute (CCI) is a world-renowned independent medical research body dedicated to ending childhood cancer through ground-breaking research initiatives. In part driven by the Government’s recent funding announcement to establish the Comprehensive Childhood Cancer Centre in Sydney – which will bring together clinical care, research and teaching under a one roof – the CCI has embarked on a major transformation.
Following a tour of CCI’s research facilities and a meeting with executives to discuss a number of current challenges, the consultants from Venturetec set to work in a bid to help the organisation prepare for the future, ultimately joining with CCI’s executive team to co-design a future roadmap incorporating key insights and recommendations. To reach this stage, Venturetec spent three months running multiple ‘diagnostic tests’ using its own innovative approach.
“The findings reconfirmed a number of insights (or suspicions) we had about ourselves, our challenges, gaps and general organisational characteristics, but reinforced them in a way that fostered more constructive discussion about how to address them, including the Venturetec recommendations,” said Mark Bizeray, CCI’s Head of Business Transformation. “It also highlighted risks and opportunities that we hadn’t considered, or had given cursory attention to.”
Providing for deeper insights into CCI’s strategy and structure, organisational culture, and future-ready capabilities, the consulting firm’s diagnostic assessment takes a human-centric and data-driven approach to organisational transformation – and has been previously deployed with Venturetec clients such as Bupa, the CSIRO, and Johnson & Johnson. This approach allows Venturetec to gain a wider view of an organisation’s current state of future-readiness.
“The recommendations translated a way forward into actionable work packages across a range of functional/strategic opportunities. The focus of the recommendations was on small quick wins, with an eye to longer term change/goals,” Bizeray continued, hinting at the lean pedigree among some of the Venturetec team. “This suited us at the present time, as a full program of changes across all recommendations would have been overwhelming for an already busy organisation.”
An alumnus of UNSW, Venturetec founder and CEO Trey Zagante says that as one of its ‘Pledge Projects’ the firm is continuing to work with CCI to guide them through the process of implementing the recommendations; “paving the way for CCI as they transition towards the Comprehensive Childhood Cancer Centre in the following years and allowing them to continue innovating and creating life-saving treatments for children with cancer.”
