The CoLabs Impact Program Autumn 26′

Some of the most important ideas in the world never make it out of a notebook.

Not because they aren’t good enough. Not because the person behind them lacks the drive, the vision, or the capacity to see it through. But because the terrain between a bold idea and a functioning venture is covered with very practical obstacles – access to space, access to capital, access to the right thinking partners at exactly the right moment. The winding path towards the entry of the innovation ecosystem is, frankly, too steep for too many people.

That’s exactly why CoLabs runs the Impact Program.

What the Impact Program Actually Is

The Impact Program is CoLabs’ way of opening the door wider – of saying that the future of bio-based, circular, and regenerative innovation shouldn’t only belong to those who can already afford a seat at the table.

Selected participants receive access to CoLabs lab and office space across our Brunswick and Notting Hill sites, along with hands-on business support, help identifying and applying for funding pathways, and structured guidance across the full arc of early-stage venture development. We’re talking about tools like business model generation, value proposition design, pitch coaching, and connection into the broader CoLabs ecosystem of mentors, members, and collaborators.

We also bring a challenge-led, complexity-informed approach to the whole thing – because the problems these founders are working on aren’t simple, and they deserve support that doesn’t pretend otherwise.

In total, the program represents over $150,000 in value for Impact, but as a genuine investment in people and ideas that we believe have the potential to matter.

From Ideation to Actualisation

The language matters here. We don’t just want to help people get a business plan together. We want to help them get from having an idea to living it – from concept to company, from whiteboard to working prototype, from ‘what if’ to ‘here’s how.’

That journey is rarely linear. It’s iterative, sometimes messy, always context-dependent. So the support we offer isn’t a fixed curriculum delivered the same way to everyone. It’s responsive, tailored, and grounded in the real challenges each founder faces. We meet people where they are, and we work with them to navigate the genuine uncertainty of building something new.

Innovation readiness levels, business model generation, value proposition design, systems mapping, funding strategy, materials research, and lab access – the support shifts based on what each venture actually needs at each stage. That’s the point.

Why This Matters Right Now

We’re at an inflection point. The transition towards circular, bio-based economies is no longer a fringe conversation – it can no longer be ignored (no matter how hard some folks from ‘business as usual’ try) and will become one of the defining challenges and opportunities of our era.

The past few years have made the stakes viscerally clear. And not just in the obvious ways. The philosopher Jonathan Rowson describes our current moment not as a single emergency but as ten entangled ones – ecological, political, economic, epistemic, spiritual – each reinforcing the others in ways that make any single-domain response feel inadequate. The climate crisis is real, but so is the crisis of civilisational purpose behind it. So is the failure of imagination that keeps us optimising systems that were broken by design. So is the absence of a meaningful collective ‘We’ capable of holding the complexity of what’s actually being asked of us. We are, as Rowson puts it, living in a metacrisis, which is a bit of a pickle. And we are being forced to taste said pickle and the nuanced layers of flavour that go along with it. 

You can see it playing out in the material world just as clearly. Global supply chains buckled under COVID-19. The war in Ukraine sent natural gas and food prices through the roof. Conflict in the Middle East has put a stranglehold on international shipping routes – with the Strait of Hormuz’s role as a critical global choke point sending oil prices surging and once again exposing just how precarious our dependence on centralised, globally stretched systems really is. These aren’t isolated shocks. They’re dispatches from a system running out of slack.

Nobody’s pretending the world isn’t in trouble. The question has never really been whether we’re in a crisis – it’s what we choose to do while we’re in one. Business as usual has a very clear answer to that question. We’re trying to offer a different one: invest in local resilience, back the people building adaptive capacity into our socio-ecological systems, and trust that the seeds planted now will matter later – even if the weather between here and there gets rough.

The case for localised, resilient modes of production, consumption and distribution, as outlined by thinkers such as Daniel Wahl, has never been stronger. New materials, new production systems, new relationships between industry and ecology – the science is moving fast, the policy landscape is shifting, and market appetite for genuinely regenerative solutions is growing. The question is no longer if this transition happens (we kinda have to make it happen or we’ll self-terminate this little human civilisational experiment we’ve been running for most of the Holocene). It’s whether the right ideas get the support they need to establish themselves and flourish.

As Buckminster Fuller put it:

‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.’

Transitions like this don’t often happen through incremental tweaks by existing incumbents. For the most part, these folks benefit from the structural inequities of the current system. They happen when a new generation of innovators – people with fresh eyes, deep curiosity, and the courage to try something genuinely different – gets the conditions they need to grow.

That’s the gap the Impact Program is designed to fill. Paying it forward so that we can create enabling conditions for the seeds of a more regenerative future to emerge. Think of it like a deliberate act of ecosystem-building – planting seeds that we hope will, in time, reshape the landscape around us.

The Impact Program as a ‘Living Laboratory’

To be honest, it’s also a bit of a live experiment or ‘living laboratory’ for us. Every cohort teaches us something new about what early-stage bio-ventures actually need, what kinds of support move the needle, and how a challenge-led model can be designed to address the complexity of the problems these founders are taking on. 

One thing has become abundantly clear through this work: conventional funding is one of the biggest roadblocks to bio-led innovation. As we explored in our piece on financing a thriving bioeconomy, the dominant funding architecture (short-horizon, exit-obsessed, risk-averse at exactly the wrong moments) is structurally mismatched with the biological, regulatory, and relational rhythms that this kind of innovation actually runs on. The Impact Program is, in part, our response to that: proof that a different model of support is possible.

In many ways, the Impact Program is the prototype: a chance to tinker, learn, and refine the approaches that we hope will one day form the backbone of a dedicated challenge-led venture studio, purpose-built to support the bioeconomy and accelerate the transitions towards it. If you share that vision and want to help co-design, fund, or support what that studio could become, we’d love to hear from you. 

Paying It Forward

CoLabs was built on the belief that innovation happens in community – that shared space, shared resources, and shared knowledge produce better outcomes than isolated individual effort. The Impact Program is that belief made explicit.

We do well as a business when the ecosystem around us thrives. When the next wave of bio-innovators gets off the ground. When the founders who couldn’t quite afford a bench tenancy in year one are running their own operations in year three. When the ideas that needed a little more runway to prove themselves get the time and support to do exactly that.

This is our version of paying it forward. It’s good for the founders, the field, and the future we’re all trying to build together.

Who’s Already Come Through

We’ve had the privilege of supporting some genuinely exciting founders and ventures across our first two cohorts. Utilium, Oyster X, C-Forge, and Melbourne Bionics have all moved through the program – each tackling different corners of the bio-based and deep tech landscape, each bringing something distinctive to the CoLabs community.

And then there are the ones who don’t fit neatly into a cohort timeline but who we’re backing anyway. ROPA and Compound are both in the fold right now, because sometimes you meet a team and you just know. The program has structure, but our enthusiasm for great ideas doesn’t.

Watching these ventures grow – from tentative early conversations to funded, focused, fast-moving companies – is one of the most energising parts of what we do at CoLabs.

An Ecosystem, Not a Pipeline

One thing we want to be clear about: the Impact Program is about supporting long-term ecosystem development and alternative approaches to value creation.

We’re not trying to stamp out a particular type of company or optimise for a narrow definition of what it means to be successful. We’re trying to build an ecosystem – one where diverse approaches, diverse founders, and diverse ideas can find the conditions they need to flourish. One that takes seriously what regenerative thinkers like Ethan Soloviev have long argued: that financial capital is just one of eight forms of capital flowing through any healthy system.

Yes, there’s financial capital, but there is so so much more. Through a more multispectral lens, we have social, cultural, living, experiential, intellectual, material, and spiritual forms of capital. These are all real forms of wealth, and a venture that generates only financial capital at the expense of the others isn’t succeeding. It’s just extracting. We’re not optimising for exit. We’re striving to optimise for multi-capital abundance.

That means being genuinely curious about the full range of what’s possible in bio-based, circular, and regenerative innovation. It means caring as much about how something is built as whether it scales. It means asking questions like: Who benefits from this? What does it give back? What relationships (human, ecological, more-than-human) does it strengthen or repair?

These are the questions that animate the CoLabs community more broadly, and they’re the questions we bring into the Impact Program, too.

Adaptation & Resilience: What We’re Looking to Support

The areas below aren’t just where we see the most urgent need — they sit in direct alignment with Australia’s National Science and Research Priorities, released in August 2024. The five priorities — transitioning to a net zero future, supporting healthy and thriving communities, elevating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems, protecting and restoring Australia’s environment, and building a secure and resilient nation — are designed to guide investment and effort across government, universities, and the private sector toward solving Australia’s greatest challenges. Department of Industry Science and Resources The work we’re backing through the Impact Program maps directly onto that agenda. Not as a compliance exercise — but because the founders and researchers we support are doing the actual on-the-ground work the strategy is calling for.

1. Climate-resilient biology (agriculture, soil microbiomes, ecosystem restoration) — speaks to both the net zero transition and environmental protection priorities, with living systems approaches offering what industrial agriculture cannot.
2. Water intelligence and decentralised water systems critical infrastructure for a nation facing accelerating drought, flood, and resource stress; central to both environmental and national resilience priorities.
3. Fire and extreme event adaptation (materials, detection, regeneration) — squarely within the secure and resilient nation priority, and one of the most acute frontlines of Australia’s climate reality.
4. Climate-adaptive built environment and biomaterials bridges the net zero transition and environmental protection priorities; where the construction sector, one of Australia’s highest-emissions industries, meets the next generation of bio-based material systems.
5. Coastal and marine resilience (living shorelines, aquaculture) Australia’s marine estate is one of the largest in the world and among the most biodiverse. Protecting and restoring it is both an environmental and an economic imperative.
6. Biosecurity and climate-driven disease resilience directly addressed by the healthy and thriving communities and secure and resilient nation priorities; a domain where the intersection of biology, climate, and supply chain vulnerability demands genuinely new approaches.
7. Localised biomanufacturing and resilient supply chains the Future Made in Australia agenda and the national resilience priority converge here; the case for sovereign manufacturing capacity has never been clearer.
8. Indigenous knowledge and bioregional stewardship for the first time, elevating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge systems has been included as a standalone national science and research priority Information Age — a recognition that the world’s oldest continuous knowledge tradition is not a heritage footnote but an active scientific resource. This is one we take seriously, not just as policy alignment, but as an ethical and intellectual commitment.

These areas sit at the frontlines of Australia’s climate reality — where resilience, regeneration, and system redesign are most urgently needed, and where biotech and deep tech can unlock entirely new approaches. The national strategy points in this direction. We’re trying to help build the ventures that actually get there.

To support work across these areas, we’ve designed the Impact Program to meet people at different stages of their journey:

Inside the CoLabs Impact Program, we’re opening up two fellowship pathways:

Inside the CoLabs Impact Program, we’re opening up two pathways:

Residency

For early-stage startups and teams who need space to build.

Inclusions:

• 6 months access to CoLabs wet labs, engineering workshop, and prototyping facilities
• Hands-on support across science, product, and venture development
• A community of founders and researchers working at the edge of biotech, materials, food, and climate

Fellowship

For those who don’t need lab space but want to be deeply embedded in a regenerative innovation ecosystem.

• Access to coworking office space, meeting rooms and prototyping facilities
• Access to the CoLabs community, events, and networks
• Opportunities to collaborate, learn, and contribute across disciplines
• A place to stay close to emerging ideas, people, and projects shaping the future

Across both pathways, you’ll:

• Work on real problems, not hypotheticals
• Learn across disciplines – science, design, systems, entrepreneurship
• Develop ideas grounded in circular, regenerative, and bioregional thinking

We’re especially excited about people working across biotech, alt proteins, biomaterials, climate tech, and circular systems.

You don’t need to have it all figured out. We’re here for the early signals gesturing towards a more protopian future. The experiments, the questions and the things that might just grow into something meaningful as we co-create a pathway towards an ecological civilisation.

Come Grow Something With Us

If you’re working on an idea at the intersection of biology, sustainability, materials, or deep tech – and you’re at that early, uncertain, high-potential stage where the right support could make all the difference – we’d love to hear from you.

We run two seasonal intakes a year – a rhythm that lets us show up fully for each cohort – but the path up the mountain is never fully closed. If you’re a bold thinker, a determined builder, or sitting on an idea that just needs more room to breathe, reach out anytime. The right conversation doesn’t always wait for the right calendar date.

 Apply here.