About Us | Business Navigate

About Us

Our mission is to inspire and help you create success

Who is BusinessNavigate

Learn more about us

BusinessNavigate is synonymous with helping aspiring women and men become an entrepreneur or create a startup business.

Our main website – BusinessNavigate.com – is where we help you get started on your entrepreneurial journey. Whether you’re deciding entrepreneurship is right for you, beginning a side-hustle, or a startup business.

We put together all the elements that go into creating and growing a new business, such as self development, sales and marketing and more.

We provide free information including videos, blog, ebooks, checklists, cheatsheets, templates, and other resources to help you fast-track your journey.

Our Academy – BusinessNavigate Academy – is our training portal which is dedicated to helping you fast-track your transformation to success.

This is where we host our in-depth paid and free video training courses designed to quickly take you to the next level.

Why we created BusinessNavigate

People want to live better lives, filled with passions and aspirations, provide for their families, make a real difference, but lack effective solutions to make their dreams come true. This may well describe you.

As you can imagine, once someone discovers what we “do for a living” they get excited at the prospect of starting a business and want to know every single detail of how we do what we do, and how they can apply that knowledge to their own circumstances.

We’ve always been more than happy to help aspiring entrepreneurs with information and moral support, and will continue to do so. But we’re often asked for more, to help develop their ideas and turn them into new business opportunities.

This is especially once they discover we’re trusted advisors to universities and large research companies on innovation, and assist them commercialising their Intellectual Property through startups and spinoffs.

Over the years we’ve assisted hundreds of entrepreneurs this way, and with the more interesting ideas we’ve taken it to the next level and invested in them. This transformed us into becoming Angel Investors.

But it’s incredibly limiting, and every year we can help only a handful of entrepreneurs this way.

This is why we founded BusinessNavigate and BusinessNavigate Academy so we can share our knowledge and experience with the entire world.

As Featured In

global-entrepreneurship-monitor
yahoo-news
fast-company
cnbc
business-insider
bloomberg
Our Values

We are inspired by a core set of values that forms the foundation the BusinessNavigate culture.
They keep us focused on what is important as we continue to grow.
It is how intend to keep long-term relationships with our subscribers and students.

Mindfulness

We believe compassion, empathy, kindness, self-awareness, understanding and a positive can-do attitude are vital ingredients to empower each other to create a better world.

Integrity

We aim to be the best version of ourselves and have the courage to be the change. We will always be authentic and transparent and believe in honesty, truthfulness. We respect each other equally in all that we do.

Creativity

We are curious and act with the big picture in mind. We challenge ourselves, and our students, to be leaders and be receptive to new ideas, creatively solve problems to discover and innovate elegant new solutions.

Collaboration

To thrive we need to listen and evolve together, recognise each other’s strengths, support and help each other to achieve collective goals and outcomes.

Courage

Courage is having the resilience, persistence, perseverance and willingness to act in accordance with your own values. Be a leader and have the confidence in your own voice to empower yourself and those around you.

Community

We are all connected and should do our best to make the world a better place. We respect the diversity and dignity of others and value honesty and integrity in all our communications.

22

Startups Launched

$215m+

Venture Funds Raised

185+

Happy Clients

5,000+

Happy Students

Our History

February 11, 1985

Innovation Commercialisation

Since 1985 we’ve worked with some of the most talented and innovative people we know. We advised and consulted to universities and large Research and Development organisations helping them commercialise their Intellectual Property in highly diverse industry sectors.

February 11, 1985
June 21, 1992

Startups and Spinoffs

We’ve reviewed hundreds of our clients’ projects, primarily to assess the projects’ commercial viability and investability. For the projects that showed good promise we mentored many of the innovators behind the projects.

These projects were in diverse industry sectors including Horticulture, Animal Health, Climate Change and the Environment, Health and Wellness, Semiconductor Industry, Education, Engineering, Mental Health, and Technology Incubators just to name a few. One project- BluGlass – led to an IPO listing on the Australian Stock Exchange.

June 21, 1992
April 25, 1994

Venture Funding

We helped secure over $215m investment for twelve of these projects and launched them as a startup or spinoffs. This included the Australian Hearing Hub, Australian Technology Park, eBiz Accelerator, Macquarie Technology Business Incubator and Science Park Adelaide.

April 25, 1994
August 2, 1995

Our own Startups

We have launched (and secured investors in) ten of our own startup businesses in diverse industry sectors including Education, Consulting, Health and Wellness, the Wedding industry, online/ecommerce retail in Fashion and Millinery, Digital Animation and Video Production.

August 2, 1995
March 1, 2010

Mentoring, Training, Angel Investing

This led us to setting-up a mentoring and training program to help entrepreneurs realise their dreams, aspirations and goals. We invested in several of their projects.

To broaden our abilities to help more people we recently pivoted to online learning and founded BusinessNavigate and BusinessNavigate Academy.

March 1, 2010

Our Founders

Karen Anderson

Karen Anderson
Co-Founder & Co-CEO

Creativity | Marketing and Communications | Technology

Karen is a high-achieving creative who loves entrepreneurship. Using her curiosity, empathy and obsessive attention to detail, she takes ideas from the concept stage and turns them into reality. Her expertise extends across diverse disciplines such as marketing, creativity, technology, product development, web development and video production as well as training and education. She thrives on collaborating, community and helping others prosper. Karen also likes to give back whenever she can.

Hans Wijgh

Hans Wijgh
Co-Founder & Co-CEO

Interdisciplinary Scientist | Startup Business Expert

One of my key and unique strength is an ability to integrate knowledge and methods from highly diverse disciplines to develop a holistic view. I draw on my BSc in science, BAHon in political science, a Masters degree in innovation, and decades of consulting experience in commercialising intellectual property. This has enabled me to develop a unique voice and become a successful serial entrepreneur in many different industries. When working or studying with us you’ll directly benefit from this, whatever your background.

Some of our Amazing Clients

We’ve had the pleasure of working closely with and advising some amazing and innovative organisations,
world-class brands and trusted leaders in their field.

You can view all our testimonials here

ashurst
university-west-australia
international-association-of-science-parks
rothschild-and-co
sheep-crc
griffith-university
western-sydney-university
multilit
booz-allen-hamilton
university-of-tasmania
meat-livestock-australia
natural-resources-sa-murray-darling-basin
mindspot
city-of-devonport
navitas
commonwealth-scientific-and-industrial-research-organisation
campus-living-villages
australian-hearing-hub
sutherland-shire-council
telstra
macquarie-university
bluglass
australian-technology-park
technology-park-adelaide
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