It probably should have been obvious when Marty Gauvin started teaching computing to his teachers at St Peter’s College that he was ahead of the game.
With the tools of the digital world all around us now it’s getting harder to image a time when the computing resources of one of Adelaide’s leading private schools consisted of an Apple II and three programmable calculators. But so it was in 1984 and the 17- year-old Gauvin was president of the computer society at St Peter’s, and making the most of its limited resources.
As Gauvin told The Vanguard last week, he was called out of class one day by the deputy headmaster who said: “I was wondering if you could give us a hand – we’ve worked out we need to get into this computer stuff but we don’t really know how to”.
“One of the gaps that I identified was that computer literacy amongst the staff was very low so I got together with two of my friends – Bill Carney and John Lindsay – and we put together the curriculum to teach the staff,” Gauvin said.
The three friends formed a company, GCL (Gauvin Carney Lindsay) Systems, although its incorporation was initially delayed by a few days until the three turned 18, the statutory minimum age to be a director of a company.
GCL Systems would embrace new technologies with early successes including creating a multi-user platform for Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system and developing a new screen design to assist the visually impaired, called Dataview.
Gauvin’s view of innovation is exemplified by the Dataview experience. Pursuing computer options for his legally blind girlfriend at the time, Gauvin asked the Royal Society for the Blind why there was no screen designed specifically for the vision impaired. All that was on offer were screens that magnified text.
Gauvin said posing that question was the moment the innovation occurred for the screen he would go on to develop in 1987.
“Innovation doesn’t tend to happen over years, it often happens in a moment,” Gauvin said.
“One of the things I have come to understand is that to innovate you have to be able to see patterns, patterns of all kinds of things. With Dataview, for example, I saw that it was not just the size of the letter on the screen that was going to help visually impaired people, it was the shape of the letter – so they could differentiate between an ‘i’ and a ‘one’, a ‘q’ and a ‘zero’.”
So Gauvin researched the shape of letters that people with very specific levels of limited sight could interpret and created a completely new font – long before suites of fonts were readily available when you unpacked your new computer.
He takes great pleasure from the call he received from a librarian in Darwin who said Dataview had helped her to stay in the workforce longer.
“She rang to say how my invention had changed her life and that sticks with me because it’s a far more direct and immediate understanding of the value of creating than saying I have more money in the bank account.”
Fast forward nearly 30 years and Gauvin is still innovating as the managing director of Tier 5 which has established a data centre – for storing IT servers and data – on the former Mitsubishi site at Tonsley. The contrast between old manufacturing and smart industries could not be more acute.
Marty Gauvin: innovators need to be able to cast their mind freely.
So how does one define innovation?
“Innovation is doing new things in new ways to add value,” Gauvin said.
“Unless you add value, it is not an innovation. An idea has to add value, it has to be implemented, and it has got to provide a practical purpose. And the value can be both economic value and social value.”
Gauvin studied three years of electrical and electronic engineering at the University of Adelaide but did not graduate due to an untimely illness which was followed by the responsibilities and community engagement associated with him being awarded Young Australian of the Year in 1987.
He doesn’t think a university education is necessary for someone to be innovative.
“Completion of a university degree teaches me, as an employer, one important thing but only one, and that is that you have an ability to complete something,” Gauvin said.
“It’s useful but it’s not the be all and end all. What you need to be an innovator is someone who can cast their mind freely, who gets away from thinking inside the square.”
An innovator must also be someone who works well in a team because the idea has to be brought to market.
“A start-up business needs four things – the innovator, a leader, the implementer and the administrator. They don’t need to be four separate people but they do need to cover those four roles.”
Gauvin’s advice for budding entrepreneurs is to gain some experience in an innovative environment like a start-up – even if it’s just pushing paper.
“Get into that world and start to see the way different ideas get tossed around.”
Gauvin has been, and continues, to toss a number of ideas around at Tonsley. Thursday will see the opening of the Flinders University Computer Archaeology Laboratory which encapsulates the development and history of computing.
“We are not reinventing the wheel but the old ideas of programming efficiently on old equipment risks being lost. If you can program efficiently on modern hardware, then what you can achieve is almost boundless,” he said.
“One of the things I’m trying to drive at Tonsley is to build an innovation layer across this site – getting dissimilar groups to talk to each other and then really add some more spice.
“So it’s not just plumbing students (from TAFE) and engineering students (from Flinders University) and data centre engineers (from Tier 5) but it could be circus performers and animal handlers.
“Anything that seems at odds, at the extreme opposites of the spectrum – if you can create that environment, add coffee shops and so forth, you can then drive the different kind of thinking that produces something new.”
“People want a continuous stream of challenges, they want it to be interesting – boredom is the enemy of an innovator.”
Gauvin is worried that the financiers of ideas, the venture capitalists, withdrew their support for creativity during the Global Financial Crisis and that the current financing environment, “the new normal post-GFC, is a whole lot more frightened and risk averse than what came before”.
“There is a degree of conservatism that is particularly strong in South Australia. There’s a lot of money in South Australia, we have billionaires in South Australia, but you can’t unlock their money.
“We need generational change and also some local successes. One of the problems we have is a bit of the tall poppy syndrome – we tend to dwell on our failures rather than celebrate our successes and there are a lot of successes in this state that are not celebrated.”
Marty Gauvin is one of those local successes and his achievements have come from not only thinking outside the square but convincing others that his ideas are worth backing.
Seemingly against the odds in 2010 he convinced Michael Dell, founder of Dell Corporation, to allow Tier 5 to establish a modular data centre in Adelaide – something the giant US corporation had previously only allowed Microsoft and eBay to do.
Gauvin sold the idea that Dell needed a link between what he described as “Dell’s mega-world” and a company like Tier 5 that could take the data centre business across Asia.
“If you take a tiny step of arrogance, sometimes you get lucky and they say: ‘Prove it’.”
It could be said that innovators create their own luck and Marty Gauvin is well on his way to proving the merits of his ideas.
