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Mark Your Calendars 📆

Hosted by Hunter iF, the Hunter Innovation Festival is your golden ticket to join a vibrant mix of innovators and entrepreneurs from our local community and beyond. This October, Newcastle and the Hunter is the place to be, as we invite you to contribute to our booming innovation ecosystem.

Following the smashing success of the 2023 Festival, we’re dialling up the excitement with fresh, engaging experiences. Last year we welcomed over 700 people to our festival events. We anticipate growing that to 1,000 this year!

Our goal? No one person can collaborate or influence like a group of passionate, intelligent innovators. We will draw in even more brilliant minds from Greater Newcastle, the Hunter region, and all across Australia. Get ready for the 2024 Festival, packed with acclaimed keynote speakers, carefully curated and deliberately handpicked presentations, lively panel discussions, enlightening interviews, cutting-edge product demonstrations, hands-on workshops, dynamic exhibitors, eye-catching displays, and so much more.

The 2024 Hunter Innovation Festival consists of three events:

  • Innovation Conference & Showcase – 17th October
  • Innovation Roadshow – 21st to 25th October
  • Innovation Ecosystem Action Summit – 31st October

Our 2024 Festival Themes

Hunter iF conducts an annual survey at the start of each year, encompassing some 3,000 stakeholders on our mailing list, to assess the pain points, areas of opportunity, and dominant themes in the minds of innovators within the community upon which to build our Festival Themes.
The Festival Themes for 2024 are: 
  • Wellness at Work
  • Technology
  • Clean Energy
  • Advanced Manufacturing
While Wellness at Work is a ‘horizontal’ theme that sits across the other three ‘vertical’ themes, there are a series of sub-themes that we will address on October 17, including:
  • Raising capital – access to government, private and crowd funding
  • Health and education innovation precincts
  • Talent acquisition and retention

 

Speaker Expressions of Interest

If you would like to be involved in this year’s Hunter Innovation Festival events, we would love to hear from you.
Click below to complete our Speaker Expression of Interest form. We will be taking your submissions until June 30th.

Sponsorship Opportunities

We have a small number of sponsorship and partnership opportunities available for the 2024 Festival. Sponsoring the 2024 Hunter Innovation Festival offers organisations a unique opportunity to connect with a dynamic national and regional audience comprising entrepreneurs, investors, industry leaders, educators, and policy-makers.
By sponsoring the 2024 Hunter Innovation Festival, you gain: 
  • Access to influential entrepreneurs and industry leaders
  • Networking opportunities, both internal and external
  • Distinctive marketing and brand exposure
  • A platform to establish valuable contacts and boost sales
  • Brand alignment with a collaborative, dynamic, inclusive event