The state’s new top innovation and technology advisor opens up about what makes him tick.
It’s an often repeated story that when stockbroker and aspiring company director Charles Morgan arrived in Perth in the early 1990s, it took him less than a year to complete a successful initial public offering.
Mr Morgan was amazed that so many investors were prepared to throw their money at an unknown blow-in from the eastern states and now, almost two decades after making Western Australia his home, he is giving back by chairing the state government’s new Technology and Industry Advisory Council.
The oil and gas entrepreneur has also just donated $1 million to fund the purchase of state-of-the-art genetic sequencing equipment, a testament to his ongoing fascination with science and technology.
“It’s just going to be so exciting to see what people can produce,” he says of the new equipment.
Raised on a sheep and cattle farm in Victoria, Mr Morgan originally imagined combining futures broking with a life on the land.
By his mid twenties, though, he had decided farming was not for him, and so began a career in broking and investment banking that took him from Melbourne to London and back again, and included stints at Morgan Grenfell and McCaughan Dyson.
By 1992 he found himself in Perth after setting up a small mining-focused broking firm, but the lure to get into the game himself was too strong.
“I guess I always wanted to be on the other side of the table, and wanted to actually create companies rather than be on the broking, money raising side,” he says.
Within a year he had floated SOCDET, now Nido Petroleum, beginning a career in the oil and gas industry that now sees him lead Grand Gulf Energy, as well as chairing unlisted companies Latent Petroleum and Seaspin.
“I fell in love with the oil business,” he says.
“It’s still the greatest business around, really. Nothing could be so much fun, you go to such weird places and do wonderful deals ... well you don’t always do wonderful deals. Sometimes you do wonderful deals and sometimes you do dud deals.”
He admits to having lost his fair share of money on deal-driven curiosity, the same curiosity that has led him to his second love: science and technology.
“The technology thing really started in 1997 when the oil price collapsed and I had West Oil back then, which we ended up giving away for nothing,” he says.
“So that was really when I got interested in the technology space; I suppose from just being a curious person in the first place, but then in 1997 thinking, the oil price is ten dollars and everything I’ve got is worth nothing, so I’ve got to find something else.”
His first foray into the field was a biotechnology venture with the CSIRO. He subsequently accepted a role on Curtin University’s commercialisation board, using his business acumen to help academics profit from their work.
It was this role that led him to his work with TIAC, after approaching then Commerce minister Troy Buswell to discuss Technology Park and the Innovation Centre in Bentley and how it could be improved.
“He said, ‘Well I’m not going to do that pal, but have I got a job for you’ … that ended up with me being appointed chair of the interim (science and technology) council,” Mr Morgan says.
He steered an interim council through the process of forming a revitalised TIAC, and was this month appointed chairman of the remodeled council, which advises the government on policies for the sector.
Mr Morgan donated his full chairman’s fee to the 2010 WA Innovator of the Year Awards, establishing the Charles Morgan Innovation Award and providing all 20 finalists with access to the WA Innovators Circle for networking opportunities.
This month he also donated $1 million to his pet cause, genetics, providing the funds for genetic sequencing equipment to be housed at the Lotterywest State Biomedical Facility: Genomics at Royal Perth Hospital.
“It will be, as I understand it, only one of two of these machines in Australia that are open access,” he says.
“It will be another tool in the toolbox to actually deliver health services … If you’re susceptible (to a condition) and it is watched and you manage to avoid it, then you’ve saved the health system a fortune.”
The machine will be used by scientists from all major universities and research organisation, as well as the WA Department of Health, and has potential uses outside medicine in fields like ecology, agriculture and veterinary science.
Mr Morgan is full of enthusiasm, both for his new role and for the potential discoveries his philanthropic gifts may inspire.
He knows there are probably some academics that are sceptical of an oil and gas man coming to shake up their sector.
“I just hope they realise that I truly am enthusiastic about this area and I’m certainly not here for the money and I’m not here for the glory,” he says.
“I’m actually here for the fact that WA has been very, very good to me and I would like to give something back – I know that’s a corny thing to say, but it’s the truth.”
