Jane is an accomplished design strategist, innovation leader, collaboration facilitator with over 35 years of experience spanning small business, design, entrepreneurship, higher education, and organizational leadership. Jane’s work focuses on supporting innovation by integrating human-centred design, strategic foresight, systems thinking and design thinking to help organizations and communities tackle complex challenges. Her approach emphasizes meaningful stakeholder engagement and co-design, to build collaborative ecosystems that deliver desirable, feasible, and sustainable solutions.
Bridging academia and industry, for 15 years, Jane worked as a “Pracademic” at the University of South Australia, where she founded and directed Match Studio, an internationally recognised and award-winning hub for client-engaged, interdisciplinary undergraduate and post-graduate learning, and research. Her work in Match Studio supported over 120 industry and community partners to work with students and research teams to deliver impactful projects spanning multiple industries including but not limited to health, social innovation, and creative industries. To enable this, she secured government, industry and philanthropic funding and has published within the fields of education, interdisciplinarity, innovation, creative industries, mental health and ageing well.
In late 2023, Jane decided to recalibrate her work life, leaving a tenured position in Academia and founded CoolBus Creative a consultancy dedicated to strategic project design, research partnership brokering, and academic and professional coaching. Believing that life success comes in multiple forms, and that everyone is creative and an expert in their own lives, Jane is committed to creating space for individuals and teams to explore and ‘prototype’ preferred futures, journey paths, and ways in which these possible futures can be realised. Jane has built a reputation for respectfully promoting and enabling innovation and cooperation and applying a strengths-based approach to help individuals and teams clarify goals, overcome barriers, and enhance performance and satisfaction in work and life
From concept to implementation, Jane facilitates respectful, creative and productive conversations with her clients, between stakeholders, and within teams, so that the design and implementation of solutions to challenges individuals and society faces are people focused and impactful.