Founder of the Tech Girls movement wins entrepreneur award

The winner of the 2017 Pearcey Queensland Entrepreneur Award has been announced.

The Pearcey Foundation presented the award to Adroit Research founder Jenine Beekhuyzen at the 2017 Queensland ICT Industry Awards.

Beekhuyzen also founded the Tech Girls Movement, a not-for-profit organisation with the goal of engaging 10,000 girls in Science,Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) entrepreneurship by 2020.

Through its activities, the organisation has distributed over 75,000 free copies of its inspirational book, Tech Girls are Superheroes, to school girls across Australia.

The event also recognised Queensland winners from seven other ICT industry organisations.

ATech founder Sarah-Jane Peterschlingmann and Wei Xiang, foundation professor and head of Discipline of Electronics Systems and Internet of Things (IoT) Engineering at James Cook University were recognised with highly commended awards by the Pearcey Foundation at the event.

The Queensland Pearcey Award judging committee is chaired by Professor Bill Caelli, and the award was presented by the Hon Leeanne Enoch MP, Queensland's Minister for Innovation, Science and the Digital Economy and Minister for Small Business.

Speaking at the Queensland event, Pearcey Foundation's national chairman Wayne Fitzsimmons, noted, "Jenine is a very worthy Pearcey award winner, especially for her focus on encouraging STEM education and entrepreneurship in our younger generation.

"This is where the economic prosperity of our nation will be created into the future.

"Jenine's efforts are having a positive impact on girls at high school in Australia choosing a career path in STEM. This is closely aligned to the work that Jo Burston and her team are doing globally with 'Inspiring Rare Birds', which is great to see.

In addition, a number of other State Awards have already been announced:

The joint winners were Mark Riley, co-founder and CTO of ContentKeeper and Phillip Williamson, co-founder and Chief Innovator at Intelledox.

The winners were husband and wife team Collis and Cyan Ta'eed, co-founders, owners and managers of Envato, a major global marketplace for creative assets and creative people based in Melbourne.

WA's inaugural Pearcey State Award was presented to ICT startup mentor and leader Matthew Macfarlane.

The award was presented to Kloud founder and Business SA director Geoff Rohrsheim.

The final state award to be presented is the NSW winner, which will be announced on 24 October 2017 at a networking function in Sydney.