Team Name

Hecs prize

Team Members

Project Description

We entice the formation of game-changing startups and visionary collaboration through incentivized competitions that encourage the creation of unique IP and sustainable outcomes
A yearly competition that brings together teams of industry (business) and researches (Higher Education) to deliver new Intellectual Property and Commercial ready products with prizes and potential investment.

The Challenge I am addressing today is

How can we overcome the cultural differences between business and researchers to encourage innovation and collaboration?

Why does it matter to find a solution?

There is a whole lot of funding going into research ($10 billion a year in fact) but a lack of new intellectual property is being commercialized. Without commercialiation, Australia is falling behind the rest of the world and new jobs are not being created. It is essential that we promote effortless collaboration between industry and research so that Australia can keep up with the rest of the world and create new jobs into the future.

The Vision is

To promote and provide a collaborative community between Research and Business which will result in more relevant research and development, to ultimately produce new and novel IP that gets commercialized.

My approach to solving this problem

To research and find out why there is such a lack of collaboration between Research and Business, what current solutions if any are out there and from this data create a viable solution? Through data.gov.au I found the National Survey of Research Commercialisation 2000-2015, I found the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) which encourages collaboration between researchers which then lead me to Research Data Australia, which is datasets from research that has been performed. The data that I did find was hard to interpret and hard to navigate around. In my research I could not find a database of current research that is being undertaken or current problems that need to be solved within industry. The research showed me that there is a huge gap between research and business due to the lack of transparency from research and the lack of data from industry which I believes creates a culture of distrust and does not promote collaboration.

Solution and MVP

My solution involves making both research and business much more transparent and collaborative through the sharing of ideas and current research being performed in a year long event. We have a history of not sharing due to fear of idea’s and IP being stolen, but we know that commercialisation only happens with great execution not great IP. So by bringing both researchers and business together we can create great IP and great execution resulting in commercialisation of new IP and creating new jobs for Australia’s future.

The concept

An incentivised year long competition where researchers add their current projects they are working on and Businesses add their current problems. When these have been submitted, the businesses and researchers will join together in teams and over the course of the year work on research and development to bring a viable product to market utilising the R & D tax incentive and other grants that are available. At the end of the year, teams will then come together to pitch their solutions in front of judges and investors and the winning team will have their Hecs paid off for the researchers and the businesses will have a new and innovative product that will potentially gain funding from investors.

The impact of running this competition

Will bring researchers and businesses together, creating innovative products and solutions to market which will help grow our economy and create new jobs for the future.

What are the next steps and how will we move forward?

I have already started building out the web platform and can have this completed within a week. I will then be getting other team members involved from the startup community I am involved in from River City Labs in Brisbane to Canvas Coworking in Toowoomba, the Sunshine Coast Gold coast and the huge startup community I am involved in. We will be communicating with Universities and industry to get the projects submitted and can start rolling out the competition from the beginning of 2019. This Competition can be run each year with the support of government and sponsors, with potential partners including CSIRO, Universities, Innovative Industries, Venture Capital and Government.

Data Story

Through data.gov.au I found the National Survey of Research Commercialisation 2000-2015, I found the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) which encourages collaboration between researchers which then lead me to Research Data Australia, which is datasets from research that has been performed. The data that I did find was hard to interpret and hard to navigate around. In my research I could not find a database of current research that is being undertaken or current problems that need to be solved within industry. The research showed me that there is a huge gap between research and business due to the lack of transparency from research and the lack of data from industry which I believes creates a culture of distrust and does not promote collaboration.