High Impact Innovation from Industry and Research Collaboration

By Peter Rossdeutscher | 8 Apr 2018

iPREP WA Marshall Institute team with Christopher Tallentire MLA

Researchers strengthening their broad collaboration skills tackling the innovation demands of workplaces. The H1 2018 iPREP cohort presented their recommendations after six weeks of concentrated work. Multidisciplinary teams of PhD researchers from five different Universities with a number of commercial supervisors tackling on real corporate problems for paying clients.

Each of the teams showed entrepreneurial thinking of the challenges and presented strong recommendations to their corporate project sponsor. The presentations were supported by a report and presentation.

Focused on projects solving real workplace challenges. Four of the projects were innovating in the sector; optimizing wetland performance of future treatment technologies; environmentally sustainable solutions for sequester carbon using hemp, using data science to increase the efficiency of fertiliser use efficiency, optimizing the sniper precision agriculture system for grain growers.

The final team of the night had been working on Nobel Prize Barry Marshall's Noisy Gut initiative. Their work included recruiting study participants for data recordings using the Noisy Guts intelligent acoustic belt. The belt will provide doctors with a non-invasive way of screening for physical diseases with irritable bowel syndrome and other guts disorders.

For the third consecutive year, Atomic Sky was a key supporter of iPREP providing commercial solution delivery coaching.  It always amazes me how quickly researchers adapt to workplace challenges and the exceptional input to the commercialisation of projects they deliver in such a short time.

What do the University PhD students most get out of this type of diverse engagement with industry partners?

- Increased business acumen

- Demonstrated problem solving

- Project management skills

- Cross-discipline teamwork

- Workplace skills translation

Christopher Tallentire MLA, Parliamentary Secretary to the Western Australia Minister for Water, Fisheries, Forestry, Innovation and ICT, Science closed the formalities. Minister Tallentire highlighted the quality of the outputs as well as commenting on the value of research working with industry as well as collaboration across sectors for growing economies.

Vicki Hodgson MC'd the evening and iPREP Coordinator, Narelle Jones, concluded the event noting that the key theme for the success of all of the projects was optimisation and applying cross-discipline thinking to innovative commercial projects.