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My brief from Australian Wool Innovation CEO Stuart McCullough was simple. Develop a program from scratch that would enable access to the brightest people from multiple disciplines and backgrounds to apply their minds to wool.
“I want a university-led, team-based program that incorporates intervarsity collaboration and friendly competition to deliver the objective”.
The objective was to create and implement applied technology in the form of accessible, low cost, easy-to-use digital tools that improve woolgrower productivity and profitability and make wool growing a more appealing enterprise choice for current and future Australian farmers.
I developed, project managed and mentored a collaboration between University of Adelaide – Entrepreneurship, Commercialisation and Innovation Centre, Charles Sturt University and Deakin University School of Engineering; the 2017 Australian eChallenge Wool Innovation program.
Participants, (most with no previous knowledge or exposure to wool), were presented with a high level overview of the current state of the industry and a proposed future state, together with an outline of the strategic challenges facing Australian wool producers. They were provided mentoring support and introduction access to producers.
Fourteen teams from NSW, Victoria and South Australia used learnings from workshops and online course content, to develop innovative, technology-based, business concepts, pitching these to a panel of expert judges tasked with identifying winners based on criteria including team skills, program engagement and woolgrower affordability, appeal and productivity impact
None of the winning teams had previous exposure to agricultural industries, yet some six teams presented business concepts that with additional support may be commercialised within the range of six to eighteen months.
