By CASEY NEILL
SCIENTISTS are leaving the lab and meeting manufacturers, with innovation in their sights.
A CSIRO and the South East Melbourne Manufacturers Alliance (SEMMA) collaboration is also taking manufacturers off the factory floor and introducing them to researchers.
CSIRO strategic initiatives and collaboration director Ros Hore said the meetings held since March have opened her team’s eyes.
“They didn’t realise there were so many manufacturing businesses basically on our doorstep,” she said.
“We’ve got a whole manufacturing research program. There’s probably close to 200 scientists.”
Ms Hore said they now had a better understanding of how businesses operated, the issues they were facing and their needs.
“Collaboration for an innovation outcome is the ultimate goal, but if we can just start broadening the dialogue…” she said.
“This is not a quick fix.
“This is all about relationships. Relationships take trust and a lot of talking.”
Ms Hore said scientists toured manufacturing facilities and then came up with ideas for improvements.
“We put it back onto the company to then select what they’d like to pursue further,” she said.
“At the moment it’s not costing businesses anything other than their time.
“Industry don’t think about going to CSIRO for solutions.
“And they don’t even realise that not everything requires a research solution, but we can often connect them to a solution.
“We can’t do everything but we have a wealth of information.”
SEMMA executive officers Adrian Boden said: “We can confidently say that despite having visited only seven businesses, the collaboration has already achieved its objectives.”
“Businesses have appreciated getting access to the expertise of leading scientists from the CSIRO and have also found that the process was not as complicated as they imagined.”
Ray Keefe from Berwick’s Successful Endeavours has so far had four meetings with the CSIRO.
“The first was a visit by them to our office to understand our business a little better and to help them work out where the fit might be,” he said.
“From that came a number of groups within the CSIRO expressing an interest in having a more detailed discussion.”
Mr Keefe spoke with groups in the big data and modelling area and in instrument development technologies.
“The big data group have some really world-class capability,” he said.
“Our potential work with them would be augmenting that with some of our own technology so that can provide a complete solution rather than a component of a solution.”
He’ll meet with a third group later in the year.
“They are interested in low power telemetry, an area we also work in, and could have some useful technology in that space,” he said.
