Award night shows we are a nation of innovators

The conventional wisdom is that Australia doesn’t innovate and can’t manufacture anything high quality, complex, or affordable. The AMDA Foundation Innovation Awards, now in their 10th year, continue to disprove that conventional wisdom.

Rhys Centin of Thornton Thomasetti has been nominated for the Young Innovator Award. Picture: Linked In

The conventional wisdom is that Australia doesn’t innovate and can’t manufacture anything high quality, complex, or affordable.

The AMDA Foundation Innovation Awards, now in their 10th year, continue to disprove that conventional wisdom.

This year they will be presented on the opening day of Indo Pacific 2023 by Professor Emily Hilder, interim head of Defence’s own innovation agency, the Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator (ASCA).

“Australian companies and individuals are showing themselves the equal of any in the world in creating technologies and ideas that solve real-world problems,” says Justin Giddings, chief executive of AMDA Foundation Limited, which organises Indo Pacific 2023.

Entrants for the awards include a group of students from the University of New South Wales in Canberra who have designed what may be the world’s first air-launched Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (a UAV, or “drone”) designed to dive below the surface to hunt for submarines. Another entrant is a Sydney-based company, Hypersonix Launch Systems, that beat more than 60 global rivals to win a US Defense Innovation Unit contract to build a hypersonic air vehicle and engine.

Along with 26 other entrants, they are competing in three categories: a National Innovation Award, an SME Innovation Award and a Young Innovator Award.

Young Innovator Award entrants include Rhys Centin of Thornton Thomasetti who, for the first time in Australia, has succeeded in shock testing naval equipment weighing more than a tonne. And Taimoor Sabih, a young engineer working for Aboriginal-owned Advent Atuma, who has developed the operating system for a new family of autonomous military vehicles and boats. Their entries are all showcased at Indo Pacific 2023 in a poster presentation near the exhibition entrance.

This year the organisers have increased the prize for the SME and Young Innovator Awards to $50,000 each.

“The Indo Pacific 2023 Innovation Awards provide a meaningful financial incentive for small business and individuals to help them develop their innovations, and visibility to potential customers and partners,” Giddings says. “The result is commercialisation of products and services that strengthen both our industry and their customers, in particular the Navy.”

Past winners include CBG Systems, a Tasmanian company that developed a lightweight, fire-resistant cladding for merchant and warship bulkheads. This is now in use on high-speed catamaran ferries and is being prototyped aboard the Hunter-class frigates.

The SME Innovation Award has been won by companies like Port Melbourne-based Sentient Vision Systems whose artificial intelligence ViDAR imagery analysis system allows aircraft and helicopter crews to detect targets at sea such as survivors in the water or drug-smuggling semi-submersibles that are invisible to the naked eye and wouldn’t show up on conventional radars and infrared sensors. Sentient Vision Systems is now supplying ViDAR to US surveillance drone manufacturer Shield AI.

The AMDA Foundation funds the Awards and its eight-strong panel of judges led by Tony Quick, which includes former deputy chief defence scientist, Dr Ian Sare, selects the winners independently. But its aims are aligned with those of Pillar 2 of the tripartite AUKUS agreement and of ASCA, which was set up after the release this year of the Defence Strategic Review and is designed to facilitate innovation and the rapid fielding of new technologies.

“It is great to see that this year’s Innovation Award winners embody the values of the Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator, in that they are striving to accelerate development and transition of capability for the ADF through innovation,” Hilder says. “ASCA looks forward to working alongside Australian defence industry partners such as these to develop an innovation ecosystem that delivers military solutions to take Defence further, faster.”

The AMDA Foundation also runs the Land Forces Exposition which next year will be held in Melbourne; the SME and Young Innovator awards there will also be worth $50,000 each.