Co-developed by the Incubator and the Office of Commercialisation and Innovation, the MQ Researchers IMPACT Program will teach researchers and HDR candidates how to actively assess the path of their research to commercialisation and real-world impact.

Anna says the seven-week program provides an interactive, practical and cohort-based approach that takes researchers through the process of customer discovery, product market fit and the University’s ‘Impact Canvas‘ tool.

“Positive feedback about the Impact Canvas – which helps people clarify their research to ensure there is an end-user and likely impactful outcome – has been overwhelming,” she says. “It has been used widely across all Faculties, in ECR training, Centre of Excellence focus groups, researchers individually, the Incubator and the Office of Commercialisation and Innovation.”

“However, we did identify a knowledge gap around how to talk about ideas to appreciate the needs and desires of end-users without jeopardising competitive advantage or intellectual property (IP) position. Hence, a course about how to conduct Customer Discovery, articulate your value proposition, learning about entrepreneurship.”

Anna has been helping Macquarie researchers identify, evaluate and commercialise their IP for five years, and in this time she has noticed attitudes towards research commercialisation changing.

“I have seen that our culture and values around IP and commercialisation have moved slowly in the positive direction,” she says.  “My team and I are passionate about helping turn ideas into reality and I have always preached that pitching research, offering a value proposition to donors and funding bodies, will result in deals being closed.  We’ve helped researchers and industry with many successes, and we are now seeing referrals from past clients.

She says the current operating environment makes it a great time for researchers to explore their impact potential.

“The needle of the impact dial has a huge potential to be positively moved now with the opportunities we have under COVID-19, a new Chancellor who is also passionate about diversifying our income and an Australia that wants to be more sustainable around manufacturing and the security and wellbeing of our citizens.”

After completion of the Researchers IMPACT program,  participants will have learned new skills to be able to view their research through the lenses of their customers and investors and make evidence-based decisions about their research, pursuing the best commercialisation pathway for maximum impact.

Interested applicants will need to submit their Expression of Interest by 27 September, with the program set to commence in October.

A technology 10 years in the making is now set to help tens of millions of people, with the world’s largest chemical company licencing the rights to a world-changing Macquarie University discovery.

Every day, the community of researchers at Macquarie University is working on innovations that could potentially improve human welfare and protect our environment. But how do these technologies progress from an academic hunch all the way to their application in the world?

Enter Macquarie University’s Commercialisation and Innovation team. Their role is to identify and commercialise new technologies developed by our researchers so that business, industry and the community can benefit.

Over a 10-year period, Professor Brian Atwell of the Department of Biological Sciences has worked with former Macquarie PhD student and post-doc, Dr Andrew Scafaro, to isolate a gene from a wild Australian rice that renders plants tolerant to very hot days beyond the mid-30s (which is about three degrees hotter than the optimum for commercial cereal crops). With conservative estimates predicting an average increase in the Earth’s temperature of at least two degrees over the next century, major grain shortages are expected. This innovation will help the world sustain wheat yields through heat waves and general global warming.

The technology was developed in a team involving international collaborations and supported by colleagues at Bayer CropScience in Belgium. The recent transfer of agreements to the German company BASF – the largest chemical producer in the world – has culminated in a mutual licence agreement with Macquarie University to bring a heat resistant wheat crop to market.

“We’ve spent the last two years negotiating the license for this technology,” notes Anna Grocholsky, Macquarie University’s Director of Commercialisation and Innovation. “Research started with Bayer. Bayer acquired Monsanto and then Bayer CropScience’s wheat business was acquired by BASF.

“Macquarie University has such a strong record for innovation and it’s immensely satisfying to be able to help people like Brian and Andrew translate their incredible efforts into solutions with truly global potential.

“This deal with BASF represents a fantastic team effort from Brian and Andrew, Legal and the Commercialisation and Innovation team.”

With BASF having licensed the rights for wheat, Anna’s team are also working with Professor Atwell and Dr Scafaro to license the technology in other crops and grains, expanding its potential to secure a staple food source for many millions of people.

You can read more about this groundbreaking work in The Lighthouse. For information on this technology, or other new technologies being developed at Macquarie, contact Anna on +61 437 463 317.

Professor Michael Withford and Dr Simon Gross from the Department of Physics and Astronomy are part of a team selected to take part in the next round of CSIRO’s ON Accelerator, a program boosting Australia’s innovation performance by accelerating big science and technology ideas into commercially viable innovation opportunities.

For the first time CSIRO welcomed Australian university applications into the program, recognising the importance of collaboration and engagement between research sectors in driving Australia’s innovation agenda.

Macquarie’s team Modular Photonics is a collaboration with the University of Adelaide and ANU.

The team’s winning idea – a photonics chip that has applications for faster data transfer in data and telecommunication companies – is built on the strengths of Australian photonics research to increase the speed and flow of data to, from and within data centres. The chip is currently three times faster than market technology.

“Before commencing the program I believed that as university researchers we understand real world needs and can readily identify potential commercial opportunities. I can see now that we are frequently guilty of developing a ‘solution’ first and then go in search of a problem. The CSIRO program has enabled us to focus on the problem first and trust that we will find the right solution later. This will involve learning how to better identify potential end-users and ask the right questions,” said Professor Withford.

“One of my key learnings from the program was that having an interesting technology is not sufficient for commercial success. The program has changed my approach to commercialisation and I’m looking forward to learning more through the 12-week CSIRO AcceleratiON bootcamp,” said Dr Gross.