UTAS wins UniQuest workshop pitch competition
UTAS postgraduate students proved they could out-perform their northern counterparts when they beat 24 other teams in the pitch competition at this year’s UniQuest research commercialisation workshop.
This was the first time UTAS students joined other universities from across Australia at the annual ‘boot camp’ run by UTAS research commercialisation partner, UniQuest.
The aim of the workshops is to teach students about the commercialisation process and the key issues of intellectual capital, management of intellectual property and the value commercialisation can add to research outcomes and careers.
As part of the workshop, each table was asked to select a student project as a potential commercial project for presentation to “investors”. Each team then had to devise a three- minute “pitch” about their chosen project and deliver it to a panel of potential “investors”.
UTAS students Isha Mehta (Agriculture); Tim Law (Architecture and Design); Lyn Murphy (Accounting and Corporate Governance); and Christina Henri (Visual and Performing Arts) pitched their project, entitled ‘Extended Life Formula for apricots (ELF)’ to a panel of seasoned commercialisation experts and scooped the main prize.
The win was the culmination of an intensive two days of learning about taking a great research idea to the global market.
The competition winners and their UTAS colleagues, Corinne Mirkazemi (Pharmacy); James Suttil and Tim Causon (Chemistry) were flown to the Gold Coast for the event in mid-March, which was attended by students from The University of Queensland, University of Technology, Sydney, University of Wollongong, James Cook University, and Mater Medical Research Institute.
UniQuest Managing Director, David Henderson, said it was great to see the UTAS students do so well and get so much out of their very first commercialisation workshop.
“The students from UTAS clearly took on board everything they learned in the sessions leading up to the pitching competition. Their enthusiasm for the workshop and for seeing how their ideas might lead to a commercialisation opportunity suggests the partnership between UTAS and UniQuest has already achieved some positive outcomes,” Mr Henderson said.
Ten academic research staff attended a similar workshop run by UniQuest in April. Another UniQuest-UTAS event underway is the Trailblazer innovative ideas competition, which will give UTAS staff and student researchers more opportunities to showcase their innovations over the next few months.