The aim of the program is the pursuit of excellence and world’s best practice. The program looks at commercialisation of Australian innovations and is concerned with entrepreneurial and business management skills.
Competing for Queensland against State winners from New South Wales, South Australia and the ACT, the win demonstrated the excellence of the business plan for Sirovision – a new high-precision 3D digital imaging technology for the mining industry.
Sirovision has applications world-wide as a rock mass structure mapping and analysis system for open cut mines.
Researchers claim it can deliver an unprecedented level of surface detail in models generated from digital photographs taken up to one kilometre from the surface to be studied. It is already in use by five of the world’s top ten mining companies. The software also has applications in the civil construction and tunnelling industries.
“Winning the award clearly demonstrates that scientists can have a realistic interaction with the business world while still doing and enjoying great science,” CSIRO team leader George Poropat said.
The team had so much belief in their product that they poured all of their personal performance bonuses and many weekends and late nights into a business training program run in Queensland by the Achaeus Group. The training program helped them to develop their business plan to commercialise Sirovision.
To get to the national finals, the team first won the Queensland Group Enterprise Workshop Business Award. Their winning business plan focussed on fully commercialising Sirovision worldwide.
CSIRO’s current Sirovision reseller, the Surpac Minex Group, is a leading mining software company and is working with the team to promote the product globally. A new version of the software is about to be released, and in major news for miners, an underground version is expected in early 2005.
The winning Sirovision team is made up of George Poropat, Philip Soole, Alison Gardiner and Andrew Beitz based at Brisbane’s Queensland Centre for Advanced Technologies, and Wayne Robertson based at Perth’s Australian Resources Research Centre.
