The defence sector is a fundamental pillar of Australian industrial development policy. The Prime Minister Scott Morrison made this abundantly clear when he added “Science and Technology” to Defence Industry Minister Melissa Price’s portfolio responsibilities.
Unprecedented investment in the sector in recent years has created the opportunity for Australian innovation in high-tech design, advanced manufacturing, and capability-building. This sector has been a stand-out in collaborations between partners, from institutional researchers to small and medium-sized businesses and multinational corporations.
These collaborations and research translations have covered the full, vast array of technologies consumed by the Defence Department on behalf of our armed services.
The 2021 InnovationAus Defence Industry award is sponsored by Microsoft and seeks to highlight the most valuable collaborations between research and industry.
The finalists in this category are:
“We are delighted to sponsor [the] InnovationAus Defence award category. Microsoft helps defence and intelligence agencies advance their missions to promote stability and security for citizens, nations, and multinational alliances,” said Adrian Motherway, Defence & Intelligence Lead at Microsoft Australia.
“We do this by focusing on trust, innovation, security, identity, and compliance, all powered by our extensive global partner ecosystem.”
“We have over 40 years’ experience in serving defence and intelligence agencies, and our industry knowledge is deep, with expertise in defence grade technology solutions” continued Motherway.
Finalists of the category include a company rapidly developing applied technologies for the growing defence sensors market and a company providing easily deployable, multi-mission solutions to the world’s most prestigious defence agencies.
The InnovationAus 2021 Awards for Excellence will be presented at a gala black-tie dinner held on Wednesday, December 1, at the Overseas Passenger Terminal in Sydney. You can book your tickets at the Awards website. For further enquiries, please email Awards@InnovationAus.com
Behind the finalists
3ME Technology is a battery and electric vehicle systems technology company based in NSW that works collaboratively with a range of platform manufacturers and end-users to electrify their offerings to mining, military and marine markets. The company has developed a proprietary lithium-ion battery management system, trademarked as Bladevolt, to meet rigorous safety and compliance standards.
DroneShield is an Australian publicly-listed company that specialises in electronic warfare, artificial technology and machine learning, RF sensing and sensor fusion fields. DroneShield designs, prototypes, and manufactures Electronic Warfare (EW) solutions that augmented by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to detect signals, objects, and vehicles of interest, and to defeat Unmanned Vehicles (UxV) across aerial, ground, and maritime domains. DroneShield products have been used globally with commercial, government, and defence customers – including with the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and the US Department of Defense.
Q-CTRL is a venture capital-backed deep tech startup founded by Sydney University quantum scientist Michael Biercuk. Q-CTRL builds quantum control products and services that lets researchers, developers and engineers to build stable, reliable quantum computers and quantum sensors – without suffering the noise and hardware error that has held the field back for so long.
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