Key dates and events

Diploma In Innovation Information Session, 21 May 2024

Disclaimer: Unfortunately, the quality of the audio recorded isn’t ideal, so we have tried our best to fine-tune the transcripts and make it possible for you all to get some highlights of this session.

Welcome to our innovation event. My name is Julia. I'm from the domestic recruitment team here at UTS.

And before we get started, I would like to acknowledge the First Nations people of Australia, including Elders both past and present, as well as emerging leaders. I extend this respect to the traditional custodians of the land of which we are hosting this event today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. We acknowledge that their enduring connection to the land, which has always been and always will be Aboriginal land.

So those joining us online, welcome. Thank you again for your patience. Please note that your cameras and microphones have been muted to ensure everyone's experience is maximized.

Should you have any questions throughout the session, feel free to submit those questions through the Q&A function down at the bottom of your screen. And we will address those questions at the conclusion of today's event. All righty.

So in this session, you'll hear from industry experts about innovation's importance in various fields. So we're also going to be inspired by alumni and current student stories, including one guest sharing their startup journey and how the course complements their core degree. We're going to be exploring exciting industry opportunities offered by the Diploma in Innovation program and learn about our flexible program options.

We're also at the very end, as I stated, going to have a Q&A session. So we will be having a microphone going around the audience for that Q&A session. And again, for those who are joining online, please utilize the Q&A function down at the bottom of your screen.

All righty. So to kick off the session, I'm pleased to introduce our guests, so our panelists here. First off, we have Dr. Paul Brown, an associate professor and the course director for the Diploma in Innovation.

So he's recognized for his expertise in sustainability systems and innovative management practices. He's played key roles in developing innovative subjects and courses at UTM. So he's played a huge hand at the development of his course.

So this also includes the Diploma of Innovation and the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation. So Dr. Brown is passionate about facilitating knowledge transfer and fostering innovation between academia and industry, exploring various work-integrated learning approaches.

We also have with us today, Dr. Jan Gruenhagen, who serves as the deputy course director for the Diploma in Innovation and holds a position as lecturer in innovation and entrepreneurship at UTS's transdisciplinary school. So his research focuses on international entrepreneurship, the process of new venture creation, innovative systems, and the development, adoption, and diffusion of new technologies. So currently Jan is investigating the utilization of machine learning techniques for research in social sciences. 
Next up, we have Nick Hazell, who is a forward-thinking entrepreneur with a proven track record in innovation.

So he's worked at top companies like Mars and PepsiCo and co-founded V2Food, a leading plant-based meat start-up. He is also the founder of Algenie, focused on making algae biotech accessible and affordable to combat CO2 emissions. So currently he serves as an industry fellow at UTS, School of Technology and Design, where he continues to drive impactful innovation.

Next up, we have Jasper Ryan, who is one of our TD School alumni. He is also a worker at VXV Aerospace and he  leads the development of business models, product strategies, and manages partnerships and customer relations. So with a diverse professional background in expanding strategy to technical expertise, he brings valuable insights into the importance of innovation and transdisciplinary skills across industries.

And last but certainly not least, we have Amanda Joyce. So Amanda is a second-year student enrolled in the Bachelor of Molecular Biotechnology and the Diploma of Innovation.

All right, so with introductions concluded, I'm going to hand straight over to Nick Hazell, where you get to delve into the influence of innovation and sustainability.

So where do I start? I think I'll start back in corporations. So I said 20 years in March, just a little bit of my background. I'm actually an aerospace engineer and a manufacturing engineer.

Started in weapons systems and electronic countermeasures, and then moved to Mars to make chocolate. Got pulled out of manufacturing because I was changing too many things, and luckily somebody took me on and said that I should be in R&D. So I became an R&D professional in the food industry, headed up Mars R&D in Europe, moved to Australia, moved to Mars to do this R&D.

Then moved to PepsiCo, PepsiCo R&D, so that's things like Redwood Denny and Railways was online. And then taught innovation and taught here when we started this thing called BCII, which is Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation. The reason I did that was because I've always tried to figure out innovation.

It's been my life. But in companies, they're not actually great at innovating. In fact, if you ask CEOs today about what they would like to be able to do, it would be innovation.

What they can't do is innovation. And for me, teaching innovation, understanding it better, and working with UTS to help others understand how to innovate was something that I could see was incredibly important. There was nothing else in the world that was teaching people how to innovate.

And it is a unique skill set, which is not intuitive. It's difficult. It's really hard work.

But it's also probably the most joy you can get in anything, because the problems that we're facing in this world are not simple. It's not something that you can just solve. It's not a simple answer which helps you navigate the systems.

And there are tools and skills you can learn to kind of join the dots in a way that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. And I spent my life trying to figure that out. And I'm just so glad that UTS were also trying to figure that out and bringing together the best academics in the world to do that.

And I had the opportunity to work with them on that. Right and forward, out of that, I started a company called V2Food. And I'm using the sort of tools that I've learned and taught.

Interesting the idea that a teacher should also be a student. But that's exactly the sort of crossover you get when you're teaching innovation, because there is no answer. It's kind of like a co-production, if you like, of answers.

The thing about innovation by its necessity is new. You know, if the answer was already there, you haven't actually innovated. You're coming up with something that wasn't there before.

And so it makes perfect sense that your teachers and your colleagues are exactly the people you work with. One of the things you learn about innovation and something that UTS got to understand quite early is that it's not something that exists within it. It's something that happens at the boundaries between disciplines.

I did my university at Cambridge and at Cambridge, they have a structure where you have like high table and then you have conversations with people with different faculties. So an engineer might talk to a biologist, you might talk to an accountant. And then something that was getting said would lead to a breakthrough.

There's numerous examples in history where, you know, the breakthrough happens not in the lab, but it happens while they're having a glass of port on the top table. That's an example of where the interface is between the disciplines. That's where the magic happens.

And this sort of diploma and what UTS is doing, it's facilitating those conversations at the boundaries between the disciplines where the magic happens. And then figuring out how to do that in a really efficient way. I'll tell you, top table is not efficient.

Half the time you're drinking too much port or you're talking about football, you're not necessarily, you're not having a curated conversation.

So winding forward, starting V2, big success. I instituted that a year ago, but now I'm focused on algenie.

And the reason for that is because we're living on a planet which has the biggest, most complex problems that need to be solved. Environmental sustainability is one of those. And Algenie could be part of the future.

So I'm exploring that now with my friends at UTS.  Is that 5 minutes? Yes, thank you very much.

Yes, thank you very much. thank you for the insight into the skills and how important innovation is in industries today. So now we're going to hear from our alumni, Jasper, who will be delving into his post-study journey and how he perceives the value of the course, especially in your work, in your current work. Thank you.

So, Nick is a tough panelist to take over from, and he's a great teacher, same with Paul. So, I'll probably go through my background and talk a little bit about what I've been doing now, and then talk about three things I can underscore from this degree, right from that. So, here we go.

So a bit of a weird one. I did civil engineering in the first year. And I came towards the first graduation where I was like, I don't know which one I want to choose. So I was kind of stubborn when I wanted to do both.

And I found a company, an engineering company, that had an interesting decentralized innovation team. It was interested in the skills provided by this degree. So I ended up going there and doing both.

So I worked as a structural engineer, so climbing through construction sites. But then in my spare time, I was progressively showing people what I could do with the Creative Intelligence/Diploma in Innovation degree, with the skills that you learn in there, like design thinking, et cetera. And sort of, I mean, I'm working as an entrepreneur now, but I was actually kind of working as a much more insightful company then.

And it's all about showing people what you can do and finding where the problems are, and then putting yourself in those situations, trying to solve them. And working with people way outside of your team. So, by the rest of the way, I progressively went from there, got a little lucky in the innovation and strategic teams, and then ended up going into consulting at the same company, because I became interested in business problems.

At the same time, my brother just finished his PhD in subject propulsion, and he was trying to commercialize it. I had quite a knack for sort of putting these business models together and understanding how everyone's working together. And sort of worked out how things would come together, was helping in my spare time, and then realized that I was really passionate about the aircraft and pilot industry.

So, I took the leap of faith and jumped into the startup of all the time, but I didn't make money. And it's relying purely on my savings, which definitely got dire at some times. Which kind of fast-forward to what I'm doing now. I'm our head of strategy and business development at VXB Aerospace, a software and network company.  So essentially what we do, we're a two-year-old space-employed start-up based in Sydney. Yes, there are space companies in Australia.

Some people were very surprised. And what we're doing is we're using our visionary AI and the advanced manufacturing to make satellite engines, essentially. So a bit about how we've been growing, we're looking to innovate people now, still being around 2 million people around.

So now, sorry, sort of trying to make this transparent. So my role is a bit of a long title, but essentially the role is doing most everything inside the business. And that's what's so enticing about early stage entrepreneurship, because you have to do everything.

And everything kind of collides together and you've got to be able to look 10 years ahead in the future. Which kind of brings me to why I think that this degree is actually useful for that. And this is a non-exhaustive list of three items.

The first is learning to work in an interdisciplinary environment is actually incredibly important. And it's not something that I really realised about until I started going to the workforce. The fact that you'll be on a team working for an industry client with three different disciplines is actually really useful, because not everyone will learn to understand how different disciplines and different degrees of reality think and solve problems.

But you'll be able to take the best of what they can do and incorporate it into your own thinking, which is actually quite rare and pretty special once you get into a post-graduate work environment where you are working in this region. So it gives you a deeper bandwidth. And I mean, you know, related to entrepreneurship, I'm working with some of the best ones all the time.

Whether it's the customers in satellite companies, or finance people in investment, or the engineers, I don't understand how all the product comes together.

The second is about being comfortable solving problems in an ambiguous environment. I think the big problem with universities typically sometimes is a big variety of problems.

They might seem complicated, but there is a clear answer you can get to. And the problem in real life in the industry is that there are a lot of cases where there is no clear answer. And I've seen a lot of people who have incredible good minds to get into a real world problem solving environment, and they just shut down.

And it's because the real world is a little bit different. And something that this degree does quite well is it puts you in a situation where things are complicated and you have to figure it out, which is really annoying and uncomfortable sometimes, but it gives you a big leg up when you're actually a graduate. And again, saying based on entrepreneurship, we're defining a business model that doesn't exist yet. That requires a flow pattern, something that is bearable to push forward and make happen.

And the third and final one is really basic. It's exposure to the industry from the very start.

If you're working with industry clients from the very beginning, you understand what they think, you understand how things work in companies and organisations and start-ups. And then you develop that what people call presence, the ability to carry yourself with a professional hat on. When you walk into a room and you speak, people go, this person knows what they're talking about, this person's impressive.

And these are all these kind of soft skill things you don't think about. I didn't think about when I was studying, but when I came out, I saw the impact. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Jasper. And I think it's really wonderful to hear how you've leveraged both your degrees, how you've formed collaborations and partnerships using this course in your professional life. So thank you very much for that insight.

So we will be spending some time now hearing from Paul and Jan about the course itself. So whenever you're ready, thank you very much.

So, welcome. Pretty excited to see you all here. So one of the things that, what does UTS know? A couple of things. So a great university, a very young university, innovation, creativity is a big part of it, and sustainability, they kind of keep it going.

So because of that, and because we're a young university, I think we'd be ranked the top young university in England. The top young university, I don't know how many years in a row, 40 years in a row. So there's a lot of recognition that we grew from 30, 40 years ago, quite a small institution now, really built some amazing work.

So part of that is the way that we do things. We do things a little bit differently to other universities. And the Transdisciplinary School, where I sit, is one of the outcomes of this approach.

So to give you a bit of a background, my first involvement was, I think, how many years ago, 10 years ago or something, where, you know, there's recognitions that the university has evolved and changed the world very quickly. And I remember being in a room, like 30 experts, all the way …, there was like scientists, engineers, you know, kind of experts IT, dialogues, all sorts of other stuff. And they threw us a challenge that said, you know, how would you teach if you weren't constrained by your discipline? If you weren't constrained by, you know, kind of history, what would, how would you interact with students that enable them to call an amazing stuff? And we kind of eased it back into the future.

And out of that came the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence, which is like wildly successful, I think. And then we created a new faculty and staff, and now the Diploma in innovation, which is this particular program - is like a very condensed version, that's available to all students.  So that, you know, this is something Nicholas said, we want to make available to everyone.

And you would have seen what we've been doing. And all of this is in recognition that our graduates do some really cool stuff, like innovation, creativity, sustainability. And we're kind of proud of that.

And we've been recognised. We've got a list here of a couple of awards that we've won. We kind of every couple of years we get asked to apply for awards. I think we've won the equivalent of the Oscars in education, we've probably never heard about it, but it's like the big thing, the big university, so we've got a hand in the ring, and we've got make recognitions for it going down, we've got a green global one, so it's really kind of a lot of stuff.

So one of the nice things about being in UTS and being part of this program is that it allows us to do innovation in the same way. And it was kind of saying, you know, we're encouraged to innovate, we innovate with our students, we want to do things a little bit differently.

So here's some of our industry partners. Because we're trying to do innovation, and kind of create, I mean, creation is fun, right? I mean, like, when you're a kid, you create your entertainment. They're like, you know, kind of get to see them a bit harder.

When you get to university, you can still create. But we love creation. And because we help organisers create and innovate, they love working with us, working with you as well.

So we have up to 800 industry partners, I think we've got about 2000 people that we've worked with on and off. I think we probably have the highest ratio of industry partners and industry connections for a student in any degree. Yeah, so why study the Diploma in innovation? So there's a whole bunch of reasons.

We've got kind of a bit of a list here. One of the first ones is that you're getting that actual innovation from the very first subject. So on the first day, the first subject, the recognition structure, you can do the degree, the course name.

The first subject, the first day, we get you to start with it. And also thinking about your identities, what do you bring? And we start getting you thinking about who you want to connect to. A lot of reflection, like, who are your friends? Who are your people that you want to kind of, kind of go on your journey, kind of create a journey? That's the very first couple of days.

And every subject, we focus on different skills, different kind of capabilities that relate to doing innovation in a very real-world setting. So in terms of working with industry professionals, there's a couple of ways that that works. One way is that we get lots of connections.

We teach you how to connect, and we often bring people in to connect with you directly. So it's like the same, you can kind of give someone a fish, you can feed someone a fish. So we do both.

So what that means is that by the time you graduate, you usually have a very well-developed connection network with real world people and friends as well. Because when you work with different people, you work with people from industry, you're finding ways to connect, like what's the mutual interest? What's the mutual passion? How do you kind of useful to other people? So then they just start connecting with people who are going to be useful to them, and they have to be useful to you, and then we're eventually finding sort of the right innovation. So we bring amazing people into the classroom.

So all the people who teach into it have done or do some form of innovation. There's something that they've done that gives them the ability to come in and teach to you. So we've all done things.

But all means, there is not a case of this is the textbook and textbook it is. Every subject is unique, and almost every version of the subject is a little bit unique as well. And that will say, as we learn, as industry changes, we're always there kind of pushing the package, which is kind of fun as an entity.

I mean, we get bored easily, and we don't need it easily, so we like to do stuff on the edge. In terms of gaining a competitive advantage, there's a couple of things that you've learned, because you've got your core degree. So you learn all the stuff you need to know to be a professional.

So if you're in engineering, or design, accounting, or whatever it happens to be, you're going to be a delivery. There's all these cool degrees. I think there's like 20, 30 core degrees at UTS.

You learn these kind of cool skills. The reason they're making the diploma available to you is that there's more that you can learn while you're at university to stand out. So when you go for a job, and you're there, you're kind of talking to, and then you kind of go to the recruitment panel, because you've done a good amount of innovation, you've got some great stories, and some great skills that other people still don't have.

We always learn, when we hear about this from students, you know, we connect them, we have a conversation, we learn about their experience. I think the TD School has been the highest graduate employment rate at the university…

The reason for that is that when you walk into a room, you're getting in peace with other people, you do stand out. The other thing, of course, is that you can be your own thing. So, I mean, I personally, I'm not that excited about working for a company, you know, from a slave to an assistant, so to speak.

And a lot of people kind of reach that point in their career, you get to work a few years, and I want to do my own thing, I want to start a business, I want to do something kind of on my own. We give you the skills to do that. And a lot of our graduates are on that journey.

And so, you know, why wait until you're 40 to start your own enterprise? You can do it at UTS. You can do it here, you can do it in Start-ups, and you might find a good fit. And that's okay.

And then you'll learn to make the most of that yourself. By doing this program, you can really add value to your own professional experience. There's a couple of other things as well.

No exams, that means there's no assessment. What that means is that when we assess you, we assess your innovation maturity. Yeah, so in-class activities tend to be aligned with the parts of the same entrepreneurship.

So they can say, hey, start an enterprise. What do you want to do? How can we help you do it? Can we collect your people to help you do it? Who can you work with? In a way, they kind of do add value to them. How do you kind of like identify whether it's not working? We even run sessions on daily duty.

How do you work out what And so all of this allows us to assess you on your practical ability to do things, not your ability to revert to pay for information, which is very different from, say, an exercise. It's pretty flexible. So we've taken away all the prerequisites.

What that means is you can do the subjects in any quality you want. So if you decide to kind of pick up a passion project, you might want to do it while you're doing the subject or the subject of the design so that you can work on your own projects as part of the assessment if you want to. So do you base it on your change agent? Whatever you want to do, we're going to support you.

As long as it's a little bit more interesting, you can kind of do it as part of the subjects. You can choose the subjects which align with your own innovation journey.

Another thing that we've done is cross-credit. What does that mean? That means that if you're in a huge hurry to graduate, there are a lot of students that are out there, you can actually do a subject, a diploma of innovation subject as part of your core degree. And in fact, a lot of that subjects are part of core degrees. So if you did a Bachelor of Business or Bachelor of Management, you did your sub-major related to sustainability, innovation, you did a little bit of enterprise, or I think it's a Bachelor of Technology.

There's a few degrees that we're part of. So if you do some of those subjects as part of your core degree, you get cross credit for the diploma. And that's up to 50% of the diploma.

What that means is that you're part of 24 credit points in the core. That means you only have to do three extra subjects and you graduate with the diploma as well…

You don't have competitive options, but it's something that's available. We've got lots of students that are like, hey, I want to do two majors, past their diploma, and then we've got plenty of students that are kind of like that. So we try to cater to the idiosyncrasies of you, because everyone's obviously part of the journey.

So this one is talking about some of the questions that are commonly get. So students often go, oh, I'm going to test this, max this, my degree, I'm going to get a distinction, whatever it happens to be. We've designed this to work with everyone.

And so, you know, if you have any questions that we can ask about your degree, this is kind of value-added skills, expertise that the industry desires. In terms of how long it takes, people often find that it takes. So you can take the entirety of your degree to finish it, say every summer or winter, if you like a subject, or if you're stuck in a huge hurry, you can actually smash that … while you're doing your degree.

I would recommend that, as opposed to just like, you're a genius, just like, don't get started, don't get stuck. And the other thing is also that we often get asked, you know, is it a student entrepreneurship, or is it like innovation? You know what, we cater for all types of innovation. So if you want to be an entrepreneur, where you will help be an entrepreneur, you'll have to do entrepreneurial activities, you'll have to do a startup, you'll have to make money if that's what you want to do.

Or if you just want to be a creative professional who's the person that sees the big picture, understands things the way others don't understand it, you're the one that intervenes in the systems, you learn how to interact, we're also cool. So you can kind of take that path through the diploma, we can take the controversy path, we're kind of cool. We've had degree opportunities, one thing that we've noticed is that a double qualification helps you be better with that.

Like when we actually talk to our graduates and say, oh, what are you doing? How's your career going? What we've noticed is those that have got this extra skills tend to accelerate faster through their career. So if you think about any core degree, if you enter the job market, you kind of go through all different actions, you get a job, you get a professional qualification, there's a free trajectory in most disciplinary areas. So if you can do something like a diploma of innovation, you tend to do that a lot faster and better.

So you're promoted faster, you'll get a job out of that company faster, it tends to kind of speed you up a little bit, which is kind of cool. This is a nice value add. The other thing is that it gives you a little bit more flexibility.

Loads of students, when you graduate, you find that you hate your job. Like seriously, it's like really common, but you go, you don't want to be, you want to go out and do science. And you do science and go, I still love the science, but my god, this, I just can't deal with this, you know, on a daily basis.

So this gives you the flexibility to kind of jump across. Yeah, so people are talented, that was my core discipline. Lots of accounting graduates go, I do a lot of accounting, big bucks, I work in a big firm, worked in a big firm for like three or four years to get an SCA, and then they're like, oh my god, this is the best in my life, I just can't deal with that.

And so they tend to jump across and become, you know, something for people, entrepreneurs, and then tech or whatever they're doing. So there's a lot of flexibility when it comes to qualifications, because innovation is everywhere. You know, when you actually rock up and you're kind of being compared to other people, you're kind of going to have the things that will be more difficult and faster.

So it does give you that flexibility. Loads of our students do this, I'll stop talking about it. There's also specific career paths.

So, you know, you've got your core degree, then you've got an innovation degree, obviously loads of entrepreneurship, so there's also kind of creativity, content creation, education, and I would advise them on this. Managing consulting is an interesting part. Lots of people aspire to get into consulting.

This is the reason for that. So this kind of qualifications and skills have an edge that not just those who have done a single degree have. So once again, there's such opportunities.

Yeah, and just adding to that, we have this specific career path, but as you know, the world is changing, and there are new careers or job descriptions coming up basically every week. There's been a lot of first of all, if you're a professional, you've got to do research and you can feel like you need to know a lot more about that. And that's something we try to look at it for to be a very consular in the space of innovation, but also in the space of uncertainty and put into depth to new situations and new conditions in the career and on the job lines.

We've just got a couple of pictures of the slides after all these good points. Absolutely. These are just like some very quick snapshots from our show markets.

So how we're teaching and learning, investing in innovation at this world growth is not like no other degree. So we are not sending you to a lecture, we are not sending you to a tutorial, but we do our teaching in a studio style. So imagine you have all the schools, and we ask you to come to the school on six school days, like 9.30 to 5. That sounds like a long time, but it is worth it, because you get the opportunity to really get to know your teammates, and you have the time to really improve on your project.

So in every subject, you're already quite popular. Some of these projects are in collaboration with industry partners, with UTS startups, but in many subjects, you also get the option to work on the project you can choose. So you have the agency to choose what you want to work on.

So we're not giving you a specific case study, or there is a missing problem, so you've got to sort these down, but you have the choice to work on the problem you think is important. We may have some for this, or we have students who have their own business idea inside the startup, you've got your separate social change initiative, for example, so it's not all about startups conversion, it's also about social change, innovation or growth, what you choose to do and in many of those subjects, we finish the subject with a showcase, a marketplace, to which you can find industry partners as well. We had something like last July, someone organizing a pitch competition, and I and my team saw some of our students' projects and said that it would be difficult to get free entry tickets into the pitch competition to pitch for, I don't know, the investment was a couple of thousand dollars, for which they would not be able to buy the rugs to end up there.

So that also helps you to narrow it to basically showcase what you have been doing. For me, it's very impressive to see what our students are capable to do within just three weeks. It's not a lot of time, but by working together and working together across different disciplines, it's just like anything to see what is possible within such a short time frame.

It's a small structure, but to be honest, we do not have a very pre-determined structure, as Paul mentioned. You can basically do the subject in an order that's suitable for you. We usually recommend starting with Information in Complex Systems, and as I just mentioned earlier, it is a very complex role.

So that's a large part of what we teach you, to embrace the uncertainty and to understand that there is this complexity, and that it's very important to really understand the problem before you come up with a good alternative solution, because if you don't understand the problem, you can't have a solution, which probably won't do much. We have a couple of subjects listed on the slide. Innovation future is also a very interesting subject.

Here, we refer to future methods. We want to try to anticipate what will happen in the near or long-term future. How can we prepare for that? How can we make our applications basically future-proof? So that's what we are teaching in this subject, looking at various areas of innovation.

Very important if you work in a corporate context, for example, to make sure that a lot of products don't just fail. Because it's not that hard to understand how people perceive the problems they actually need for a specific product or service…

We have fundamentals of Innovation that's on the start point of one subject.

So we are interested in the process of creating an idea, changing an idea, maybe to a completely different direction, doing research to understand what potential customers may need or want once decided how you can adapt your product or initiative to their demands and needs. We have Navigating  Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, which is a really cool subject, to also get to such internet organizations in Sydney, but also in the U.S., that are in the innovation and entrepreneurship space and help you to be able to lead the networking. We have a couple of other initiatives there.

One of them, I'm quite biased because I'm teaching there (innovation Funding Platforms), but I think it's very cool. We're working together with UTS Startups. So we team up with startups and you go basically on an innovation funding journey.

So you try to work with them to get money, venture capital, to access funding grants. So it's a real-world project. We've started a technical or business funding group with these companies, which again also helps you to get contacts, to get students.

They are making mutual shifts for that because they obviously talk to the founders, to the business people, and they work together and there's a lot of workers, quite some knowledge. So it's like a very beneficial business group with industry partners, to work in this very intensive context. One of the subjects, just maybe it's not my interest, is the UTS ProtoSpace.

I don't know if you are aware that we have this, which is a 3D print facility. It sounds very challenging and it's very challenging for the students to tell them, okay, you have two or three days, you come up with a new product, and you print the product. But after these three or four days, it is so amazing to see what these students produce in such a short time frame.

And they're coming to me and saying, I would never have thought that I'm able to do this within just a few days. So we challenge you to some extent, but we think we get the rewards by seeing your opportunities and getting out of your structure. You go to a lecture, you give this to someone, then you go to the lab or to a tutorial by yourselves.

But we do that in a very studio- style.

Thank you so much for that. I think it's really important that you highlighted the practicality of the course as well, the collaboration involved.

Also just on ProtoSpace, so we do have a wonderful ProtoSpace here on campus. And these are very large 3D printers. They're like, they can print pieces of furniture and other structures like that.

So it really is a wonderful space for students to utilize from a variety of faculties as well.

So moving on to our current student, Amanda. So we're going to be hearing a little bit from her about her experience in this course, perhaps why you chose to complete this course as well.

And yeah, just an insight on your experience so far. So I have been doing this for one year now, so I've come back to the table a little bit. I've condensed down the diploma.

So I'll be taking two courses in July. So I was enrolled into the DI one year ago now, and I didn't actually know all that much about the diploma. So I didn't come forward in some of those sessions.

I knew it was going to be problem solving and and that I'd be doing it for four days and that it was meant to improve my flexibility. The very first course that I did was, the Innovation in Complex systems. So I came, very first day, not 100% sure what I was going to do, and everyone was very welcoming.

So it was a group of people from the college and faculties. Lots of IT students, but it was good. We came the first day, and like today, we all had a lot of industry experience, innovation and startups.

This guided us a lot, of course, in the social theory behind innovation and what we did.. And we worked on a bit of prototyping, because we got to do pretty big printing. And then in the second week, two weeks, we got together in a group.

So it was a bunch of students and everyone said so with everyone's different background, we worked to form a solution, an idea, for a group that we're going to, and we break down things in words. How can we overcome barriers in New South Wales to reaching net zero? So that's a part of our culture involved. I think my team ended up choosing an educational program for people that work in building design, but there were a lot of very different and interesting programs.

One thing I have noticed about a lot of the courses is that they often encourage to work with people from the faculties. And more often than not, the assessment that you do can be done during your class time, because they want you to work together as a team, rather than just work. And then on the very final day, we did a showcase.

It was terrifying for a lot of us. A lot of us had sort of better papers than we thought, but we were all told we could do it. After all the pitch and everyone had to be there and everyone had to talk, it definitely was very hard to find a point to be consoled.

So I would not be here at the same point today and talking about it if I didn't do it. And that's something that I didn't realize I would get out of this course, but it's helped me in my career as well. So I'm sure a lot of you have realized by now that a lot of us are going to school asking to make a presentation for time of year on assessments.

And I have noticed that compared to when I was here, I'm a lot more confident speaking in front of people and I don't need to be apart of others. And I would not recommend having to do that for a long time, unless I had done the spots. Another subject that I did a lot more recently was called complexity and Sustainaibility.

So that was a really small focal. There were eight of us. We did it before the round went and we learned about complexity theory.

So it was very similar to find a problem that we got to choose at this time and solution. I think there was a lot of different ideas. People were looking at reflective paint to reduce heat inside the city.

I think my group, I think we did, we looked at how to create coffee cups out of banana leaves. There was another team that was working on their own idea, which was something to do with reducing emissions from food lines. But yeah, that was a really interesting and it's a lot different to all the other courses that I've done because it was so small and you got a lot of hands-on support from all.

And we're really encouraged to reach out to experts. So Paul obviously is an expert in this field, but more often than not, something that you're interested in is going to be sort of a very different field or background. So you're encouraged to reach out to Start-ups and industry professionals and talk to them.

And I found that more often than not, if they have the time, they are very willing to talk their ear off for a long time about what they do. They love doing that. And reaching out with mentors to see what was actually part of the internship that I'll be doing soon.

So I've got an internship research group at UTS now. But yeah, there's one takeaway that I think it's the reason that I would find suggestive of this course. It's to gain the confidence to reach out and make connections that are going to help you in your career, or if not your career, then make your time at university a lot more interesting, a lot more frequent.

Yeah, I think that's it for me. Thank you very much. Could you tell us while we help you, what was your, what has been your favourite project being completed on this course so far? I have said before, it's been a fantastic course.

So me and a team mate looked at how we go around producing these cut pieces and other objects, basically. And we got to look into all these details about, you know, how do we currently use self-helping cups? And we looked at the carbon footprint of it, not just the product itself, but we looked back on the production of plastic, the production of the environment. So now we've looked further back to look at the production of, we can fertilise it with weeds and things like that.

So I think it made me realise how in-depth and how far back we can go looking at, the idea a lot of people are talking about development, but it's a lot more neutral. And I think that made me realise how important it actually is to be like carbon neutral, carbon negative, because there's a big circle of effects. But yeah, other than that, maybe in the very first week of the innovation, we did a prototyping thing.

We were looking at improving our current products. And I think we ended up looking at, I ended up prototyping more with a toilet that was meant to be helpful and encourage people to use more sustainable food products. So I think we looked at it as a way to make carbon neutral, friendly and carbon neutral basically.

Thank you very much. Okay. So I'd now like to kick off our Q&A panel discussion.

So for anyone in the audience who has a question, feel free to raise your hand and we will pass you a microphone so that you may ask a question to the panel. And for those online, please continue submitting your questions through the Menti or through our Q&A function down the bottom of your presentation. So we're happy to support students doing whatever they're doing in school.

So we wanted to try new things. So we've actually designed the diploma to accommodate the desire of some students. That is, if you are part of the team, part of the staff, you can do some of your subjects.

And I think more or less with every subject, we bring the assessment in such a way that you can opt out of a major work on your project, but apply it on the colleagues' project. So that's kind of like a unique thing. I don't think that's wrong.

But I think what we encourage people to do, which has taken us a few years and so many pages of planning and writing, is that we actually try and give you the work. If you actually come up with something, lots of students come up with really cool stuff, like where else can we make it? Everybody's like, it's your idea. Well, it's a really good idea.

And I still remember the showcase submission, like a sustainably incorporated UTS. This is cool. We should do this UTS.

And this is one of the things we've been thinking about doing. And that's something that happens all the time. People come along and go, this is great.

And they make these sparks of creativity and connection. So what we do encourage some students to do, if you do something that's really cool, and you want to do it, and you've got some friends you want to do it with, we let you carry on the project through multiple subjects. So for example, a member of a student group, they came up with this idea in the first subject to do with a type of battery that's carbon, which is kind of a cool idea.

It's very science and very difficult. It's got three main components. They're asking you to explain how it works.

Well, they're like, I've seen that. So they worked on that for several subjects. And they actually try to get funding.

They're putting some grant applications. There's a pretty good chance you'll be able to actually get it to work. And it's kind of cool.

It's like deep tech. You can learn something really about, and there's always that rhetoric out there. A lot of the really cool stuff, you've got to take a little bit of time.

If you can come up with a solution to something over the time of a couple of weeks, there's a pretty good chance that you never, it's not that the insult of out-pivoting, you're probably not going to be hugely successful in some way. It's just something else we do. So we've kind of built in this ability to kind of add to your knowledge, reflect a little bit, be kind of driving your trajectory.

So we've been involved in that way. Thank you very much. I have a question that I'd like to pass on to Nick.

So how do you think transdisciplinary courses like the Diploma in Innovation prepare students for the challenges and opportunities from your experience as an entrepreneur in the workplace? I kind of say that innovation happens everywhere, and that's my lived experience as well. All the cool things I've been in aerospace and in Mars, a lot of them happened because I was talking to across a boundary. Maybe I shouldn't have been.

I was a production manager in a chocolate factory, and an example was in the UK, they were making chocolate that wasn't chocolate. It was using different fats and using cocoa butter, and you could do that, but it was a little bit cheaper. But we knew in the factory that the export chocolate was a lot better because that was real cocoa butter.

So I said, well, how do we get export chocolate? We were making bounty bars. How do we get export chocolate onto all the bounty bars? So all my friends in the UK, including the Promise side, which was actually the export side. I didn't even know about that, so I talked to people in R&D, and then I talked to people in the chocolate factory, and they were telling me that actually it's expensive for them to change over between the export and export, and actually the changeover cost was quite high.

And I was running a production line, and I was thinking, well, our changeover costs are high, and then I got to talk to the accountants, and I asked them to tell me about the changeover costs and how they accounted for them, and then we were doing the maths together, and I realised that the costs of doing changeovers in three different departments was actually about the same as the cost difference between export chocolate and their own chocolate. And the export chocolate tasted so much better, and I talked to the R&D guys, and they said, this is a lot better. It's probably better for you as well.

And so we changed. So we got the business case together, and we actually changed, and so they just ran the business for export, and that's the standard. So that's the example of you get taught to go outside your boundaries and talk.

You've had a problem with space, so the thing that irritates me was I like chocolate, and this one was better. I could see it. And then I thought, well, how do we change it? Now, that's one example.

That's the sort of stuff. I wasn't taught that. That's just me being a maverick, and that's just the way I'm wired.

But you kind of get taught that. You kind of get taught that's how stuff gets changed, and how do you have those conversations? It sounds a bit woody, but it really is a technique and something that can be taught, and I'm not going to say that you're all going to be the next Steve Jobs. That's unrealistic, but the way you tackle problems will be more complex.

You'll have a toolkit that will kind of help you sort something, because otherwise what you'll just do is you'll just be another person in a system getting really angry, kicking the cat because it's so frustrating, but you won't have the agency to change. This will give you some of the tools. It doesn't mean that you'll always succeed, but it will give you some of the tools you need to actually do something useful, which, let's face it, that's kind of what we're here for.

We're here to get some joy and maybe do something useful for the planet. If you have those two things in your life, you've had a good life. Thank you.

That was wonderful. That was a wonderful insight, though. Thank you.

How much work has something gone on in the few weeks? Yeah, so I'll direct this one to our current student and for your personal experience. So you've gone for two full days each three weeks, and more often than not, if you guys aren't progressing and you can get pretty much all the work done during that time, there might be a little bit of extra work done during the session for writing and maybe a couple of extra hours of research, but it's not that much more. I'd say maybe it's going to be like three or four hours a week outside of the actual day, which is a full eight-hour day doing this work for most of the time.

Jasper, did you have anything to add? Nah, Thank you very much. Okay, over to our academics. So the short answer is that even if it sucks, you can start the deployment any time, so it's very flexible.

Due to audio quality, we'll share some highlights of the Q&A section:

We designed the program to meet students' needs, providing support and flexibility while also addressing industry demands. This includes structured assessments that allow you to work on projects that interest you, offering a unique opportunity to explore your ideas. For example, students have developed innovative solutions such as a sustainable battery. We encourage creativity and offer support throughout your journey.

Transdisciplinary courses, like the Diploma in Innovation, prepare students for challenges and opportunities by fostering collaboration and innovation. Innovation often occurs at the boundaries between disciplines, as seen in real-life examples. This approach equips students with problem-solving skills and a toolkit for tackling complex issues, sparking creativity and connections.

In terms of workload, students typically spend two days each week on coursework, with most tasks completed during that time. Additional research may require around three to four hours per week outside of class. The program offers flexibility to accommodate different projects and provides access to resources, including guidance on raising funding for your projects.

The way we work together involves leveraging the specific skills of different individuals within a team while still collaborating and supporting each other. This fosters a supportive system and encourages learning from one another, enhancing the overall experience of the program.

We've also created a collaborative environment where students can learn from each other and access a variety of equipment and spaces. If you have any further questions or want to explore more, feel free to book a one-on-one consultation with our team at innovation@uts.edu.au.