Key dates and events

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to our innovation event. My name is Kenny and I'm from the Domestic Recruitment Team. Now before we begin we'll start with an acknowledgement of country and I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Inuoro Nation upon whose ancestral lands our city campus now stands.

I would like to pay respects to the elders both past present and past and emerging, acknowledge them as the traditional custodians of this land. Today in this session you'll hear from our industry experts about innovation's importance in various fields. Be inspired by the stories of our current students including one who will share their startup journey and an idea that was born of the Diploma of Innovation and how the course complements their core degrees.

Explore exciting industry opportunities offered by the Diploma of Innovation program and learn about our flexible program options and have your questions answered by our guest speakers today. Now to kick off the session I am pleased to introduce our guests. So first up we have Dr Paul Brown who is an Associate Professor and the Course Director of the Diploma in Innovations renowned for his expertise in sustainability systems and innovative management practices.

He has played key roles in developing innovative subjects and courses at UTS including the Diploma in Innovation and the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation. Dr Brown is passionate about facilitating knowledge transfer and fostering innovation between academia and industry and exploring various work integrated learning approaches. Next up we have Dr Jan-Henrik Gragen and he's the Deputy Course Director for the Diploma in Innovation and a Lecturer in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at UTS's Transdisciplinary School.

His research focuses on international entrepreneurship and the processes of new venture creation in innovation systems and the development adoption and diffusion of new technologies. Currently Jan is investigating the utilization of machine learning techniques for research in the social sciences. Up next we have Nick Hazel and he is a forward thinking entrepreneur with an impressive and proven track record in innovation.

Originally an aerospace engineer he has led technology and innovation at companies like Mars and PepsiCo and founded V2Food, a leading plant-based meat startup. Nick is also the founder of Algini, focused on making algae biotech affordable and scalable to combat co2 emissions. Currently he serves as an industry fellow at UTS Transdisciplinary School where he continues to drive impactful innovations.

And last up we have Andrew Smithyman, a student here at UTS and is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Business, a Bachelor of Sustainability and Environment and a Diploma in Innovation. Through the Diploma Andrew co-founded Air2Energy, a startup dedicated to reducing harmful emissions in the marine industry through capturing and converting pollution into energy. This innovative idea was born in the Diploma of Innovations program and is now propelling him into exciting new ventures, providing access to Cicada Innovations, StartMeet Student Fellowships, Blackbird ProStars and even pitching at CSIRO.

Now I'm going to hand over to our first keynote speaker, Mr Nick Hazel. We look forward to hearing about the impacts of innovations and sustainability in various professions, drawing on his experience as Director of Research at PepsiCo and founder and CEO of V2Food. Nick, I would like you to highlight the importance of innovation today and discuss the key skills needed to drive change across industries.

Thank you. So what is innovation? I mean basically innovation is creating something new and something useful. It's actually solving a problem and the way I think about it is what is the problem that you're trying to solve and is it a problem worth solving? Now if you look at the world today you could probably put your finger on a number of problems that actually need to be solved.

I mean we're living on a planet that has an existential problem because we're destroying the climate on the planet and we're making it unlivable for us and for other life forms on the planet. So you would argue that there is a problem to be solved. There's a problem with sustaining 10 billion people on the planet with nutritious food without trashing the environment.

And then you bring it down to macro problems. Every company has got a set of problems. They want to serve the customer better.

They want to serve their shareholders better and they want to be sustainable and sustainable from an environmental perspective but sustainable also from an economic perspective. There's no CEO of a company that has been asked by their shareholders to reduce the size of their company so they need to be able to grow in a sustainable way. And the job of companies is to do that.

How they're going to do that? It's a combination of innovation and replication and my perspective working for large companies was that actually large companies are not very good at innovation. They spend most of their time just basically trying to take their business model and replicate it around the world. But the job of the innovator within those large companies is to try and persuade them that it's possible to do it in a better way, in a more sustainable way, if it's a food company in a more nutritious way and then try and get those plans and those products and those technologies into the company in a way that fits the economics of doing business.

And the thing about innovation is that it's not about having good ideas. It's about solving a problem that's worth solving and doing it in a way that makes economic sense so that there are funds and resources that can be brought to bear against that problem. Because ideas are really cheap but you're going to have to find someone who is going to give you the resources and that will mean the money in general for you to actually take those ideas and turn them into something in practice.

So that is the job of the innovator. I spent most of my career doing that in big companies and finding ways of making innovation happen. It was pretty tough.

It meant that you sometimes had to go around the rules. You had to go underground. You had to reapportion budgets, if you like, into your innovation plans.

There was a whole lot of things you have to do as an entrepreneur. I'm now doing a startup, which is a totally different kettle of fish. You have no constraints.

No one's telling you that you can't do something but you still need money. So I need to persuade investors to give me money to pursue my ideas based on some sort of future return that may or may not happen in the future against their investment. So I need to sell a vision of what we're doing.

I did this with V2Food, which was actually in hindsight relatively easy because we're in a paradigm where everybody wanted plant-based meat and I could demonstrate that we could do that. I'm now in algae, which is actually a lot more difficult to persuade investors that it's possible to save the planet, if you like, by growing algae cheaper because there's been a lot of inventors over the decades who've failed to make that happen. So welcome to the journey of an entrepreneur trying to raise money to grow algae to save the planet.

I think I'll better leave it there. Fantastic. I do have one question.

Do you ever find yourself, now that you're a founder and CEO of a startup company, do you ever find yourself struggling to innovate within your own company and finding those efficiencies and methods? Personally, no, but that might just be me. I always used to say when I was teaching innovation at BCII that it really does help to have more than one idea because, again, ideas are cheap. You've got to have an idea that happens at a time where there are people who are interested in your idea, they're interested in funding your idea, and that idea actually solves a real problem that someone has and they really need that solution.

The chances of all of those planets aligning are pretty low. You've got to talk to a lot of people, you've got to kiss a lot of frogs, effectively. So you better have more than one idea.

I always said I've got 20 or 30 good ideas and they're waiting for the planets to align, for somebody to be interested in them, and for an opportunity to arise to actually implement. So don't fall in love with one idea, would be my advice, because the chances of it actually succeeding in the real world are pretty low. Thank you so much for that.

So now we're going to move on to the program delivery and pathways that you can get into about the Diploma of Innovation. Now I'll hand this over to Dr Brown and Dr Gruhagen, if you please. So the Diploma of Innovation is a kind of unique program at UTS.

It's made available to all UTS students and it's in recognition that, as Nick said, the big challenges that we have require a lot of people, require a lot of ideas, require a lot of skills, and amongst them includes not just having the ability to come up with lots of ideas, it's the ability to get financing, its ability to be persuasive, and a whole bunch of other skills. And so we sit within what's called the Transdisciplinary School. The Transdisciplinary School is also a very unique thing to UTS.

We sit between the disciplines, so the school's made up of lots of different people. So my background was accounting, I do a lot of production economics, I do a lot of sustainability-based work, sustainability measurement, trying to come up with more sustainable ways of doing things. And in our school we have writers, we have scientists, we have a whole range of different people.

And we work together to help students to do things that you can't do within a single discipline. And one of the cool things about being in the Transdisciplinary School is that because our students are able to do really interesting work and, you know, quite curious because of the program they're going through and the way that we kind of, you know, encourage them to kind of, you know, dream big and try and invent and come up with new things. We actually have loads of industry partners.

We've ended up with over 800 industry partners, that's organisations, and maybe over 2,000 individuals that are affiliated with the school. And they love our graduates. In fact, I think we don't have the up-to-date data on the diploma per se, but the sister program has, I think, the highest employment rate, certainly at UTS, and probably one of the highest in the state.

I think about 95% of the graduates will have a job within four months of graduating. And a lot of those jobs come from the students just kind of standing out, not just in interviews, but they're often offered work from people that they've partnered with on projects. Other recognition that the school has gotten for, you know, kind of enabling students to do really interesting things that aren't commonly done is we actually won the, recently, a national and international sustainability award for enabling students to essentially be involved and create change while they're at university with industry partners, which is really cool.

We've won a whole bunch of other awards as well. We've got lots of different recognition, including in the early days, we were recognized at what's called the Wharton Awards, and they are kind of like the Oscars for global education, you know, where you're kind of competing against Stanford and the other large institutions. And we were quite well recognized there.

So here's a snapshot of some of the partners affiliated with the school. And one of the things that we try and do in the diploma is we try and connect students and their passions with specific partners where there's a nice link. So we have some students that really care about the environment, you know, kind of perhaps from a social perspective or animal welfare perspective.

Other students care about the environment from more of an inventive, and you'll hear from Andrew in a minute, where students are trying to kind of create new ways of doing things, all the way through to students that just want to do a startup or similar. So why do the diploma in innovation? So there's a range of different things that you're able to do as part of the diploma that you can't normally do as part of your core degree. So one of the things is that every subject enables you to work on a project, which you have some agency over.

And that is that rather than us giving you the problems every time, we encourage students to identify what problems or what direction does your career want to go? What are the big issues that you want to be involved with? And we help you not only work on them and gain skills that relate specifically to what you aspire to do, but also to make connections with industry in the process of doing so. One of the other things that we've done is we've allowed students to make connections between subjects. And what that means is that you can work on something in one subject and develop a core capability, such as you might invent something or you might find a really interesting space to work, like something that you find really makes you feel creative and inspired.

And then what we do is we allow you to build up your capability across the subjects. So you might do innovation in complex systems, you might come up with an idea, you might develop a startup out of it or a startup concept in one of the subsequent subjects. And you might go really deep in perhaps trying to find some financing to help fund it or maybe go deep in terms of the invention of a new production system, which you might do in one of the other subjects.

So one of the things that is another advantage of the diploma is because it's an additional course, while you're doing your core degree, you're learning everything that you need to be very proficient in your core discipline. And then every summer and winter, you do another subject or two with us, you can do it in an accelerated mode, or you can do just like a normal mode. So that when you graduate, you graduate at the same time as all your peers, but you've got this extra qualification.

And you've had all these experiences that other students don't get to have. So you'll have connections, you'll have friends from across disciplines. And so when you kind of launch into your career, you're in a much better position and you're able to stand out much easier.

And that's one of the things that students say to us, they really kind of enjoy about the diploma and studying part of it. The other thing is that we have quite good connections with UTS startups, and some of the other programs at UTS. And that is that while you're at UTS, you can actually start creating a startup.

And I mean, the research tends to show that most successful founders are about 40 years old. Why do you have to wait that long? Really? And they also say that usually you fail maybe four or five times, I mean, maybe more. Most people I know that have been successful founders tried a lot more than four or five times before they're really successful.

And so what we encourage you to do while you're doing the diploma, if that's what you want to do, is start experimenting, start trying to make a difference in the world, so that when you do graduate, you then kind of have the choice. You can kind of go into a more conventional career, or you can kind of go off and become something different entirely. And we've got quite a few graduates who work in the Sydney-based innovation ecosystem and are doing some really cool stuff.

I might pass over to Jan to share some other insights. Yes, thank you. So I would like to talk a little bit about some additional benefits you can get out of the diploma.

I'm adding some more details to what Paul already talked about. So one thing which probably all like to hear, we do not have any examinations. That does not mean that we do not have assessments, but we think putting you in a room with a paper and pen, that doesn't really help with learning what we try to teach you.

So our assessments are rather reflecting what you would be doing in the workplace, in the real world, right? So that can be pitches to potential investors, for example. It can be reports. It can be creative work, depending on the project you're working on.

And as Paul mentioned, we are very flexible in terms of what you are working on, because you have some agency. You can, to some extent, choose what you're working on. And we also take that into consideration when it comes to assessing your work.

So we are very flexible in terms of that. Some administrative advantages, I would call it, that we have cross credit options. So if your degree allows you to choose any electives from across UTS, you can get credit points towards your core degree, but also towards the diploma.

So you can use certain subjects to get credit for your core degree, and also to advance in the diploma in innovation. We are also very flexible in terms of the study options and the progressions. So as Paul mentioned, our subjects are all offered in summer and winter school, so it does not add any additional workload during your already busy spring and autumn semesters.

The subjects run for three weeks, two days per week, and it is flexible in which order you do the subjects. So we do not have a very precise study plan. That means if you want to go for a holiday, maybe during summer or winter, you can just do it, right? You do a subject just during another period, or if you have an internship or work lineup, so you can choose when you do which subject.

Another advantage Paul also mentioned, you can take your own projects into our subjects, right? You can work on something you have some passion for, maybe a problem which always annoys you or which has always been annoying you, you can work on that problem in our subject. And some of our students, not all of them, but they start working on their own startup, which is one potential avenue, and we are more than happy to let you work on your startup project in our subject. So that's kind of like a win-win, right? You can work on your own project, on your own startup, and get credit towards a degree, and you get professional mentorship from the teaching staff to advance your project and your startup.

Having said that, it's not all about startups obviously. So we talk about innovation and entrepreneurship in a broader sense. So we have a lot of students, they are looking at social initiatives, the big grand challenges we are facing currently in terms of climate change environment, and as mentioned, you have the freedom to choose what you want to work on.

And because we do this project-focused and project-based work, and we give you the freedom to choose what you want to work on, we find that students are usually much more motivated to work on these projects, right? It is different compared to have a lecturer telling you, okay, this is the case study I want you to analyze, this is the lab project I want you to work on, you can choose it yourself. And by doing that, it also helps you to build up a portfolio you can then use once you apply for a job. And in general, obviously, it is a big benefit if you graduate from university and you do not only have your core degree, which is already a big achievement, but you can also show well, I have invested this additional effort and done a diploma on top of that.

So you have accumulated these additional skills, but you also demonstrate that you are willing to work hard, right, and do an additional degree to boost your career chances. So you can pair the diploma with basically any course at UTS except the BCII, our sister degree, also offered by the Transdisciplinary School. You do it in part-time, as I mentioned, our subjects run in summer and winter school, so the idea is that you can graduate with your core degree and the diploma at the same time.

So it does not add any additional time towards your degree you are already studying. We have some students, they choose, and as I said, you have a lot of choice options, they choose to accelerate finishing the diploma, and they may do two subjects in summer school or winter school. That is also possible, but that is totally up to you, however it best fits into your study plan, but also in your life plan, basically.

As I said, if you need to complete an internship, if you want to go for a holiday or you've got work lined up during the semester breaks, and I may hand back to Paul. Oh cool, so one of the questions you often get is, you know, what are the career opportunities associated with, you know, your core degree or, in this case, the Diploma in Innovation. To answer that, we've actually put a bunch of screen on the slides here, a bunch of reports, and these go back more than a decade, where at the national level and at the state level it's been recognised that innovation, the ability to do innovation, is critical to the success of the broader Australian economy, and that is that, you know, within the Australian context, as Nick alluded to, particularly within larger organisations, sometimes it's a little bit hard to do innovation.

What we know is that organisations that do innovation have sometimes double the profitability. They grow faster, they're therefore able to pay higher wages, they also enable you to do much broader things, such as, you know, kind of export and have more of an international career. So the Diploma in Innovation pairs with almost any degree, so we have students that do, for example, nursing and then the Diploma, and then they're able to do innovation in the context of nursing.

We have students that do, you know, kind of business, you know, marketing or kind of finance, and once again, when they're actually in practice, when they graduate, they've got this extra set of skills that they're able to do innovation in a different way. We have loads of science students who are then able to kind of invent, and then the way they practice their science is different, has more of an innovation kind of character to it. So what we observe is that students, one of the key skills, one of the key career opportunities is the ability to do things better and differently in the career that you are imagining.

So in addition to that, there's a couple of kind of core roles that you can get if you're good at innovation, and we've listed some here, for example, you know, if you're good at innovation, you're usually pretty good at business development, you have skills in kind of creativity and production, product design, we do a fair bit of that in terms of that's the area that you want to specialise in, management consulting, innovation management, and a whole range of other kind of things, but the ability to invent, the ability to think differently is what distinguishes our graduates from, you know, the typical graduate. So here's a bunch of photos we thought we'd share, just to give you a bit of an idea about what it's like to do the diploma as well, so maybe you can share. Yeah, so that's just some pictures from some of our showcases, so in many of those subjects we finish with a public showcase, where we also invite people from industry and other people from UTS, where student teams present their work, and it's usually in a kind of trade show environment, so you know you have been working on your project, and at the end of the three weeks intensive workshops you present what you have been doing over these three weeks, and it's always super exciting and super cool to just walk along and look what students have achieved, and it's the same every semester, we start a class and students tell us what you want us to do all this in just three weeks, I have never done this, I have never done that, how can I ever achieve this, and after just three weeks they are so proud and said I did it, I was able, I was capable to do all this, and they never thought they would be able to do this, so this is like amazing for personal and professional development to be able to achieve something, something tangible within just three weeks, and from these pictures like the group at the right for example, they identified a problem because they were annoyed with the UTS my student admin system, which you're all probably very familiar with, and they really worked hard on how could we improve that, and they came up with a kind of working prototype, a website, this is how the system could look better, so that was pretty amazing right, it was a problem from your everyday life, something which really annoys you, frustrates you, and they said we want to look at this problem and try to solve this problem, and come up with ideas how we can make it better.

The other group at the top left, they looked at the problem that people who have to take a lot of medication, they may get confused right, and may not take the right pill at the right time, and they developed a prototype for an app to assist people, to assist patients with managing taking their pills at the right point, and taking the right pills, so it is very diverse what our students work on, and that's influenced by their personal interests, it's influenced by something which may annoy them, a problem they have identified, or an opportunity they have come across, and what we do during these three weeks is we are not really like lecturers or tutors, how you know it from your core degrees, but we understand ourselves I think more and more as mentors, so we try to help you on your journey to finish the project you chose to work on successfully within three weeks, and that's for us as teaching staff I would say very rewarding and enjoyable to observe what students do throughout three weeks, and what students are really capable to do, and I think in many core degrees you're kind of like confined and restricted a little bit, and you can't develop these skills and capabilities which we try to encourage you to develop in our subjects. We have the course structure, but as I mentioned I don't want to say we don't have a structure, but we are very flexible, so this is just suggested study flow basically. We have a couple of subjects we offer, so we have our core subjects, and then we have elective subjects you can choose to study depending on your personal interests, and I don't know Paul if you want to talk a little bit about innovation complex systems, because that's a really cool subject.

Yeah, I mean you don't have to do this the first subject, but it's the subject we recommend students to do innovation in complex systems. In that subject you basically get to play with over 80 different methods, so these are methods that involve creativity, some involve kind of observation, we have methods from science, methods from health, we even have some methods from literature, we have a lot of different things that you play with, and then you apply it to a big problem space, so there's lots of stuff in that subject. In fact we run it with, it actually sits within the core of a couple of other degrees as well, so when you do it you'll often be sitting alongside quite a diverse set of students, which is a lot of fun, and it works so well that we've actually launched it as a micro-credential for high school students to do a university subject before they go to university, and so we actually ran it last week, and students were able to invent some new things, which is amazing.

So the stuff that we teach you will work for you, and it'll work for a diverse group of people, and the skills are really there. I'll give you an example, so these high school kids which have not had the life experience that you've had at university, but they were able to kind of come up with some ideas to help their schools and communities reach low carbon footprints, and on their final showcase day we identified maybe three or four really outstanding projects that are going to be championed by the school and the broader community, including launching a competition and a few other different things as well, and so that subject's a lot of fun, and it's kind of very transdisciplinary. In fact that subject you'll learn what we call creative intelligence, which most innovators kind of have just through the practice, where you interplay between creativity and kind of a kind of more logical and intelligence-based approaches.

And one of the really cool methods you teach, and which this subject shares a little bit with the fundamentals of innovation, so we collaborate in some sessions, is 3D printing, which is really cool. So we teach you how to 3D print and use our UTS proto space lab, so you get to design your own prototype and 3D print it, and then we have a mini showcase with students from innovation complex systems, but also fundamentals of innovation, and you can see what the other students have done and give them some tips, ideas, and some feedback. So that's a really very collaborative environment and a very constructive and collegial, and you have to remember we have students from all across UTS, engineering, business, health, you name it, and by buddying up with students with a different disciplinary background, you are able to achieve so much more than what you would be able to achieve if it was just say like business students, engineering students, or design students.

So that's another big advantage, and we try to really make use of that in our subjects and try to form teams which are very diverse. We have a couple of more subjects, navigating entrepreneurial ecosystems, for example, which is also a really cool subject that really teaches you to think about the system around you. So if you are a student, if you are an organization, if you are a company, you do not function in isolation, right, but you are embedded in a system, and that is not only important for entrepreneurs, but also for employees, for companies to understand, okay, how does this system around me look like, and what can I do to potentially change the system in a way that it is of benefit for solving a problem or just of benefit for my organization, and we actually get students to go out, to go to different institutions, to talk to people, and that also helps them to build up professional relationships.

And in this subject, again, we also have a showcase, and this year it was really cool that quite a few people from industry, from government, students had initiated the contact with, they came to the showcase and listened to and looked at what students had done. So that's for many students who may not have a lot of professional experience. A little bit challenging at the beginning to actually reach out to email a stranger, to give them a call, but at the end of the subject, everyone is super happy and super proud, and they can see what they have achieved.

I may jump to the next slide. So this December, we do have a couple of subjects on offer, innovation complex systems. We have innovation futures, which tries to make use of futuring methods, so to look at what can we do now to improve the future, to anticipate what we may need in the future to solve a problem, so acknowledging that we are in a very dynamic environment, and we are not only operating in the present, but also need to look at the future and try to anticipate what we can do now.

And we have innovation funding platforms, which is also a pretty cool subject. So in this subject, our students pair up with a real startup and try to work together with the startup, help the startup to get funding in, whether that's like venture capital, grants, crowdfunding, and so on. So this is like a real-world project.

It's not a book. It's not a case study. So students work with a real startup and help them on their financial journey.

And we also do have a subject on offer in February, which is leadership in innovation, which tries to combine innovation, creativity with the leadership skills an innovator needs to be successful in innovation and creative methods. And just a small note, we are always innovating on our courses as well. So some of the names we've actually changed as well.

So when you go to enroll, just like look at your study plan and kind of look at the subject number, and you'll be given a bunch of options. But we're always innovating and changing and evolving what we do to kind of keep up with industry, keep up with what's happening more broadly. Fantastic.

Thank you so much for that detailed breakdown of the diploma innovation course. I think my biggest takeaway from that is definitely the encouragement to be flexible and to personalize. And it gives students a lot of opportunities to really build up their portfolio before they even graduate.

And I think that's a great segue to our final guest speaker, which is Andrew. Andrew, would you like to go through your entrepreneurial journey and the deployment innovation and some of the biggest takeaways you could have the degree? Yeah, for sure. So I'm Andy.

Basically, I started this company called Air2Energy. We're trying to create a solution to emissions within the marine industry. I think it's about 60% of students at UTS want to start a startup.

So this is where the deployment is extremely good. It helps like provide you basically like a structure and a pathway. So you can go back and ask the professors what like you should do, what you want, that sort of thing.

Yeah, so I think the major part of the deployment that's very good is the transdisciplinary, being able to talk to different people, get different insights, talk to different people from different areas. Like when you go into the startup industry, there's gonna be so many different like viewpoints in a way. So like for me, it's business going and looking at from like an economic lens compared to a science lens.

So working through the diploma, we have like figure out different issues and like talk to each other, basically going and saying like we're working on a membrane, trying to pick a membrane to use for our system. And we had it like, I was like, no, this is too expensive. It's not gonna work.

It's not gonna be commercially viable. And then Kira, the other co-founder was like, no, it doesn't have enough energy yield. So that sort of thing.

It's led to me having quite a few opportunities. So I pitched at CSIRO. I did like start my student fellowship, which is like a pre-accelerator sort of thing.

Joining the diploma, I didn't really have a innovative business idea or anything that I like thought I was extra special in, if that makes sense. So just wanting to learn something new would be my main, like if you want to learn something new and you want to bring like practical skills into your job employment and having your uni degree, I definitely recommend it. I think when you're trying to apply, I'd go look through each of the courses and understand which courses you want to take, especially the electives.

I did the complexity and sustainability one recently, which was like pretty good. Working with like a life cycle analysis and more looking at carbon, like sequencing going through from your beginning to your end. Yeah.

Fantastic. Now we were talking a little bit before the session started about your new startup project. Would you mind just giving us a little rundown as to, I guess, what motivated you and how your double degrees sort of funneled into that deployment innovation and how you came up with the plan and if it's something that you're passionate about as well? Yeah.

So we're basically trying to create a solution to emissions within the marine industry. So we've designed a system which would be able to be retrofitted onto the exhaust manifolds of marine vessels. And the somewhat goal is to be able to reduce the environmental impact as well as provide them the economic benefit of hopefully producing them a bit of power.

As well as that, we'd want to allow them to track their emissions, their fuel saved and that sort of thing for like ESG reporting. Yeah. So with my business degree, it's pretty good, I guess, because with the diploma, when you're working on like a business or startup, you can bring in that like financial statements, that sort of thing, which you already have pre-knowledge in.

So going back to the transdisciplinary-ness of it, I don't have a huge understanding of engineering science, so we had an IT person also helping us. So having that IT background to come back onto it, I don't know, I don't really know what I want to do in the future, but I thought it was a good idea during the diploma because I was thinking about going into environmental consulting, that sort of area, or sustainability consulting, which I don't know if you looked on the list, but one of them was management consulting, so I'm hoping there's a bit of a crossover between that. Yeah, so with the diploma and my business degree and the environmental degree, being able to bring innovative thinking, especially I think, what is it called, but when you, we basically sat all along a table and went in circles trying to, like working on a solution to something and picking out two points that you thought were good with the other person's project, and one person, one point that you thought you can prove on, and then for yours you'd have to go and say, I'm struggling on this, I'm struggling on that, and then like you're crowdsourcing, I guess, answers to your questions was extremely good.

I think that's something I'll probably bring into the future. Yeah. I think as someone who's also doing a double degree as well, was there any sort of challenges coming in with the diploma as well? Not as much as you think, because obviously the diploma's during the holiday, so you have, like you have time, you're not doing your double degree.

It does, I mean, you're doing a lot of work, I guess, would be my take. You're studying quite hard throughout the semester and then you have a slightly reduced holiday to do the diploma, but I think it is worth it. I wouldn't say the diploma is a lot funner than your core degree, or at least it's for me, because it's like two days a week.

I prefer the method because it's basically like a one-day thing, which is also good if you, like, I don't know, you want to meet new people, because the problem with university and trying to, I guess, make friends is you have to go in and say, see them for two hours, then there's a week break, see them for another two hours throughout the semester, but with the diploma you're with them basically for like seven hours or whatever it is, so being able to do that sort of method of learning with the diploma as well, what I like, I kind of like the feeling of like a child by fire, if that makes sense, which is a bit of what today is for me as well, but being, having to learn as you go is really good and that's added with the diploma, so basically getting that idea of what you have to do beforehand and then, like, throwing you into the sharks and you have to go and do it, mixed with the feeling of, like, when you're doing your core degree, you're working on XYZ company, like a made-up little question, where you can actually go and pick what you're interested in, makes it a lot easier to learn compared to just creating some financial sheet for a made-up, I don't know, accounting firm, it's a lot of fun, you can go and pick whatever company you wanted to do or what you're interested in, which was for my first subject, I think I made a flexible flask because the idea was that I could fill the flask up with, like, drinks, sneak into a club and then drink in the club and then can, like, crush it down and then chuck in my pocket, because the idea with the metal flask is that it would be too heavy, so if I could make, like, a silicon flexible sort of, I don't know, flask, which we 3D printed at the Proto Lab, I think, which was, yeah, very cool. That's a great idea. Fantastic.

Well, Andrew, thank you so much for sharing your professional and academic journey. It's truly inspiring to see what you've leveraged at your degree at UTS, and honestly, it's quite amazing that, you know, at this stage of your degree, you're already going to have such an impressive portfolio as well. Now, we've come to the end of our keynote speakers, and we're actually going to open it up for Q&A, so for those in the audience, please raise your hand and a microphone will be brought to you, and for those joining us online, please continue sending your questions through the Q&A box.

To start us off, I've got a question for you, Nick, and I know that you touched on this a little bit earlier, but I think I would, as someone who is a very logical thinker and who struggles to think outside the box, I would say, I'm not the most creative person, but for those like me and perhaps not like me, what are some of the specific skills or knowledges that employees seek in candidates, and how would a deployment innovation address those needs? The question's interesting because you actually frame it, you say, thinking outside the box, and the whole point is what is the box that you frame a question in, and if you get given a problem or a question, there's always a framing around it, which is, you know, this is the company, this is the sort of thing we can do, find a solution, and you're encouraged to sort of look within the box to find the solution. Now, what you actually have to do is to go much bigger and look at a much bigger framing, and then you'll discover that there may be solutions which are outside the box, but you actually have to take your focus and look a lot bigger than the framing of the question, and that's one of the things that you do get taught when you learn innovation at UTS is refuse to accept the framing you're given, and then look a lot bigger and say, if we look a bit bigger at that problem, is there another way that we maybe can use resources from outside the company or other people who might have solved the problem in a different way, or maybe the problem is actually you're solving the wrong problem, there may be another problem to solve, and to be honest, most innovation means you're refusing to accept the definition of the problem, and you're redefining the problem and solving the redefined problem, and that's kind of innovation, and it's the sort of thing you've got to unlearn everything you learn at school, because at school you get given a really strong box in which you've got to learn that stuff, and teachers are kind of paid to make sure you've got to learn that stuff, not stuff that's irrelevant. In real life innovation, you've got to not accept the box and reframe the question, so we're teaching people to be a little bit, you know, to go outside and to reframe the problem, and yeah, problems are, when you do that way, problems are easier to solve.

It's quite an unorthodox approach to it, but thank you so much for that. Do we have a question from the audience? Yes, so this is from online audience, so I think this is directly to Andrew, so I'm debating to choose between the Diploma of Innovation or BCII, what made you to choose to study the Diploma and not the BCII option? Well, the direct answer would be I was already doing two courses, so I couldn't do three, but I think you could, like if you wanted to do like a double degree and then the Diploma, it does match up surprisingly well for me, especially because the like environmental sustainability is not as like heavy. I think the Diploma was also a slight bit better because it wasn't as much time, so if you, I don't know what other degree you're doing, but if you're doing quite a content heavy degree, like I don't know, engineering or law for example, having the BCII on top of that is quite heavy.

By just doing the Diploma, you do get a significant amount of information and experience for less like time, if that makes sense. Your value to time is a bit better, but it depends on what you're really looking for. If you have the time to do the BCII, it's probably beneficial or more beneficial than the Diploma, but that's up to you.

Sorry, I might just quickly jump in here. My understanding is that if you start with the Diploma, you can actually transfer into the BCII as well, would you? Yeah, the Diploma is like a sister program, so the BCII Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation is a four-year program, so you do an extra capstone year, but one of the streams that you can do through the Diploma, because with the Diploma, there's like quite a few electives, and so one of those streams matches with the BCII the first three years, and that then enables students that are doing the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence to transfer into the Diploma, and we also allow students that are doing the Diploma to transfer into the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence, and that's something we do to increase flexibility. I mean some students, in the, quite a few students will perhaps start out in the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence, then maybe they'll get a great job or some amazing opportunity, and then it's advantageous for them to transfer to the Diploma, and quite a few students start with the Diploma, and they're just like, wow, this is just, I want to spend another year on top of what I was doing to kind of do a lot of extra work and build some bigger projects, and they will transfer into the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence, so it's quite a fluid kind of arrangement.

It's a lot of flexibility there, so yes, to summarise essentially, you can start with the Diploma and then sort of get a feel for it, and then if you really like it, you can tack on the BCII through that particular stream. Perfect. So next up, Andrew, can you share a specific example of how collaboration with students from different disciplines enhance your entrepreneurial journey with the Diploma, and also how this transdisciplinary approach has prepared you for the challenges and opportunities you have encountered as an entrepreneur? Yeah, so within the Diploma, mostly it's very good experience, so when you're stuck in your little business bubble, I'm not going to say all business people think the exact same or talk the exact same, but we have a different, like a same, I don't know, root knowledge coming out of problem, so being able to like broaden your ability to explain and understand a different or empathy towards another person, because for you what might be super simple or something you've known forever with someone else is completely different and vice versa.

So for me, maybe someone doesn't know how to do a profit and loss statement, for an example, and I might not know much about the experimental process or writing a hypothesis. So being able to explain and change your language to be able to explain that to someone else, and then for them to explain back to you is very important. To build something, you need multiple different people.

I think it takes a, as a saying, it takes a village to build a company, so having to have all those different people and being able to communicate is something you definitely learn in the Diploma. I did talk a bit earlier about this membrane, which was a bit of a struggle for us. I think it took three hours of us sitting in, like not arguing, but passionately debating what membrane we should use, because we couldn't find one.

Eventually we did find one after a bit of compromise, but going into more outside of UTS, it's similar. So when I'm like talking to a VC, for example, I'm going to change my language and what I'm showing them to be more economically viable, and change my language so that they can understand it, and not go and just argue about high-level scientific language, or go and ramble about that. But when I'm talking to CSIRO, we're going to lean a bit heavier on that scientific understanding and that scientific explanation, which is very important, something we did learn in the Diploma.

Also, how you're selling it comes into that. So basically tailoring yourself to the person you're talking to from a different disciplinary. I can definitely attest to that.

As a law and medical science student, you know, they're two very different industries, two very different fields, and the people there are also very, very different. So definitely learning how to communicate effectively with different groups of people is definitely one of the most important skills in this day and age, which I think is definitely surely lacking in most parts. Dr. Brown, how does the- Kenny, sorry.

We also got a question from the online audience. Yes, absolutely. So I think this is for academics.

So would this diploma be beneficial for me as a health student, given that it is a generic course and not field-specific? Yeah, I mean, we have quite a few health students. I mean, the health industry requires a lot of innovation. In fact, one of the reasons why I think the Australian healthcare sector has done relatively well is because of innovation.

And so the people that practice health have extra rules around how they do innovation. For example, you can't just like, you know, kind of do your startup and just like launch your product. You've got to go through a whole bunch of things that are specific to health, but it's nonetheless very important.

I would add to that, I did a project quite a few years ago, actually not that long ago, where we're looking at where the big areas are for New South Wales. And this is for the Innovation and Productivity Council. They're like going, oh, you know, where are the future jobs? You know, what are we good at? What can we do really well? And one of the areas that really stood out is actually med tech.

And so what we do know that in the Australian context, a lot of our big success stories are individuals or teams where they have really good training in health and good understanding of health-related challenges and some sort of innovation entrepreneurship capability. And we can think of examples like Cochlear. You've got examples like ResMed, which created the sleep apnea machinery.

And there's been a whole bunch of really amazing exports that are really kind of, you know, allowed Australians to make a difference internationally. And yeah, it's really good. So actually, to answer your question, it's going to be helpful for you in terms of your career and, you know, kind of being an effective operator within the healthcare system.

But also, you know, should you want to, you know, really do something that has a lot of impact with the time that you've got, and you go, well, maybe you want to do some innovation in the healthcare, like the health space, then you're going to be set up really nicely to do that. I mean, whether you do it now, when you graduate, or you kind of wait like 10 or 20 years, you know, I said the typical entrepreneur is about 40. But yeah, I hope that answers the question.

Fantastic. Do we have any more from the online audience at the moment? Yeah. So I think this is for Jan.

Can you explain a little bit more of the delivery mode? And what do you mean by studio style? So the delivery mode is what we call an, like you mentioned, immersive studio experience. And we do in this intensive mode. So the subjects typically run for three weeks, and we have two full days per week, like Monday and Thursday, or Tuesday and Friday.

So that gives you the opportunity to really immerse yourself into your project, rather than doing a one hour or two hour tutorial, and then forgetting about what you have been working on until the next week. We usually are in these collaborative classrooms, you probably have come across them where you have like a seating area where you can sit together with your team, you have your display. So it's a little bit like your workplace, right? Your work environment where you work on your project.

So how a typical day looks like is we may have like a couple of slides, for example, just introducing you to a new method, to a concept, to a challenge, we have guest speakers coming in, we have mentors coming in, and helping you to work on your project. So it is not this very formalized, you have a lecture, you have a lab session, you have a tutorial, but it is like for these three weeks, the studio is your home, basically your workplace where you can get really creative and work on your project, supported by us as the mentors. I might add a bit as well, and one of the things we know from the practice of creativity is that it is wonderful when you get into that state of flow, where you are really paying full attention, you almost lose track of time, your senses are heightened, for example, and so some of the subjects at various points, we actually try and encourage students to get into that state, and that means that often we run the days a little bit flexibly, and in fact some, there are a few of the subjects that kind of have quite large projects, often the second last day will be the whole day will be you in that state of flow, working intensely with mentors.

So as soon as you get stuck, we kind of come around and help you, but we find that if we disrupt that state of flow, students don't like it, they actually like to work on the problems that they're working on, and that's something that also is kind of like an interesting characteristic, it's like a funny thing that kind of just happens kind of naturally when you do this kind of learning. It's kind of the most fun there is, when you do that, it's just spectacular, so much excitement because you're creating something new and you're bouncing ideas around a team, it's fantastic. Fantastic, I think that actually concludes our session today, so I'd like to thank all of our guest speakers today, and thank you so much for sharing your insights, it really means a lot to students like us, and obviously from a student as well, thank you so much for sharing your insights, it definitely gives us a lot of encouragement to think outside the box, to be a little bit more disruptive, and to reframe the questions that we're seeing in the world, and seeing the problems in the world as well.

So, and thank you so much for illustrating the value of the Diploma in Innovation, in enhancing our students' professional outcomes as well. Now, to everyone who joined us today, we appreciate your participation, we hope you found this session available, valuable in deciding whether the Diploma in Innovation is the right choice to advance your career, and to help you stand out in your field. Now, as a friendly reminder, those wishing to apply can do so directly via the UTS student portal, and if you've already received your offer, you can accept it through the My Student Admin.

Now, just note that the last day to apply will be on the November 20th, and the last day to enroll will be 6th of December, and that's for this year. And classes for the December sessions will commence on the 2nd and 3rd of December, and for the February session on the 27th and 28th of January, and please scan the QR code to learn more about our upcoming classes, and if you have any questions, feel free to contact us at askutsdesk, or email our Innovations team at innovations at uts.edu.au. So, for everyone else who is on campus today, I invite you to stay back, have a chat with our guest speakers, and enjoy the refreshments at the back as well. Thank you so much all for coming.

Thank you.