The KCA Research Commercialisation Awards are back for a second year!

Our Sponsor

The 2015 Research Commercialisation Awards are kindly supported by Wrays. KCA would like to thank Wrays for their continued support year after year. We are grateful for all of their assistance.

What are the Awards?

Have you closed an amazing deal in the last 12 months? Or has your organisation pulled off a creative engagement strategy in the last 18 months? The sector wants to hear about it. Share your achievement with the rest of the member base and go in the draw to win complimentary passes to the Annual Conference, press coverage and more.

The KCA Research Commercialisation Awards are open to all KCA members and their respective research and industry partners. The idea behind the awards is to showcase and recognise the powerful relationships and partnerships transforming our country’s cutting edge research into products and services; the majority of which improve and benefit the lives of everyone in our community, return economic value, and/or increase our nation’s competitiveness globally.

The Categories

There will be two categories under which you can submit an entry: “Best Commercial Deal” and “Best Creative Engagement Strategy.”

Best Creative Engagement Strategy

Engagement must be between a research institution/their respectful commercial arm and either a public or private business/industry partner/government agency, and the project must be current (no longer than 18 months old). Submissions into this category will be evaluated on the following criteria:

• the innovative nature of the engagement strategy
• the benefits of the relationship to both the research partner and the business partner
• the desired outcome of the strategy

Best Commercial Deal

The commercial deal can be for any form of commercialisation of knowledge (licencing, spinout, consulting, contract R&D), but must have been completed no earlier than 31 March 2014. Submissions into this category evaluated on the following criteria:

• the innovative nature of the deal
• value-add of the deal to the research institution
• potential long term social and economic impact of the deal

How to Enter

1. Fill out the nomination form and return it to Mel by 10 July.
2. A panel of industry experts will review your nomination form and select three finalists in each category.
3. Finalists will be announced on 4 August.
4. Finalists will then be asked to shoot a short video (you can record it on your smart phone) or produce a short paragraph of text pitching their success to their peers to be entered into a People’s Choice Awards category.
5. Video and/or text will be uploaded to this section of the KCA site and peers will be invited to vote for their favourite deal or story 24 August – 10 September (entries will close at 5pm).
6. Winners of the first two categories (as decided by the expert judging panel), as well as the People’s Choice Award, will be announced at a special dinner integrated into the format of the KCA Annual Conference on Thursday 10th September, 2015 in Melbourne (venue TBC), 6:30-10:30pm.

Judging Panel

1. Topaz Conway, Accelerating Commercialisation
2. Chris Farquhar, Founding Partner, Aureae Portae
3. Rhona Knox, Director Open Innovation, Proctor & Gamble
4. ​Erol Harvey, CEO, MiniFab
5. Susan Oliver, Chair, Scale Investors

Prizes

• The Social Science has come on board and will provide one of the winners with a one-hour one-on-one consultation on how they can use or improve their use of social media to market their product / service.

Our Media Sponsor

Aiding in supporting the implementation of the media strategy for the KCA Conference and Awards are the fantastic folk at gemaker. This is the third year in a row that gemaker have come on board in support of a KCA event – a big thank you to gemaker for their continued support.