Michelle Curry, Tony deLiseo, Rana Pala and Aditya Chordia were the judges who reviewed all the participant’s presentations and agreed on the winning and highly commended projects. The judging was held at the Grant Thornton offices in Sydney, and the Tata Consultancy Services office in Melbourne. Here are the citations for all the finalists.
Winner – IT Technical Innovation category
Lu Xia
University of Melbourne
BillLess Smart Household Electricity Demand System
The judges felt that this solution is very relevant and topical to current market needs both in developed economies where electricity consumption is continually increasing in cost as well as in developing countries where supply availability is challenging at best. Further it has a very real opportunity for commercial application, is well researched and innovative and was well presented.
We would recommend that a detailed business plan be developed and guidance be sought as to how this should best be commercialized.
Winner – IT Enabled Business Innovation category
Eisa Zarepour
University of New South Wales
An Innovative Approach to Improving Gas-to-Liquid Fuel Catalysis via Nano-scale Sensor Networks
The Gas-to-Liquid (GTL) fuel process is well known and it has undergone incremental improvements over the past 60 years, mostly with improved thermodynamic and engineering processes. The Nano Sensor Network will allow the uses of a remotely monitored and controlled array of nano sensors, within the reactor, to control the behaviour of the chemical and physical process in a GTL fuel reactor. This will look to dramatically reduce the low value by-products and improve the efficiency of the reactor. The Nano Sensor Network can potentially increase the selectivity of the reactions from 35% to up to 90%!
The environmental impacts of this improvement are huge, as is the potential to produce net greenhouse gas neutral fuels. Many low value or waste gases will be efficiently converted to highly valuable liquid fuels.
The geo political impact of this innovation could be vast, and additionally it was the judges’ assessment that other beneficial implications of the adoption of such an innovation have the potential to be far-reaching and significant in nature.
Highly Commended – IT Technical Innovation Category
Hooman Shidanshidi
University of Wollongong
Free Viewpoint TV
Free Viewpoint TV aims to provide users with an unlimited views of an event – such as sporting events – with a limited number of cameras, and the final image being rendered from the information gather by the camera array.
This has great potential in the areas of entertainment and security.
Although the concepts of rendering an infinite number of possible views from a finite number of cameras has been worked on for a while – the innovation in terms of rendering algorithms, client side processing of data and reduction in the number of cameras required impressed the judges and they thought the submission merited a highly commended recommendation. Additional work was required to move on from the initial concept / prototype to a more large scale trial and onto some real world applications.
Highly recommended – IT- enabled Business Innovation
Iman Behzadian and Reza Rajnbar Omrani
RMIT
ChArtist
The CHArtist presents a unique application (App) for share trading strategies and simulation tool for Australia and other international stock markets. The CHArtist will incorporate both behavioral and statistical analysis and leverage social media on a tablet platform at a competitive cost. Education sector and gaming are the other two prospective markets for this application.
The CHArtist team researched its solution and target market as well as has a well-defined plan to market the application. The judges felt that the solution is different, practical and has potential to scale. The judges also suggest that the CHArtist should get endorsement from one of the leading financial institutions, this will provide CHArtist further credibility.
Participant – IT Technical Innovation
Vahid Vakiloroaya
University of Technology, Sydney
iTouch
The judges were impressed with this innovation and its application in optimising energy consumption and cost spend on cooling, ventilation and heating provided by HVACs. Addressing elements beyond temperature and humidity, iTouch takes a holistic approach to human comfort as regulated by six “comfort-determining” factors, and influenced by these factors’ inter-relationship with one another in any one iTouch serviced area. The premise is to deliver optimised comfort levels using optimal energy levels and to reduce under- and over-consumption of energy, and that this has flow on effects to people behaviour and performance in the execution of life and work tasks. The judges’ final assessment is that while temperature and humidity were found to be the two most significant factors of the six factors affecting comfort in iTouch (the two comfort regulating dimensions delivered by most HVACs today) that iTouch has market relevance, has been designed for easy implementation, is considered to be relatively low cost and delivers sound benefits in terms of green solutions. One recommendation the judges have is that a study that looks at how iTouch influences productivity in workplaces by providing more dynamically regulated ‘comfort’ could result in an enhanced commercial application of this work.
Participant – IT Technical Innovation
Andrew Indayang
University of Technology, Sydney
Smart Glass App
The Judges believed that the concepts presented in this submission already existed in other applications. Wearable devices will become more available and more functional in the near future and we encourage people to look at innovative ideas to provide benefits to the users. There is much more work required to realise the ideas in this submission into a product or service.
JUDGES PROFILES
Aditya Chordia
Aditya Chordia, Managing Partner, Rescon Partners
Aditya has more than 20 years of diverse corporate experience in the field of Sales, Marketing, Program/Project Management, Change Management and Consulting. He has worked for leading organizations like AMP, IAG, Suncorp, BT Financial Group, HCL Technologies and ABB.
Aditya started his career as sales executive and rose to a position to lead country Sales and Marketing for ABB, India for their Automation products. Later he decided to change his career in delivery services.
For the last ten years, Aditya is focused on Program, Project and Organisational Change Management and delivered large programs that includes setting up Greenfield capabilities, process improvement, setting up offshoring-outsourcing and various technology programs. He has managed programs valued up to $20Million and led teams of 120+ resources.
Aditya is also a founder member of Rescon Partners (www.resconpartners.com.au), a start-up management consulting company, where he is involved in global research and consulting projects.
Aditya is certified practitioner for Prosci ADKAR® Change management, Prince2 and Agile project management. He is an Engineer and MBA by education.
Michelle Curry
Lead Partner Consulting APJ, Wipro Limited
Michelle is the Lead Partner for Wipro Consulting Services for Japan and Asia Pacific, a business consulting team focused on providing differentiated solutions to clients’ business challenges and opportunities across the region. Prior to joining Wipro, Michelle led the IBM Strategy & Change practice, comprised of strategy practices (Business, Operations, Technology and Organisation Change Strategy), as well as Marketing and Advisory Services (HCM, SCM, AIM, FMS, CRM). Michelle grew this team to a 600+ strong MBA qualified global workforce of strategy and advisory management consultants, selling, solutioning and delivering engagements to companies worldwide. In this role she also established a collaboratory with IBM Innovation Labs and the IIMs to use strategy applied disciplines to increase uptake of R&D innovations including developing the Smarter Cities Strategy and Roadmap – a USD370M consulting program; conceived and launched “StratCast” – a podcast reaching 100000+ people disseminating white papers, POVs, and disruptive solutions in strategy and innovation management; created a diversity program, called ‘Asmaa’, focussing on the retention, development and promotion of women in the business.
Michelle was recognised in the India media for pioneering business model innovation in the services industry. In 2006 she was a Finalist in the Telstra Business Woman of the Year Awards.
Tony De Liseo
Manager – Asia Pacific, Bond International Software
President ICT Illawarra
Tony is the Asia Pacific Manager for Bond International Software. For the past 15 years he has been involved in developing and bringing to market IT and CRM solutions for HR and the recruitment industry.
More recently Tony has been focusing on the development and implementation of cloud computing based solutions within this sector, as well as developing Bond solutions for the Chinese and Japanese markets. He is leading the team developing the mobile application for the Bond suite of products.
Tony graduated from the University of Wollongong with a BSc (Physics). He has worked in product marketing with a number of large international corporations, and has been involved in IT and environmental start-ups. He recently was the president of the ICT Illawarra cluster and is working to grow and support the IT community.
Tony was a judge of the 2012 and 2013 NASSCOM Innovation Student Awards
Rana Pala
Partner International Business, Grant Thornton
Rana has over 30 years experience in providing commercial tax and business consulting services to meet the challenging requirements of dynamic international business including many subsidiaries of multinational corporations, publicly listed companies and large private company groups.
As Head of the Global Compliance/ Outsourcing Services (GCS) Team in Sydney, Rana takes the lead in developing Grant Thornton’s strategy to partner with dynamic businesses who are seeking to expand their global footprint, particularly across the Asia Pacific region.
Leveraging off his experience with similar clients, Rana plays an active role in delivering value added services and solutions to GCS clients wherever possible.
Rana’s expertise lies in the co-ordination, collaboration and delivery of services across multiple locations with respect to GCS and includes the coordination of a wide range of advisory projects that require the collaboration of a number of Grant Thornton’s experts from across the region whilst ensuring seamless and co-ordinated client service delivery.
Rana has held a number of senior National and International roles including Board and management positions and has led International Strategy Workshops and presentations.
