Today I was a guest speaker on the Industry and Business panel at the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Communication. The topic was “Path from Research to Industry”. It was a huge privilege to sit beside a number of very distinguished people who had built their entire careers on helping research come to market. The panel was moderated by Daniel Austin, Head of Research of the Smart Services CRC, and had the following speakers:

• Dean Economou, Technology Strategist, NICTA

• Paul McCarthy, Director, Strategy & Innovation, Sirca Group Ltd

• Luiz Pizzato, Co-Founder of Octosocial, and Pizzato Data Science Consultancy

• Jeremy Brun, Staff Software Engineer, Dolby Australia

• Khimji Vaghjiani, Business Advisor, NSW Department of Trade and Investment

• Dean Gingell, Principal, Lens10 Pty Ltd

The heavy weight of experience in this panel was impressive. They were directly involved in the creation and the development of a number of high profile and extremely successful examples of research commercialisation.

My main contribution was to give an insight into the mind frame of researchers, how they view commercialisation and why it is so hard for them to think of commercialisation as a good thing for themselves and their careers. But more importantly, how researchers can overcome this and perhaps even start a company of their own.

IEEE ICC Panel