Perth’s first innovation hub dedicated to the resources sector plans to focus on the impact of disruptive technologies after its official opening last night.
Perth’s first innovation hub dedicated to the resources sector plans to focus on the impact of disruptive technologies after its official opening last night.
CORE Resources Innovation Hub is co-located with FLUX, Perth’s largest co-working and innovation space at 191 St Georges Tce, which in turn is backed by social enterprise Spacecubed and property group Hawaiian.
Chief executive Tamryn Barker said CORE provides an environment that creates connections between players in resources technology.
She said it would focus on disruptive technologies such as predictive analytics, automation of knowledge work, autonomous vehicles, robotics, cloud and mobile to help solve the sector’s main challenges.
“Australia is already a global resources hub, but we risk losing the immense opportunities from digital technologies if we don’t drive commercialisation of this capability into the sector,” she said.
“This is part of aligning a vision for Australia with our strengths, and pursuing a strategy where we dominate resources technology as a globally disruptive domain.”
Backing for CORE has come NERA and METS Ignited, which are two of the six industry-led, government-funded growth centres established by the federal government last year.
NERA is tasked with maximising value from Australia’s energy resources, and has its Perth office at CORE, while Brisbane-based METS Ignited has the objective of growing the mining equipment, technology and services (METS) sector.
METS industry association Austmine and Caterpillar equipment supplier WesTrac are also foundation partners, while Unearthed is the resident ‘accelerator’, bringing with it a network of mentors, emerging startups and industry challenges.
Newton Labs co-founder Simon Vincent is CORE’s entrepreneur-in-residence.
His company won Australia’s first resources hackathon with Unearthed in 2014, developing a novel hardware solution using vibration analysis to detect oversized rocks, and has gone on to be named WA Innovator of the Year (Emerging Category) in 2015.
State development and innovation minister Bill Marmion said greater collaboration and open innovation goes hand in hand with realising the vision for Perth as a global resources technology hub.