Today the Premier launched the State’s strategy to support defence and defence industry out to 2025.
It identifies a number of key priorities around themes such as Maritime, Systems and Cyber, Aerospace, Land and Science and Technology. It also acknowledges the need to building effective partnerships between Defence, industry and academia.
The University of Adelaide has a long and proud history of engagement on innovative defence related projects. These span all of the nominated areas of interest, and include submarine technologies, work on radar, photonics, lasers, complex software systems, defence communications and networking, GPS, drones and many other areas. We are also involved in important work supported by the Department of Veteran’s Affairs and the Department of Defence that examines the impact of military service on the mental, physical and social health of serving and ex-serving personnel and their families.
These transformative projects are built around long standing engagement with Defence and Industry led by key academics and researchers. A long running partnership with DSTO was cemented in 2014 with a renewed agreement – ARI was pleased to help develop this with our DSTO colleagues (and this agreement was used as the template for partnerships between DSTO and all Universities in Australia). In 2014 we were also pleased to partner with Defence SA, the Defence Teaming Centre and the Technology Industry Association to run a number of events, both within the University and beyond, showcasing some of the positive stories of engagement and providing more networking opportunities to help spur additional collaborations around areas of defence and industry need where researchers can provide an innovation and capability edge.
We look forward to more of the same in 2015, and have been discussing new leads and opportunities with business and government colleagues over the last 2 days – at the launch of both this new SA Strategy and the Aerospace Alliance. We will also be participating in DSTO’s newly announced Partnership week at the beginning of May, which is part of their push to improve external engagement to achieve better capability outcomes for Australia’s defence.
The SA strategy document is available at http://www.defencesa.com/
(For those interested in learning more, ARI’s key account lead for defence related matters is Paul Arthur – paul.arthur@adelaide.edu.au. Our Relationship Development Manager is Roxanne: roxanne.jansen@adelaide.edu.au)