Page 3236 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 17 September 2013
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Sage Health, the developer of SmartWard, a practical health informatics solution to revolutionise patient care in hospitals, has been facilitated through programs including Lighthouse, innovation connect, the discovery translation fund and, recently, Commercialisation Australia.
Digitalcore, which is a leading provider of revolutionary 3D high-resolution image-based core analysis and petrophysical services to the oil and gas industry, emerged from the ANU and received support from ANU Connect Ventures, trade connect and Lighthouse. Digitalcore recently joined forces with Numerical Rocks from Norway and, now known as Lithicon, is a fully integrated imaging and analysis service provider to the global market.
Quintessence Labs, another ANU spin-out, a developer of ultra-secure encryption technology to protect networks, has gained international attention as the runner-up in the IBM Global SmartCamp and has established an office at NASA’s Ames research facility in Silicon Valley.
The ACT is a smart and clean city, and we will continue to promote the city’s competitive advantages in this area.
As members are aware, the government is committed to making the ACT Australia’s solar capital and achieving a target of 90 per cent renewable energy by 2020. The recent decision to build solar facilities at Mugga Lane and Coree, along with the previously approved Royalla solar farm, will generate, through renewable energy, power to 10,000 Canberra homes. This in turn provides opportunities for showcasing Canberra and developing innovation and commercialisation opportunities. As I mentioned earlier, InvestACT played a supporting role in promoting the solar auction process and facilitated the involvement of local, national and international companies participating in the auction. Already, partnerships are being developed between project developers and research institutions that will contribute to the further development of our growing clean energy sector.
In addition, NICTA’s Canberra Research Laboratory is teaming up with solar energy experts from the ANU, ActewAGL and local ACT companies Armada Solar and LAROS Technologies to develop ways of predicting the expected power output from rooftop solar energy systems. Forecasting solar energy production over a time span ranging from minutes to hours is important in order to stabilise the energy grid, decrease operational costs and ultimately achieve a high penetration of distributed solar energy production.
The ACT business community now has a reputation for being export focused. The ACT’s export statistics continue to be impressive. The value of goods and services exports from the ACT increased by 9.4 per cent to $1.3 billion in 2011-12, above the national rate of growth of 6.3 per cent; the ACT had the highest year on year growth rate among jurisdictions in 2011-12; and the five-year trend growth rate in ACT exports is 6.8 per cent.
We have played a major role in facilitating this growth. Through the Canberra Business Council, we established the ACT Exporters Network to bring successful
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