Only three more sleeps until nominations close for Australia’s 50 Most Innovative Manufacturers 2025

We are nearing the end of the nomination period for this year's Australia's 50 Most Innovative Manufacturers, with Saturday the cut-off to make your case to join 2025's prestigious list.

If you entered last year or in 2023 and wonder if you can nominate a second (or third) time, let me assure you that you absolutely can.

If you're innovating but it doesn't involve new products, then let me assure you that this is absolutely worth telling us about. We go by the below definition, taken from the Oslo Manual.

An innovation is a new or improved product or process (or combination thereof) that differs significantly from the firm’s previous products or processes and that has been made available to potential users (product) or brought into use by the firm (process).

The nomination window — your chance to share your innovation prowess with the @AuManufacturing community — closes on March 15.

So far this year we've profiled a plethora of fascinating innovators. Among them:

• Laronix’s Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi, who left academia to commercialise a world-first voice for the voiceless;
• Smith’s BBQs founder John Smith, who is obsessed with building the perfect Aussie barbie at Temora in regional NSW
• Element Engineering’s Ayrton Sue, whose company is focussed on the challenges of high-tech innovation and sovereign manufacturing;
• Jonathon Wolfe, founder and CEO of Optera Solutions, which is taking dragonfly-inspired neuromorphic sensors out of Western Sydney University to solve problems from satellite monitoring to the efficient use of CNC tools in workshops;
• Professor Mark Kendall, CEO and founder of WearOptimo, a third-time inventor/entrepreneur developing flexible microelectrodes;
• And another medtech technical founder based in Brisbane, Dr Chris Jeffery, whose company Convergence Medical is on the way to making life easier for orthopaedic surgeons with the world’s first arthroscopic robot.

We'll be speaking to plenty more leading up to the awards event on May 7. If you're keen to tell us about your company's innovation story, then nominate and — assuming we have the bandwidth — we'd love to hear all about it for a yarn on this website.