@AuManufacturing’s 50 Most Innovative returns for 2024/5

It’s that time again. 

Today we launch the third iteration of our Australia’s 50 Most Innovative Manufacturers campaign, or the 50 Most Innovative in its abbreviated form, or #A50MIM if you’re really into the whole brevity thing. 

This time around, it’s been made possible through the support of these fantastic sponsors – Australia Wide Engineering Recruitment, TXM Lean Solutions, the Industry Capability Network, Bonfiglioli Australia, the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre and the SmartCrete CRC. A huge thanks to them.

So why have we returned for a third time with this campaign and awards program?

It’s because there are few topics as fundamental to manufacturing and therefore as relevant to our audience as innovation.

Like manufacturing itself, innovation gets misunderstood and mischaracterised.

We see it as part of our job to run a months-long effort to learn from manufacturers that are applying innovation to identify, understand and meet their customers’ needs. The happy byproducts of this application are value creation by the manufacturer, and well-paying, rewarding jobs for Australians.

And there is plenty we can learn from our innovators and apply at our own enterprises.

This year around we’ve selected the theme of “risk and reward”, because it helps set the tone, and it correctly positions innovation as something both daring and carried out in service of a payoff. 

A major question we hope to explore this time around is “what makes a company innovative?” 

Once again, we are indebted to Dr Munib Karavdic and his team from WAVE Design. We are not experts in evaluating innovation, and so we’re grateful for WAVE’s guidance on this project, and for creating criteria by which nominees can be fairly judged.

On that note, WAVE has helped us trim application info, removing a few bits of repetition and unnecessary questions, which should make being a part of the 50 Most Innovative slightly less demanding at no expense to the campaign’s high levels of credibility and prestige.

We hope you can get involved. As always, it’s completely free to nominate. You can do so here.

As with the 2024 campaign, we’ll be announcing the list and the category winners during Australian Manufacturing Week at a special event. Be sure to join us in Melbourne on May 7 for this (details available very soon.) And as with previous campaigns, you can expect a freely-downloadable report at the end, where we’ll summarise what we found out and where manufacturers can learn from their peers.

(You can download the 2023 and 2024 campaign summaries for the 50 Most Innovative here and here.)

And of course, we’ll be doing our best to profile as many nominees as possible through feature stories on our website and interviews on the @AuManufacturing Conversations podcast.