Best of the week — the five most popular stories among @AuManufacturing’s readers

Curious about what people were most interested in during the week just finished? Here’s what visitors to this site were reading.

FLINDERS TO CATAPULT INDUSTRY INTO THE ADVANCED MANUFACTURING AGE

The federal government has had two attempts to mimic the success of Britain’s Catapult centres and Germany’s Fraunhofer technology and innovation centres, places where industrial technologies are developed, scaled up and realised in partnership with industry, publicly funded researchers and government.

Neither of the two attempts, the first by a Labor government and the second by the Coalition really got the formula quite right.

Now Flinders University in Adelaide, University of Strathclyde – operator of the National Manufacturing Institute Scotland, one of nine UK Catapults – and BAE Systems have signed a MoU which promises to realise something of the Catapult model in Australia, supporting our continuous naval shipbuilding programme.

DEFENCE INVESTS $27 MILLION IN INNOVATION

The Defence Innovation Hub has awarded contracts worth $27 million to ten Australian businesses, including a Tasmanian research organisation.

Defence industry minister Pat Conroy said: “Investing in Australian innovation is critical to building our national defence capability.

“The contracts being announced reflect the ingenuity of Australia’s defence industry, and the Albanese Government’s commitment to building a strong sovereign industrial base.”

SEA ELECTRIC DOUBLES VEHICLE ASSEMBLY PLANT CAPACITY

Changes to electric vehicle policies foreshadowed by the federal government have encouraged electric truck manufacturer SEA Electric to double the size of its local assembly facility for zero-emission trucks in Dandenong, Melbourne.

The company, which team its EV drive trains to OEM supplied truck chassis here and in the United States, will expand its present plant to cover 8,000m2 on a total site of 15,000m2, giving SEA Electric the capacity to produce eight trucks per day, or up to 2,080 units per annum.

SEA CEO Tony Fairweather said: “Since launching our new range last year, we have attracted incredible interest from a wide cross-section of leading companies and government bodies, who seek to improve their environmental sustainability, despite a lack of policy and incentives to fuel growth in the sector on these shores.

H2X REVEALS WARREGO HYDROGEN POWERED UTILITY

Australian hydrogen electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer H2X Global has released details and photographs of its long awaited Warrego hydrogen powered utility vehicle (pictured).

The Australian company is moving to achieve European compliance for the vehicle, to be followed by Australian compliance.

Based on the Ford Ranger utility, the utility is being converted to include the H2X powertrain developed for light vehicles featuring a Supercapacitor based Hybrid system at factories in Sale, Victoria and in Holland.

PRODUCTIVITY COMMISSION FIRES BLANKS IN REPORT ON BOOSTING INNOVATION

The latest report from the same mob whose policies brought you today’s fragile and narrowly based economy – the Productivity Commission – gives us more of the same faith in markets as suitable drivers of an economy that has so patently hobbled productivity growth.

The PC, and its ally the Treasury have had a focus on building on comparative advantages – not creating competitive advantage as with industry policy – meanwhile tinkering in the way markets work through a focus on things like skills, childcare and deregulation.

The Commission, in their new report – 5-year Productivity Inquiry: Innovation for the 98 percent – actually admits that its policies have abjectly failed.

Picture: Flinders University Vice-Chancellor Professor Colin Stirling, SA Deputy Premier Susan Close, BAE Systems Australia’s Sharon Wilson, and University of Strathclyde principal Professor Sir Jim McDonald