By CASEY NEILL
“THE battle for manufacturing is as much a battle for talented people as anything else.”
This was the key message from guest speaker Professor Geoff Brooks at the Greater Dandenong Chamber of Commerce Premier Regional Business Awards breakfast at Sandown Greyhounds on 29 July.
He said many talented students eyed medicine or law studies.
“We need to convince them to follow this path,” he said.
Prof Brooks co-ordinates and develops manufacturing-related research and education across Swinburne University of Technology and is a metallurgy expert.
He spoke about the future directions of manufacturing.
Prof Brooks graduated as an engineer in 1983 and “got the research bug” a few years later.
He drove to Melbourne University and approached the engineering faculty about a PhD.
They asked what he knew about metallurgy and he was soon on his way to visit John Floyd in Kitchen Road, Dandenong.
“The technology developed in Kitchen Road, Dandenong, is used in smelting around the world,” he said.
“John Floyd had an enormous impact on my career.”
Prof Brooks listed ways to turn around Australian manufacturing, including a shift to higher-value products and services, adapting existing strengths to new circumstances and linking manufacturing to innovation.
He said innovation was about making the most of new materials and technology, business models and approaches, and novel designs and products.
Prof Brooks said the digitisation of design had enabled testing in virtual environments, speeding up the prototyping process, and rapid sharing that removed borders.
“I don’t think we’ve fully recognised the potential of it,” he said.
He said technology also made finding specialised skills and new ideas easier than ever before.
“That’s a huge benefit of the world we’re living in at the moment,” he said.
Prof Brooks urged guests to take inspiration from the late Steve Jobs’s efforts at Apple.
“Make the consumer experience the heart of how you develop a product,” he said.
Vacuum developer James Dyson set out to remove the word hoovering from the world’s vocabulary, vowing to make a better product.
Prof Brooks said this was an example of determination to follow through on a clever idea.
He also paraphrased 2012 Young Australian of the Year Marita Cheng who said the country needed to encourage children to become makers, not just consumers.
“You’re a city of makers and you should be very, very proud of that,” he said.
