 Chief Innovation Delivery Officer from Frontier OSI to present an exciting topic to the group today and and Phil welcome and we actually, I guess, in terms of the history, Phil has extended knowledge of the Australian spatial sector, harking from his days back to the CRC spatial information involvement and triple SI. But Phil is the Chief Innovation Delivery Officer Frontier OSI as I mentioned. And today he's going to present on the topic of communicating the value of space and spatial technologies. And if you'd like to find out more about Phil, he has a buyer in the abstract link which we posted there. And over to you Phil. Thanks. I'll just share the screen. Let me know if that's working. Oh, good. Thanks Phil. Wonderful. So yeah, thanks for that introduction. Look, I know everyone that's listening here today is doing really important work. And today I hope to help everyone maybe slightly improve how they can communicate the impact of that work. I guess my hints up on screen and it generally involves talking a bit less about science and technology, but we'll cover more on that later. So for those of you who don't know Frontier OSI, we're an applied research and innovation organisation with a history in the cooperative research centre programme. We're a not-for-profit social enterprise who works with our government, private and university partners to bring innovative ideas through to real-world productions services, ultimately aiming to grow the size and impact of the space and spatial industries in Australia and New Zealand. So as Chief Innovation and Delivery Officer, I oversee the delivery of all of our project portfolio. I also help our partners better define their problems so that we can create clear paths to solving them. So as I'm sure many of you are aware, it's a really exciting time to be working in space and spatial technologies in Australia. Well over a billion dollars has been invested at a federal level alone in space and spatial initiatives in the past three years. About half of that just in last week's budget. And this is a really large underestimate. It only includes large-scale, very obviously, space or spatial initiatives. And it doesn't include the massive investments that are happening at the state and local government level, missing out on major improvements to things like foundational data, the growing use of digital twins, and innovative new satellite projects like South Australia's SA-SAT-1. So as I guess you may be asking as a geospatial capabilities community why I'm also talking about space so much. So I guess space is being increasingly connected to spatial technology. And while the two sectors have many areas where they don't overlap, certainly when space technology is pointed inwards at Earth instead of outwards to space, the technology almost always gets used as part of a solution with spatial technology to drive impact to any users. Recognizing the critical links between these two sectors, a new growth roadmap is currently under development under a cross-sector working group. This presentation is not about that initiative, but the 2030 Space and Spatial website will soon publish its first white paper. And I'd encourage you all to have a look at that as it includes some consultation. So with so much investment and technology happening at the moment, who's it all for? So I guess to try and dig into that a little bit, I had a bit of a look at the mission statements or descriptions of a few of the major space and spatial initiatives working around at the moment. So if we have a look at something like positioning Australia, looking at the large-scale positioning augmentation. It's a program building national spatial positioning capability. That's the technology that all Australians can access their users that will meet the growing needs across a lot of industries. And I guess that's where impact will happen. Digital Earth Australia, our major satellite imagery data infrastructure. Decision-ready satellite data and products and services technology to be used by Australian governments, business and individuals, users to make more informed decisions. That's about impact. Some of you may, in fact, just recently, have heard of the SmartSat CRC. That's looking to a translational research which creates game-changing technologies. Generating know-how, which I guess is the impact to make industries more competitive. Impact, future-proofing jobs for Australians, users. It goes over a few of our other ones as well. The space agency, similar, looking at technology, impact, and Australians. Last week, the Digital Atlas of Australia was announced. Also looking at a platform or technology. Looking at place-based policy, planning, investments and decision-making is our impact. And looking at it for all Australians as our users. Moving away from the federal level, taking something like the New South Wales digital twin. It's a platform or technology that has benefits at the national, state and local levels for industry and the community, looking at impact and the users. So we can, I guess, all these visions and missions really boil down to the following. An investment in new technology will deliver broad impacts across the economy to lots of sectors, businesses, government, and citizens. And while this is undoubtedly true, it doesn't necessarily help the people that are creating that technology prioritize that investment, build it for a purpose. And as we've seen many times, just because we build something doesn't mean that people will come and use it. And it certainly means that in most cases, there's a large unrealized gap between the potential and actual benefits being delivered by this technology. So how do we better design and build this technology to make sure that we maximize the impact that it has across Australia and potentially more broadly globally? Well, we talk to them. This, of course, raises a couple more questions. What kinds of people do we talk to? And how do we get useful information out of them that can help inform and prioritize our investments? So to answer this, I'd like to talk about a couple of frameworks. One is about understanding the value chain, particularly as it applies to space and spatial information. And the other is talking about push and pull marketing strategies. So the data supply chain or value chain is the way that we understand how data makes its way from a custodian who produces the data and distributes it through a supply chain through other organizations where they may take and enrich the data and eventually deliver it to an end user who can use the products and services to make a decision. And after that decision, hopefully they take some action and that action is really where real benefit is realized. At each step along this chain, the original data is either improved itself or enriched by combining it with other data sources. And the end user who is making this decision may have little or no understanding that they're using space or spatial information at all. Nor should they need to. So looking at some, I guess, broad examples of who typical players may be sitting along that value chain. In the data provider side, it's generally government organizations or large scale private companies. There may be other parts of government or a range of, you know, spatial technology organizations that then develop some value added services on top of that. That data may make its way in to be incorporated with other business data and some visualization platforms through some application developers. And then it'll see its way out to an end user. This is obviously broadly simplified and there'll be many cases where either the chain is longer or shorter than this. But for the purposes of what we're going through today, it's hopefully useful. I guess to make, to further look at this as a more concrete example, we may have something like Digital Earth Australia, create some analysis ready satellite data. A spatial company like NGIS may enrich that by creating a fractional ground cover product, which they'll feed into an application developer through the private company Decipher, who might integrate this with some IoT sensor data coming from the field and some production data coming from their mines. And that will eventually get served to the mining company that may be able to take some action around proactive management of a tailings dam or looking at the impact that groundwater extraction might be having on something like vegetation. So all of this describes how data and products flow, but it doesn't show how communication and information, particularly information about demand at the user end flows between the organizations. So in all our visions earlier, the data providers aim to help end users make better decisions to ensure that our new data and technology or our existing ones for that matter deliver maximum benefit to the end users. It's clear that the information about value problems, potential users and decision making drivers needs to flow up and down that value chain freely. This will ensure that all the relevant insights that a major beneficiary or user of space or spatial technology can have, make sure that they have the products and services they need. And also, importantly, the education and information content made available so that they can make a decision and easily use it. While this may sound logical, unfortunately, this hasn't been standard. Communication is often just between the first two links of that value chain. And in fact, this was highlighted a few years ago when we did some work on the 2026 agenda that the major growth strategy for the spatial industry five years ago. Where the two major barriers that were identified by the industry, inhibiting its potential growth and impact, we're talking to ourselves too much and an inability to communicate value. Those two things are obviously very related. So when the information flows only between the two next stages of a value chain, it relies on messages about demand needs and opportunities to pass all the way from the end user through the whole value chain back to the data providers. And technology creators and vice versa. This method often leads to organizations along the chain, modifying the flow of information in a way that makes it optimized for their organization, rather than from the for the end consumer. That might lead to a product that is not optimized for the needs of the market, which then impacts how many people are likely to use it. Most often this leads to the creation of a product or service at one end. And these products then get pushed along the value chain all the way until they find an end user that may be able to use it. In simple terms, this relies on people creating a product and then telling a group of potential users, hey, I have this thing and you guys should use it. So because the communication happens often just between the first couple of stages of this value chain that often results in a service or product that's easy for a spatial company or an app developer to integrate. But doesn't necessarily create a product which is optimized to meet the use the needs of a large end user market. And this is where the gap is created between potential and actual benefit of technology. So the major impact of this is that when there is a new major technology platform sitting on the left, if it only talks to the first organization along the value chain, they're unlikely to have a substantial impact on the decisions made by the end users. And certainly won't be able to influence the size of the user base that could be using that technology. So what's the alternative? Well, obviously to talk to the end users directly. This allows the data provider or technology creator to make products and services that are optimized to meet the needs of a particularly the unmet needs at the moment of a market, a whole market, not just the part that's already using it. This increases the overall size of the potential user market, but more importantly, makes it more likely that a consumer will successfully solve their problem using that product as it has been created for them. This importantly means that they will then recommend this product or solution to their immediate network, creating a pull factor where users begin to seek the product saying hey I think you guys have this and I use it. This is known as a pull strategy. And so while I've presented these push and pull strategies as quite distinct, they shouldn't be viewed as an either or choice. They're both important. In order to create to increase the benefits of technology investment, a pull strategy is required in order to deliver a user driven approach that maximizes potential impact and the size of the potential user market. The push approach is required to improve the existing value chain and ensure that everyone along it has the products and services that are ready for new users. And connecting these frameworks to what I talked about earlier around industry engagement. Industry engagement when we do it needs to engage both with the value chain and the potential end users to create information to help implement both pull and push strategies within the organizations that are creating major new data sets. Or major new technology. So you might ask what main outcomes of an industry engagement exercise are and why they're useful. So fundamentally, they provide two things, an understanding of potential users of technology and the problems that those users are currently experiencing. These outcomes are fundamental to making sure that the technology you have is considered in the options that a user looks for when they're saying, how can I solve my problem. This is especially important when trying to grow the size and impact of technology across many markets. A farmer who's looking to manage topsoil runoff isn't going to search for fractional ground cover satellite imagery. They're going to search for managing topsoil runoff. And if our information about a spatial technology isn't visible to them, it's unlikely to be considered as one of the options for solving their problem. An urban planner seeking to understand the impacts that various planning designs may have on energy demand isn't going to be searching is going to be searching for energy demand forecasting and management, not for digital twins. So this leads to a large kind of flow on of impacts that if we don't understand the problems, we don't see the benefits in the user. So if we don't understand the end user's problems, we can't identify and explain how we are relevant to solving that problem. If we're not visible when people are searching for ways to solve that problem, we can't be considered an option for solving that problem. If we don't understand how people are then evaluating the differences between options, what's important to them when they're choosing a solution. We can't change our products and services and the information that's there about them to make the decision to choose some kind of spatial technology as part of that to make that choice easy. And if we don't know how people would like to use our solutions, we can't tailor the products and services to their needs so that they can be easily integrated with their existing system. And through all that, if they do end up using our products, but they don't advocate for us because it hasn't been easy enough or customized enough for them, then we haven't created the market pool that makes it much more likely that we'll grow the user base and overall impact of our investment. So the key outcome from any industry engagement is hopefully to enable technically minded people to communicate in the language of the problems that they're solving rather than communicate about the complexities of the technology that they've created. And this is what leads to sustained and impactful growth in the use of new technology. So the good news is that many of those major space and spatial investments that I talked about earlier are taking this approach. Many of them working through one set frontier of science. I'd like to talk about a couple of examples of what those major infrastructure investments are and what some example insights that they are getting out of industry engagement might look like. So I'll start with one of our major investments. That's one of the largest out there that's probably over $250 million invested in the positioning Australia program which is Australia, which is looking to create a new national positioning capability to enable 10 centimeter accurate satellite positioning anywhere across the whole continent of Australia as well as our maritime areas and coverage much more than that as well. And a three centimeter accurate positioning accuracy in areas with mobile internet. And while this is fantastic, I guess the question comes, you know, so what and what's the impact going to be and who uses it. So positioning is this positioning Australia program are undertaking work with ourselves at frontier side as well as curtain uni and positioning insights to understand both the value chain needs and the end user benefits here. Engagement with the space that with the spatial and technology companies focuses on helping companies easily integrate the new products and services coming out of positioning Australia. But of course the engagement with the users is what will help grow the overall impact of the technology. And these engagements occurring over a really wide range of industries, including consumer markets, mining, agriculture, marine construction and aviation. And this helps lead to critical insights which affect the fundamental design of the infrastructure itself. So for example, in a in aviation, a core problem that we've found is that for regional airports, they're unable to leverage the safety benefits that assisted piloting navigation systems have in that are available for the metro airports. And that's because in order to do that, a really significant investment in expensive ground infrastructure is required. So positioning augmentation like what is available through positioning Australia can help this. However, a critical insight is that to receive the safety of life certification needed for this to be used in planes, accuracy is less important than signal integrity. And this means that they're not fussed if the accuracy is three centimetres or 50 centimetres. What they do care about is having an extremely highly reliable signal to ensure that the navigation systems are safe to use. So moving on to a different example of this, I mentioned the SmartSat CRC earlier. This CRC was founded in 2019 with the mission to build Australia's space industry in close collaboration with the space agency and the Department of Defense, as well as a whole raft of private companies and universities. It represents an investment of around about $250 million, part of this from government, but the largest investments here coming from industry and universities as well. The CRC is looking to create major new space technology in the areas of advanced communication, artificial intelligence and analytics, and earth observations from space. So in order to truly respond to the needs of the nation, the investments in these areas are being guided by a range of end user advisory boards and key application areas. The ones that are established so far are focused on agriculture, mining and defence. But also looking more broadly at a project that we're leading for them called Know the Market to Grow the Market. So this project also involves CSIRO, looking particularly at their Apple Watch program, and has a focus on the mining, agriculture and water users across Australia. The engagement is looking for critical unmet needs where the integration of space-based technology can help lead to a step change in how an Australian industry functions. For example, in that engagement we identified a challenge in the aquaculture market where Australia has a large potential to support a thriving industry that supports shellfish. For example, the small but growing rock oyster industry in Australia. But the major problem here is that it's really expensive to find appropriate sites, as they're often very remote. And even more expensive to then monitor things like salinity and water quality during the growing and harvesting of those shellfish in order to meet food safety standards. So things like remote internet of things and earth observations maybe combined here to both find, but then monitor those sites to help significantly grow that industry. And that's the focus of a recent investment from SmartSat CSIRO in a project called Oysterqual. This is happening more broadly as well, so stepping out of Australia for a minute. We're also helping Digital Earth Africa, which is a $20 million investment from the Helmsley Trust in the USA and the Australian government to help improve the lives of people across the African continent by translating earth observations into insights. Industry engagement here has a bit of a different flavour as it's not necessarily focused on market sectors like a mining company. It's really focused on continental problems such as food security or land degradation. And while the work here is still in early days, example insights here are really around helping to better understand crop and water trend data as an example, looking at optimizing plant productivity, plant choice and looking at harvesting time as examples. And the World Economic Forum has done a really great piece of work that they released in January on Digital Earth Africa that showed that even at a very conservative level, there's $2.3 billion US in benefits that can be realised each year through the better utilisation of earth observation data. But obviously in order to do that, we need that really fundamental understanding of the problems that are experienced, which will be very different from the problems experienced here. And finally, I'd like to talk about Digital Earth Australia. So Digital Earth Australia represents an Australian government investment in GSI Australia to unlock the value of continent-wide satellite imagery here for Australian businesses, researchers and government. It's important to note that Digital Earth Australia isn't just a technical infrastructure for satellite data. It's a whole programme of work that covers everything from negotiating the regular and speedy access to satellite data from European and American space agencies, calibrating, validating and correcting that imagery so that it's in an analysis-ready data format, providing a range of continent-wide data products relating to things like land use, water and our coasts, hosting the data on commercial cloud environments, and then engagement and education activities out to the ultimate end beneficiaries of satellite data in a range of Australian industries. I'll spend the rest of this presentation talking about some of the outcomes from our industry engagement for the DEA programme, as this is the engagement with the most publicly accessible outcome so far. So four of the reports that we've produced so far are on screen, and we'll have several more coming. So these are all available at the moment on the Frontier SI website, but they will also be on the Geoscience Australia website. Soon they're just in the process of updating those websites. But having a look at what's in a report like this that is useful to people looking at helping to prioritise their technology investment, the reports feature information that we think technology providers need to have before considering starting work or expanding work within the sector that's coming, such as finance or agriculture. The insights contained within it are for Digital Earth Australia, but they're by no means focused on Earth observation. And the business problems outlined at the end of the report are written in the language of the end users and contain no technical jargon at all. The reports also outline significant user profiles that we feel are critical parts of that digital value chain, most of whom will be involved in deploying or using technology in some way. And this is where the language and communication tools really start to show within these reports as they provide not just the success measures and profile information of these users, but also critical examples of language which can either help or hinder the establishment of relationships within each user or that sector. The final substantial elements of the report is the inclusion of a range of problems that users want to have sold in their operations written in the language of these users. For the agriculture report, for example, there are about 27 or so statements, I think, and these have been grouped into three broad categories. Those problems that affect decision making today, those that are about managing risks, and those that relate to planning and managing the farming operations of the future. And these problem statements are coupled with additional context to help outline the business or Earth observation specific opportunity to make the problems easier to understand. Over the rest of the year, we'll be releasing four more industry engagement reports starting next week with the release of a report around the mining and met sector, met being the mining equipment and technology services sector. So that's really the support sector for the mining industry, which is roughly as large in economic terms as the mining sector itself. So to give an idea of what some of the insights might be coming out of these kind of reports. From the mining side, a mining company during the planning and design phase of a new mine might ask what regulations are relevant and what information to regulators need to see to give approval. And this is a great example of a question which is inherently based on location as the answer to that varies so much depending on where you are in Australia, but mentions no technology at all. Another example might be, can I avoid sending a person into a risky location? Now answering that is something that is that requires obviously a lot of complexity. But understanding how to communicate what you do to say how what is this technology that you've made? Oh, it's a technology that I've made that can help avoiding someone into sending someone into a risky location is a much better way for a mining company to understand what you've done than to talk about remote IOT and satellite data, for example. So our work in the finance and insurance sector is certainly less developed than mining just because these things happen in sequence. We expect the report for that one to come out early in the financial year. But so far, we've been really impressed by the engagement showed by organizations within finance and insurance so far. We think particularly finance is often seen as an area with little opportunity for space and spatial technology, but this couldn't be further from the truth. Early examples of insights coming out of here, including include the focus say on finding bank assets that might be suitable to bundle and sell as green bonds. Or the ability to improve and speed up the process to on board a new customer by automatically understanding much more about their property features and value. All the really significant and growing importance of understanding climate risk both to their customers and their assets. So there are obviously many more examples of great problems that need to be solved that are defined within these reports. And we look forward to sharing them all with you over the rest of 2021. So I hope that through this presentation of outline why deep industry engagement with the ultimate end users of major technology investments is the best way both to develop the platforms themselves or new data products, but also to create effective communication pathways to ensure that adoption and impact occurs with each of these new technologies. And I guess I'd like to leave you just with a simple thought which hopefully captures all this in one slide, which is that if we don't understand the problem, then we can't we cannot be part of the solution. So thanks Michael back to you.