Some problems can be solved with maths and assumptions, others just need the right people having good conversations…I’m passionate about the second type.
I’m currently the Innovation Partner for Aurecon’s Queensland offices, collaborating with our internal team and our clients to build understanding, unearth innovations and support their growth. I help teams work collaboratively to ensure they have a deep understanding of their stakeholders, are solving the right problem, and that the full group are aligned to ensure that your decision making is informed and de-risked.
I’m fortunate to draw on my Engineering background, delivering and leading a range of technical and advisory projects, including several large sustaining capital portfolios. This combination allows me to blend a strong technical and process driven background with project delivery experience and the blue-sky thinking of design thinking. As an engineer, the framework enables me, and my team, to solve both analytical and intuitive challenges.
As Aurecon’s Innovation program has evolved, we’ve brought together our human centred and design thinking approach with futures research and digital innovation – and as Innovation Partner for Aurecon’s Queensland offices, I’m lucky enough to be right in the thick of it.
Aurecon’s innovation program takes a top down and bottom up approach to ensure that our efforts are aligned to your strategic objectives and the right market signals are given the right environment to grow and scale up.
Our design thinking frameworks allow us to use client, customer and community insights to create ideas and test solutions. It provides us a way to engage with and understand the end user or customer and typically pushes us further than we may get with traditional approaches. It complements our deep technical expertise and opens us up to consider how ‘old thinking’ is unlikely to help solve the new problems we are presented with.
By applying a Futures Research lens, we’re able to examine trends and signals of change to better understand the opportunities and challenges our changing landscape presents, how they will impact us, our clients, and the industries in which we operate.
As Innovation Partner I work with our clients to explore their problems - to understand what is, explore what if and what wows. I’m responsible for key market pursuits, managing our regional innovation portfolio and supporting our internal teams and clients as they build out their core, adjacent and transformational innovation initiatives.
As the Global Design to Innovate Lead for Aurecon’s Energy, Resources and Manufacturing (ERM) markets, I was responsible for embedding Aurecon’s Design to Innovate (D2i) framework across our internal team and applying the principals to explore our client’s wicked problems.
The D2i framework lets us use client, customer and community insights to explore and test problems, to de-risk projects and increase buy in from stakeholders by designing meaningful and collaborative ways to test options.
I began my career as a Mechanical Engineer in Aurecon’s Resources team, focused largely on bulk materials handling and sustaining capital projects. During this time I was responsible for a range of services including;
- Sustaining Capital portfolio management
- Sustaining Capital and brownfield improvement studies and design
- Engineering management
- Design of Bulk Materials Handling and Conveyor Systems
- Development of dynamic and static simulation models simulating various industrial applications
- Design and analysis of bulk materials handling terminals