We are proud to be a part of the 2014 National Agricultural Fieldays, starting this week. As part of Fieldays Innovations, we are helping to judge the Innovation Awards as well as sponsoring the Locus Research Innovation Award.
We are also running the LAB within the Innovation Centre, which is also sponsored by Fieldays partner Vodafone, Soda Inc powering the Innovation Den, NZ Farmer, TruTest, DAL, and James & Wells.
The Locus Research Innovation Award will be awarded to an entrant in either the Grass Roots or LaunchNZ categories. It will be awarded to an entrant that could really benefit from our help and hopefully help them achieve their goals.
The winner receives 4 x 1-day sessions with 4 of our team members to tackle the things which will make a difference. It could be a brochure, brand, technical problem, IP, commercial or any aspect our integrated team can help with. This is over 120 hours dedicated to what they are working on.
Timothy Allan and Motovated Design & Analysis MD, Jonathan Prince will be contributing to the Judging on the 11th of June and we look forward to announcing the award later this week.
There are two parts to the LAB concept, firstly education about innovation, and secondly helping our rural innovators define new areas to work on.
Part of creating a successful, innovative product is to first identify a meaningful problem on farm. Our goal with the LAB is to survey visitors and help identify the most pressing problems farmers have and then publish these for innovators to look at for next year. The LAB will be open to the public from Wednesday the 11th to Saturday the 14th, 10am - 3pm, so come around to chat with the team and fill out our 'Top 5' problem survey and help our rural innovators deliver what matters for 2015.
From 8-10am and 3-5pm each day the LAB will be available for the entrants of the Innovation Awards to work with each other, and experts for guidance, mentoring, brainstorming on their projects and ideas.
We've been busy creating and building the LAB itself and have documented our process on Tumblr. We'll also be posting live from the Fieldays, so follow our feed to keep up with progress and actions throughout the event.
Check out our Tumblr feed here.
Hope to see you there!
