Swinburne U opens its new Innovation Precinct today, in a former fire-station, where DVC R Alexksandar Subic says the university will keep cooking with its “secret sauce” – researchers having, “freedom – the licence – to step back from their habitual way of viewing concepts and problems.”

“Breakthrough ideas rely on a diversity of perspectives. They rely on inclusion and diversity. We have the best chance of coming up with great new ideas when we mix diverse approaches, fields, cultures and backgrounds – something we have always known instinctively here at Swinburne,” he says.

Professor Subic will point to projects and applaud alliances that are already producing products and services from Swinburne. But his main message is less about what is occurring now than what Swinburne’s sauce of “diverse and inclusive teams cutting across functions and identity,” can accomplish.

“ One cannot inject an ability to innovate or be creative. You can however provide the right environment – a favourable ecosystem, an enabler of ideas and capabilities, a place where ideas will turn into global products and services.”