Recently, I was given the opportunity to work on a really impactful mental health project for the BlackDog Institute to redesign a treatment program for people with suicidal thoughts. Navigating both the constraints placed by the current (remote working) environment…
As 2020 unfurls, we are being reminded again and again of the complex and interconnected nature of our world. Of course, COVID-19 was just around the corner. And on top of the environmental disaster and the health crisis, societal tensions have come to the fore through the Black Lives Matter movement. The commentators are quick to rightfully remind us that none of these events are isolated, but rather are symptomatic of what our world has become. A world we have created.
Celebrating International Women’s Day this year was bittersweet. It’s wonderful to be part of an event that’s so widely adopted. It’s an occasion to talk up all the wonderful women we know and work with—and goodness me there are many—to raise awareness of how far we still have to go in workforce gender equality, and talk about how to get there. But it’s also a reminder that it’s 2020 and we still live in a world without equality, not just in gender.
Helping non-for-profit organisations innovate at hackathons, teaching primary school kids the basics of computer programming, encouraging kids in rural communities to study STEM, and sharing what they know at Meetups and community events – these are just some of the ways DiUS colleagues give back to our community.
I’d like to tell you about the most recent RHoK project that I’ve been involved with. It has been a very powerful and enriching experience and I’m so proud of the impact we’ve been able to make.
MARVEL aims to be a virtual laboratory for students, teachers and scientists to study and analyse real-life planetary data from Mars-orbiting satellites. Its goal is to create a platform for crowd science to progress Mars scientific discoveries as well as conducting STEM education research.
Our very first Hack Day in October 2013 was a huge success, a lot of fun and generated some great ideas. For our next one–we would focus on Creating Shared Value: hacks that benefit our community and DiUS at the same time.
Open innovation and mass collaboration are topics close to the heart of DiUS. While we strive to encourage curiosity, investigation and creativity within our company, we also believe in working together to give back to the communities in which we live.
Over two great nights in Melbourne and Sydney we’ll be presenting to audiences about Open Innovation, the idea of a more participatory, decentralised approach to innovation – and how it can be used to collaborate on a massive scale to make a massive impact.
For companies like DiUS that want to help society make substantive progress, Creating Shared Value (CSV) is a new way of thinking that goes beyond ‘giving back’ and ‘being responsible’.