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ONE-ON-ONE
Ian Christensen is the Managing Director of iMOVE Australia. He spoke to William Poole. AMT: What is iMOVE Australia? How long have you been in operation and what are the organisation’s objectives?
AMT: Tell us how you got involved with iMOVE and your professional background before that.
Ian Christensen: iMOVE Australia is Australia’s national centre for R&D in transport and mobility. We run the iMOVE Cooperative Research Centre (iMOVECRC), which is funded through the Federal Government’s CRC program. It was set up in 2017 to tackle major challenges and harness opportunities in areas such as congestion, supply chain optimisation, journey planning, and a whole range of diverse transport-related tasks, all of which could benefit from the evolving tech. The CRC Program approach is an interesting way of doing this; it has a strong track record of delivery over many years by strenghthening connections between research and business and harnessing national research capability to business challenges.
IIC: After doing chemistry and maths at uni, I spent 30 years or so in the manufacturing sector, largely in the process industries, making polymers, paper, sealant, masterbatch, and ultimately pigments, in a stint overseas in Switzerland. In all those manufacturing spaces, I was always heavily involved in product and process improvement, so when I came back from Switzerland, I sought to get work in the technology development space and ended up in the first of three CRCs that I’ve been involved in.
As iMOVE operates nationally we are in the fortunate position of working with many different partners in government, industry and academia. Most of Australia’s state government transport departments are conducting some form of research through the centre, as is the Federal Department of Infrastructure. AMT: Can you give some examples of the projects you’re working on? IC: With over 60 projects in the project portfolio, we cover a very broad range of areas. I’ll give you a few illustrative examples. We conducted a study for the Department of Infrastructure looking at all the sources of freight data in the nation, and the need for freight data that exists in both the transport sector and industry more broadly. We combined the two to determine what Australia should do next to improve visibility over freight information for the transport and adjacent sectors. The Department of Infrastructure subsequently used this report to secure funding from Treasury to establish a freight data hub for the nation. In a different space, but with a common theme of how we use data to optimise transport, is our exploration of Mobility as a Service (MaaS).The big idea of MaaS is to bundle different transport or mobility options together providing a very user-friendly interface for booking and paying for transport in an integrated manner. A project we are doing in Sydney with IAG and the University of Sydney is looking at how customers would pay some sort of monthly subscription which gives them access to a range of mobility services suited to them. This research will help us understand the appetite for MaaS offerings and how we can best respond to diverse community needs. The approach to passenger transport is now becoming increasingly person-centric. Technology now presents an opportunity to determine options based on very specific criteria such as whether you want the cheapest option, or prefer to sit down, or you want wifi access for the duration of the journey because you want to work, and so on. We’re also actively involved in the connected and automated vehicle space, looking to see how Australia could generate benefits, particularly safety benefits, from early adoption of vehicle connectivity and vehicle automation. The most high-profile of these activities is the connected vehicle trial taking place in Ipswich, Queensland. This ambitious trial will determine the impact of vehicle connectivity in a range of scenarios through capturing data on vehicles from the local community that have been retrofitted with the relevant technology.
AMT DEC/JAN 2021
The first one was the Molecular Plant Breeding CRC, a little bit away from manufacturing, but nonetheless an area of quite dramatic development. Then the second was the Automotive CRC, which was focused heavily on improving vehicle manufacturing and improving supply chains to manufacturers, as well as looking at alternative energy sources for vehicles. Finally, based on the automotive experience, we thought about how we could take what we had learned at AutoCRC and use it in the wider context of transport and mobility. So we set up iMOVE as a CRC to focus on further opportunities to improve the movement of people and goods. I see the common thread in all of this experience as the desire to keep pushing boundaries to make things better in our technologically advanced world. Transport of course touches all of us every day in some shape or form, so the opportunities are huge and it is an immensely satisfying area in which to work. AMT: So you were with the AutoCRC during that period when the last three car manufacturers in Australia closed down? IC: Yes. It was a sad day. The AutoCRC operated from 2005 to 2017, so that spanned the period when the support was withdrawn, when the decisions to leave were taken, and when Ford, Toyota and Holden actually wound themselves up. AMT: Looking back on that time, it was obviously a traumatic period for Australian manufacturing, but it also prompted a lot of reflection on the future opportunities both in manufacturing and in mobility and transport. IC: Yes. It was indeed traumatic, that’s absolutely the word for it. For me, I had been through a smaller version of that earlier, in late 1980s, early 1990s, when effectively the same thing happened to the chemical industry. Most process manufacturing left and went offshore at that time, and that too caused a lot of dislocation. But the wind-up of automotive had an even more dramatic impact on Australia’s manufacturing sector. And it really challenges us all to think what’s the role for manufacturing that suits the Australian context? What’s the path of the manufacturing industry and how can we configure our strengths into an economically viable industry? I think the answer to that is agility. The thing that Australian industry has developed over many years is an ability to develop new stuff, to put it into production quickly, and to cope with rapid product changes within a production process. Whether that’s changing colours or changing grades or changing models, Australian industry is adept at facilitating change processes. I think that’s ultimately the characteristic that will distinguish Australian manufacturing in the global sector. We might never be the global-scale, long-run manufacturing hub you see in Europe and North America and China, but we can compete very effectively in the innovative, shortrun agile space.
