Dr Mike Briers AO

Dr Mike Briers AO

Mike was named in the Knowledge Nation 100 as Australia’s chief evangelist for big data and the internet of things (IoT) and appointed Australia’s first Industry Professor of IoT at UTS. He is currently the CEO of the Knowledge Economy Institute, an IoT innovation hub, and leads the Food Agility Cooperative Research Centre to empower Australia’s food industry to grow its comparative advantage through service innovation. Mike is a co-founder and Director of the Internet of Things Alliance Australia.

Mike’s pioneering efforts in fintech and e-research led to the global success of SIRCA and the founding of big data company RoZetta, e-research service provider Intersect Australia, and co-founding of Capital Markets CRC and AgTech business, The Yield.

Dr Mike Briers Paper Crawford Fund Conference 2017

Dr Mike Briers Presentation

Taking the Hope and Fear out of Agricultural Service Innovation

Abstract

Agriculture lags other sectors in the development and uptake of digital services needed for safe and sustainable food production. Challenges to digital readiness include Internet connectivity in rural areas. Whilst connectivity solutions are emerging, two key enablers of digital service innovation are lacking and often overlooked. The first is the absence of reliable underpinning information systems calibrated for decision-making (knowledge infrastructure) to enable services to be scaled and repurposed for different use cases. Progress is being made in the development of such systems which will attract new investment and open many transformational opportunities across the food and agriculture ecosystem. The second relates to the maturity of contemporary lean start-up approaches to iterative co-design and market validation prevalent in the sector. These methods place the customer or service consumer at the centre of a co-creation process to ensure that value is delivered and ultimately adoption is maximised. This is particularly relevant for agriculture in both advanced economies and developing countries characterized by a highly complex and volatile decision making context. Designed and executed well, this approach to deliberate service innovation removes the hope and fear elements more commonly experienced.