Whether it’s helping to develop ways to streamline new ideas or imagine new ideas themselves, my role impacts everything from project initiation to innovative ways of sourcing contributors, different means of contribution and innovative processes. How can we do things better?

I believe innovation starts from the core of us as people, for Standards Australia to compete as an innovative voice in this country, it has to start from the people. Our culture, our resilience and our language. What do we want to prove? What do we want to do? How do we want to do it? These are all big questions and luckily, we have the Innovation Incubator to help us answer them.

The Innovation Incubator is a big project that you’ve probably all heard of, we use it to trial new ways of writing standards, timeframes and holding committee meetings. Anything and everything to do with innovation for the standards development process is a project the Incubator team wants to be a part of.

Through the Incubator we have trialled many innovative projects to support and better different functions of Standards Australia; for example the agile working space was proposed and trialled by a committee to help fast track and ease difficulties through the drafting process of standards by providing one, all-encompassing online space to draft, comment and publish a standard. It’s proven to be a great way to develop standards in a timely and efficient manner, which we hope will be further adopted across other committees in the future.

As we move forward, I hope to see our innovation grow even more, it could be expanded to include some exciting and process-changing projects like machine readable standards and the use of artificial intelligence to support our committee members with content writing.  Within our incubator we want to ensure that we are leading an innovative and ever relevant standards ecosystem.

Brainstorming ideas can be a quick and fun job, however getting these ideas built into concrete processes and systems is a long and complicated process. Personally though, the payoff for committing so much effort is immeasurable – the changes and the updates I see from innovations in Standards Australia make a big difference to standards development and Australian Communities.