Today's guest is David Burt Executive Manager of the CSIRO ON Accelerator, Australia’s largest researcher accelerator ON is Australia's national science and technology accelerator program serving Australia’s 43 Universities, the CSIRO, and other publicly funded research institutes.

David is also on the NSW Committee for Economic Development (CEDA), is a Director at the not for profit environmental organisation Planet Ark and hosts the Good Starts podcast that explores how science is translated into new technology and products.

All of the partners at Main Sequence Ventures were involved in setting up the first few intakes of the ON program and we work pretty closely with the ON team with helping recruit and select researchers and some of the workshops, in the program seems to be going from strength to strength

Give us some background about CSIRO and ON

• Tell us why the ON Program was established and the history
• How many researchers you have helped since the program was established?
• How was the program established? Government funding?
• What are the main programs you run?
• So there are dozens of accelerators out in the Australian ecosystem, what makes the ON program different?
• Why is it important to draw participants from the entire research sector?
• Getting research out of the lab: commercialisation through industry collaboration and launching new businesses 
• Creating new industries, helping world-class research actually build a product and launch to the outside world

What has the ON Program achieved?

• Taken over 2000 researchers through industry engagement training
• New companies 51
• 13 companies raised $36m 
• Approximately 220 jobs created
• 270 mentors have helped, its probably the biggest mentor program in Australia

What are the top / most interesting research projects?

• Emescent - 25 jobs - crazy
• Silentium Defence - 15+ new jobs all funded via revenue
• PainCheck $200m+ market cap on the ASX; $12m 20+ jobs
• RapidAIM - magic founding team with world-leading technology

What are the common mistakes you see researchers make when they first join the program?

What is the main takeaway from the ON program if Im a researcher, why is that important?

What's the future for the ON program?

The original Federal Government Budget runs out in May next year and needs to be extended to allow the mission to continue. We will never get the chance again to build a pan Australian researcher program like the ON program.