A Queensland plant maintenance technology start-up has been named as Innovator of the Year in an Australian national Hot 30 listing of innovators in the mining, energy, space and defence industries.
GreaseBoss, formed in 2020 by mining engineers Peter Condoleon, Steve Barnett and Tim Hall, is the CORE Innovation Hub’s top Hot 30 innovator.
The company’s cloud-based analytical software tracks and traces the status of scanning tags in machinery grease points to give maintenance technicians a real-time view of plant and equipment lubrication levels. It is designed to alert users about overdue servicing.
Commodities major Glencore was among the initial adopters of the product.
CORE Innovation Hub, which has offices in Western Australia and South Australia, aims to facilitate collaboration between start-up and larger suppliers, resources companies and universities to address technical, safety and environmental operating challenges.
As well as the latest Top 30 list dominated by companies in Western Australia (15), Queensland (7) and South Australia (6), the innovation hub named five category award winners:
- Emerging Industry award: Greatcell Energy which aims to reduce the cost of solar power by using small, thin, solar cells produced with roll-to-roll technology.
- Sustainability award: Wildfire Energy for its efforts to eliminate landfill by turning residual wastes into renewable electricity and hydrogen at scale.
- Women-led Innovation award: Cheeditha Energy which decarbonises businesses by increasing equipment efficiency, reducing non-renewable energy consumption.
- Western Australian Innovation award: Diptek for its DipStick field device which integrates modern sensors such as LiDAR, GPS, rotary encoding and imaging sensors to collect drilling hole data for future analysis.
- South Australian Innovation award: 1414 Degrees for its SiBox thermal energy storage technology.
CORE national innovation hub manager Renee Hakendorf said winners had used innovation to “solve real-world problems, created new technologies, scaled up when needed, improved industry capabilities and reached global markets”.
“Many of these businesses have started small and are still growing, however, they’ve been able to contribute to significant advancements in their field on a national and international scale,” she said.
