Breakthrough Lab

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DFM or Design Factory Melbourne, is an early stage innovation lab that bridges the gap between education and industry.

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No matter what stage you are in your business or your business idea, we are there to help you move. Whatever your idea is, to take a concept, to make it concrete, to take a risk that you think may or may not float. We have a team that can help lift that idea to support you. So we do mitigate risk.

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We do extend your ideas to outcomes that you may not necessarily have thought about. And that's why ideation and prototyping and experimentation is a fundamental but very much overlooked area in any sort of ideation or business development. What makes DFM unique is the opportunity where they are linked with the startup ecosystem in a university environment. So those workings in terms of articulating what your market audience would look like or what a product or prototype would look like.

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Getting expert opinions within the university from researchers or industry experts is something that DFM helps support. If you are a business with a global product or you have ambitions to expand your market, the insights that you'll get not only from industry experts here at Swinburne, but from global experts within the design factory, global network will really give you an edge in terms of not only understanding your customers here, but in understanding the customers that you want to get tomorrow and the next month and the next year.

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Think of Design Factory Melbourne as a sandbox, and that sandbox enables businesses to bring their idea, bring their business problem, try something that they normally don't do in their everyday business, getting to play in a safe space and taking the risk out of your product development process. Companies need to innovate and find meaningful solutions to answer the business problem, but ultimately they also need to be prepared to adapt and change.

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How we can help organizations navigate that change. Not knowing what the business needs now, but what the business might need in 5 or 10 years time to really give organizations that unique perspective on where their organization could go and how they could innovate. That way, we can provide a bespoke solution with tools that are fit for purpose, and the end result of that is not only a solution that works for you and your customers, but you get that capability building along the way.

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As an entrepreneur and innovator, myself, I was really keen to engage with the team here. They really have that evidence based background on how they're going to look to solve your solutions. They're truly professional, really interested in making impactful outcomes for customers like ourselves. When we come to them to talk about problems that we're trying to solve and great communications in terms of able to relate to us.

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Squash was the next step I felt we should take as an organization. Whenever we provide any trainings for organizations, it's very interactive and it's very either sector or context specific. So ultimately what any participant would get is a very practical experience and very relevant experience to their role. I loved Design Factory's Design Thinking course. It's part of my business as a consultant.

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I work with a range of different teams, and I find those skills incredibly handy to be able to practically introduce new ways of thinking, get ideas out to teach people how to embed innovation and creative thinking into their everyday work. We first need to understand the capabilities so we work a lot unpacking what they want for the future and what they currently have.

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We also do a lot of market research to find out what's currently in the market. What can be improved. Of course, we use a lot of data analytics, and we help build a commercial strategy that is aligned with the client and strengths. And in our worship here where we are, we have a bunch of different tools that allow us to test ideas quickly.

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So we have a lot of rapid prototyping tools. We have to printers, basic cutters for programing, and of course, we have a bunch of different software that just allow us to test and play what different ideas could be and how they may look like, and to show that to our clients, because design is what allows us to really help visualize and communicate what we're saying, you can have confidence that they are backed up by research.

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You have real expertise, so it really can help you to walk away. I've seen you very confident with the outcome that you've received. The really creative thinkers, they're really passionate about what they do. They really work with me. I really feel like they are my partner. What we care about is making your idea come to reality. What's special about it is that the team in Design Factory in Melbourne have the requisite skills and long standing how to unpack, to iterate, to test and bring that into reality.