The best investments – new NSSN Board member Natasha Rawlings writes – are usually based around someone solving their own, or someone else’s problem. And this tech entrepreneur has met quite a few sensor founders who have a dogged determination to solve a wicked problem.

I have been deeply involved in sensor businesses of all tech flavours for about seven years now.

My role as an Investment Manager at Uniseed (an early-stage university ‘deep-tech’ investment fund) enabled me to see lots of terrific inventions to help humanity and the planet, and in some ways ‘see the future’ daily.

I suspect I had a lot of people’s dream job!

The role of early-stage investors in ‘raw’ technology means that often you dig deep into the possible customer problem these inventions hope to solve.

These inventions – especially sensors - give people superpowers they did not have before, to help solve the world’s most wicked problems.

It is important to point out, that often new discoveries are created just to be that.

They do not directly solve (at least right away) a personal or industry problem.

After all, that’s what university research is primarily about, to scratch humanity’s curiosity itch about how and why things work the way they do.

The easiest investments to make, and therefore businesses to form (or ‘commercialise’), is where an invention’s purpose has been rooted in directly solving someone’s problem.

(From left to right) Founder of Wildlife Drones, Dr Debbie Saunders; Natasha Rawlings; materials scientist and high tech mentor, Sylvia Tulloch.

In fact, the best investments – whatever the industry or technology – is usually based around someone mostly solving their own problem, or someone else’s that they have a close connection to.

It is one of the things that most investors look for when they invest: what is the unfair advantage or insight that the founder has and has solved it in a way that will change any industry forever?

I have had the privilege of working closely with quite a few sensor founders, or at least got to know their story very well.

All of them experienced a painful problem and didn’t give up until they had invented something to fix it.

Even harder still, they went about forming businesses to help solve the same problem for others.

It often takes a lot longer and much more money to commercialise an invention, than ‘make’ the invention in the first place.

For every founder, it is a long and tough journey with an unknown outcome.

And for most, what keeps them going is that dogged determination to solve that wicked problem.

So let me tell you some stories I have been lucky enough to witness.

Sarah McDonald, the founder of Baymatob, experienced a very difficult birth with her first child.

Determined that no other woman should ever have to experience something similar, she created a multimodal sensor hub called ‘Oli’ that helped work out how effective a woman’s contractions were working, or not, during labour with many other applications across pregnancy and labour.

This multimodal sensor will lead to better health outcomes and patient experiences for mothers and babies, as it gives hospital staff an unprecedented understanding of what is happening in women’s bodies during birth.

Baymatob was created from Sarah’s PhD work at the University of Sydney.

Lewis Collins came up with his sensor – SporeScout – when he found it hard and frustrating to use the current technology available to farmers to understand fungal infections.

The sensor is also based on Lewis’s PhD work at the University of Sydney.

SporeScout finds airborne diseases not visible with the human eye, and helps farmers identify fungal diseases earlier.

By doing this, SporeScout can help save up to 60% of crops affected by fungus (a lot of what we eat) and help farmers spray less or use softer chemicals with early fungal identification.

Dr Debbie Saunders created Wildlife Drones, as she found wildlife research usually impossible, or at least very difficult and dangerous, when finding tagged animals in the bush.

Her sensor allows wildlife researchers and consultants to find wild animals in minutes, rather than days.

This changes wildlife research forever at a time when biodiversity is becoming imperative for a healthy planet.

Finally, Forcite Helmets was created by Alfred Boyadgis as the capstone project of his Industrial Design degree at UNSW.

His smart helmet has a camera embedded, which is hard to do from a safety and weight perspective. Forcite met the world standard for this tech first.

Alfred created his Forcite helmet after he had a life-threatening accident, when a camera almost penetrated his skull during a motorcycle accident.

A camera of course can provide computer vision and one day this technology will provide the safety that us car drivers take for granted with tools like Advanced Driver Assistance Systems.

Thank you to these amazing founders who created sensors give us humans superpowers in sight, touch and sound and help to make the world a better place AND create a lot of amazing Aussie jobs and industries along the way.

I remain very excited about our future, not only as an Australian, but as a human who knows we need some superpowers to help solve some tough problems.

The sensors that make inventors superhuman and help solve wicked problems