Chief Scientist to open ARTSA Global Leaders Summit

Dr Alan Finkel, Chief Scientist of Australia, will open the ARTSA Global Leaders Summit conference in Melbourne on 8 May 2018.

The theme of the opening session is 'Australian Heavy Vehicle Innovation'. The session will consider the factors that promote local manufacturing in heavy road vehicle logistics.

Dr Finkel has previously spoken about the four factors that promote local innovation: leadership at the corporate level, development of the human capital, willingness to fund new ideas and effective regulation.

He will illustrate these key requirements to promote innovation in the heavy vehicle sector. Dr Finkel has previously praised Australia’s Performance-Based Standards (PBS) approach as a model that other industries could learn from.

National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR) Chief Engineer, Les Brusza, will then describe how PBS has been applied and what types of innovation are resulting. This session will explain have the PBS framework has allowed regulators to gain confidence that innovations can be assessed for road and infrastructure safety. The achievements are world leading.

The first session will conclude with ARTSA Chairman, Dr Peter Hart, who will quantify the scale of all forms of manufacturing and modification work in the Australian heavy vehicle sector.

This opening session has the important task of quantifying the scale of local manufacture in our industry sector and identifying the key success factors for continuing innovation.

(Image: Chief Scientist of Australia, Dr Alan Finkel.)