When defence industry meets university expertise, the result is speed to capability
When Chaos1 launched their inaugural October Sky event in October 2023, it was the culmination of a whirlwind four months that saw the innovation and technology company scale up at unprecedented speed.
Over two weeks, 24 companies, three universities and government and defence organisations from Australia, the UK, the US and Ukraine, came together at Chaos1’s XLAB facility at UTS Tech Lab to explore and translate new technology ideas into tangible defence capabilities.
October Sky was a major collective achievement led by Chaos1 that leveraged the ongoing partnership with UTS to drive innovation — and a key enabler was SME@UTS
A pathway to rapid growth
SME@UTS is a concierge-style service that connects SMEs to university expertise, facilities and resources to help them scale and grow.
“SME@UTS was an absolute advocate of what we were trying to achieve. They helped us gain a level of access within the university and helped us promote the type of problems we were looking to solve, which was the starting point for our UTS journey. Engaging with them has definitely helped accelerate our growth over the last 12 months,” says Chaos1 Founder & CEO Benny Johanson.
Benny Johanson, Founder & CEO providing the October Sky situation brief in Chaos1’s XLAB
Benny and his co-founder Brad Pettit first crossed paths with SME@UTS in October 2022, and soon after toured UTS Tech Lab, a multidisciplinary research facility that supports innovative university-industry partnerships in engineering and IT.
At the time, Benny and Brad identified a natural synergy between their business goals and Tech Lab’s commitment to highly applied research and defence industry. The SME@UTS team was the catalyst for Chaos1 finding a permanent home within the facility.
“There was an immediate orientation towards defence technology companies, with a number already on site. The maturity of Tech Lab itself in understanding the defence tech space and being able to facilitate industry access to the right tools, technologies and people has been a fantastic experience,” says Benny.
Leveraging the value of UTS expertise
Within a few months, Chaos1 had expanded from their original space to open XLAB, an experimentation space in which industry, academia and defence end users can come together to explore and iterate new ideas.
In XLAB, the team started building an intelligent decision-making platform called EURECAx. They had a theoretical design framework in place; next, they needed to digitise it and build in the AI functionality that would bring it to life.
With further support from the SME@UTS team, Chaos1 was accepted into the student-led Software Development Studio (SDS), a UTS program that matches senior IT students with companies seeking high-level, low-cost software development expertise.
“The Software Development Studio was an important one for us, because what it really did was unlock our development pathway", Benny says.
“The problem we pitched to the students was how do we build an AI-enabled decision support tool in the context of solving capability problems for defence?
What the students achieved in response to the brief has allowed us to accelerate our development timeline by almost 18 months,” Benny says.
After the success of the SDS program, Chaos1 continued to develop EURECAx via the Green Gate Consulting program, which brings together the student-led UTS Optik Engineering Consultancy and the University of Sydney’s Jacaranda Flame internship initiative.
Based on the quality of these outputs, Chaos1 has since hired two of the UTS Optik interns and has plans to hire more in future.
A multi-faceted approach to investing in innovation
It was the launch of October Sky that really put Chaos1 on the map. The event, which received significant support from UTS, provided a forum for knowledge and technology exchange between industry, academia and defence and showcased the power of building trust-based networks to fuel innovation.
“Tech Lab facilitated our ability to deliver October Sky by providing the space for it to occur, which was XLAB. We wouldn’t have been in a position to deliver the event at that size and scale without investment from the university,” says Brad Pettit, Co-Founder and COO.
Brad Pettit, Co-Founder & COO providing an October Sky Industry Showcase Briefing in the Chaos1 XLAB
Currently, the Chaos1 team are planning the second October Sky initiative, which is due to take place from 1 -3 October this year. This second iteration is set to be bigger and better: it will include a focus on emerging technology wargaming, a disruptive critical and emerging technologies symposium and an integrated capabilities demonstration alongside an industry showcase.
Beyond Tech Lab, Chaos1 has developed the Innovation Execution Leadership (IXL) short-award course in partnership with the UTS Enterprise Learning team, and they’re also exploring future partnership opportunities with the UTS TD School, a global leader in transdisciplinary innovation.
Collectively, Chaos1’s experiences are a stellar example of how SMEs can innovate and scale quickly with the right connections.
“Universities are gateways to almost limitless expertise, facilities and programs, many of which have significant potential to lower the barriers that SMEs face to investing in innovation and R&D .
However, the size and complexity of universities mean that many SMEs will struggle to access the right university partners because they don’t understand the university ecosystem.
From my first meeting with Brad and Benny I saw their potential for success and quickly set about connecting them to the right people to leverage the best of what UTS has to offer.
I encourage other SMEs to reach out and explore how SME@UTS can assist,” says Annette Dockerty, Program Lead, SME Engagement