Brief

SW/TCH Festival was a vision born from a shared desire to disrupt the status quo and foster a culture of innovation across industries.

The aim of SW/TCH was to deliver a high-quality value proposition to corporates, entrepreneurs, graduates, and students. And help to raise vital funds for innovative brain cancer clinical trials which will contribute towards achieving the Foundation’s mission to increase the 5-year survival rate to 50 per cent by 2023.

The Cure Brain Cancer Foundation engaged Blue Seed to bring to life one of its core strategies – which is to address the rapid rate of change and disruption occurring both domestically and globally across a cross-section of industries from ‘not for profit’, corporate, educational institutions, startups to government

Blue Seed worked closely with the SW/TCH Founders at a strategic and operational level. We assessed the current project and change management principles being applied and rapidly moved into leading the process, design, build and execution of an innovation tournament unlike anything ever seen in Australia.

Solution

Design thinking sits at the centre of everything the Foundation does and is doing, to achieve their critical mission of increasing 5-year survival to 50% by 2023.  The design of SW/TCH focused heavily on design thinking and collaboration.

To achieve this vision a three-day innovation tournament was designed to deliver an industry learning and development platform to stimulate growth by creating inter-industry linkages, reset corporate culture to innovative practices and breaking down siloed, incremental approaches to innovation and ultimately help industries to open up their IP and assets to other industries.

SW/TCH Festival challenged industries and organisations to diversify their existing platforms and activities, opening up the opportunity to monetise under-exploited resources, create new business models and grow market share.

SW/TCH focused on developing disruptive approaches to industry challenges, learning and development, and business value creation. It provided participants with a tool-kit to drive exponential innovation rather than incremental steps within their industries and organisations.

The three-day forum put cross and multi-disciplinary teams of corporations alongside disruptors, start-ups, educational institutions and government to create commercially viable solutions.

Our consultants played a key role in working with the Founders to define the process, design, and build of SW/TCH and execute a fit for purpose event that met the strategic objectives of the brief.

Results

The inaugural SW/TCH Festival was a huge success held over three action packed days (27-29 August 2015) at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

The event was supported by some of Australia’s leading corporations; ANZ, Blackmores, Scentre Group and IAG, with up to 200 participants attending from a cross section of corporates, entrepreneurs, start-ups, educational institutions, government and not for profit.

SW/TCH remains a core strategic initiative for the Foundation with the next SW/TCH Festival planned to take place in July 2016 at the UTS Business School.