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South Australia's IMPACT Award winners announced

Education

TWO software companies and one specialising agricultural manufacturing have been awarded for their capacity to impact on global markets at the South Australian

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IMPACT Awards held in Adelaide. 

Event organiser Kimon Lycos said the three South Australian companies – Alcidion, SpectraQEST and Kelly Engineering – stood out from more than 60 nominations for their capability to grow internationally and benefit from the mentoring of the Award Ambassadors.

Adelaide based health informatics company Alcidion, were recognised for their Real Time Decision Support software in assisting clinicians track patient flow through the health system and make decisions around patient care.

SpectraQEST, also based in Adelaide, develop laboratory and field software for construction materials such as concrete, asphalt, aggregate and soils, and were selected for their software solutions to managing project information across governments, engineers and the building sector.

Kelly Engineering, based in Booleroo in the far north of South Australia, were selected for their innovative custom made farm machinery which has led to greater efficiencies for broad acre farms, while helping farmer's reduce their reliance on herbicides.

SpectraQEST resources and markets director Stephan Mavrakis said he thought the judges were impressed by the company's vision and the fact they already “had significant runs on the board.”

“We've managed to double in size four times over the past 16 years, and we managed to do that while returning profit to our shareholders,” said Mavakis.

Unlike most competitions, the judges of the IMPACT Awards are also the prize.

The winning companies have access to a pool of 26 Ambassadors (mentors) willing to work with them indefinitely, to review their business strategies and “super-charge” their networks with introductions to business contacts around the globe, says Lycos.

“For someone like Kelly Engineering, we have some of Australia's leading manufacturing experts in South Australia, people like Tom Phillips who ran Mitsubishi and Tim Stanislaus [senior production manager at Amazon] who has exceptional connections in the US – people of that ilk,” said Lycos.

While these businesses might have their eyes on international expansion, Stephan Marvakris said SpectraQEST is not about to pack up and move overseas any time soon.

“We could have this company anywhere, in fact there is good argument for us to be based in the United States.

“The reason why we're not in Sydney, we're not in Melbourne, we're not in Chicago is because in Adelaide we can find incredibly good, talented engineers straight out of university that we can grow.

“The University of Adelaide is one of the leading engineering schools in Australia, if not the world in my opinion, and we have a bunch of engineers here that we grew and we now have a very stable work force,” he said.

This is a Creative Commons story from The Lead South Australia, a news service providing stories about innovation in South Australia. Please feel free to use the story in any form of media. The story sources are linked in with the copy and all contacts are willing to talk further about the story. Copied to Clipboard

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