- SHRMP.bio Everyone is building a better shrimp box. We aim to build what every box needs. Almost everyone trying to grow shrimp on land is building a box. A better tank, a smarter container, a cleverer set of pipes and sensors. The competition is a race to own the best box. We looked at that race and decided not to enter it. “But your SHRMPreactor illustration is a box!” Correct. It’s an illustration. The opportunity in… 12 October 2026
- SHRMP.bio In 2024 I built scenarios for 2050. Some of them are turning up early. And not precisely the way I expected. In 2024 I did the sober version of imagining the future. It included two key axes — whether the world holds climate change in check or doesn’t, and whether food technology advances a lot or a little — and the four futures that fall out of crossing them. In the future that I bank on most, the one with hard… 07 October 2026
- Aurora Your last meeting of the week Your last meeting of the week, and not the kind you are picturing. No boardroom, no deck, no cocktail. A small sailing boat on Port Phillip Bay, one big problem each, and quite possibly a stranger sitting next to you. That is the plan for the final calendar entry for Friday afternoon - a Session on the Sea There is… 07 October 2026
- Aurora Bluey meets Red Bull TV? Six students, one impossible brief, and a map with the X scratched out A making-of, for a show that does not exist yet. COLD OPEN. Six students, spread across enough time zones to make a single shared meeting a small act of diplomacy, are handed a brief that opens, more or less, with a confession: we have no f… clue how to pull this off. Which, for a student team, is the perfect… 03 October 2026
- Aurora A cannon on a sparrow Seven students, on three campuses, none of whom had met, and not one of them a sailor, spent four weeks this winter building the case for something they had never seen and, in at least a few cases, may have needed to look up: a youth sailing programme with enough boats to take a full patrol to sea for more… 02 October 2026
- SHRMP.bio The day I agreed with an admiral - on security, not on sailing (Why SHRMP.bio) I didn’t expect that, when I started working on a seafood startup, I would end up in an email exchange with an admiral. A pleasant one. Two years ago I built a set of scenarios for the future of food to work out whether building SHRMP.bio made sense. They kept returning the same uncomfortable answer: that in the futures worth… 18 September 2026
- SHRMP.bio Australia says it has no food-security problem. I am not convinced. (Why SHRMP.bio) Australia’s official position, put plainly, is that it does not have a food-security problem. The reasoning is straightforward: the country produces far more food than it eats, exports something like seventy per cent of its agricultural output, and sits inside a global trading system that spreads supply risk across many producers. A temporary shortage on a supermarket shelf is a… 18 September 2026
- SHRMP.bio In sixty pages on Australia's future, the word aquaculture does not appear On the first day of our “Innovate to Grow” programme they gave us Our Future World to read, and I did the slightly vain thing you are not supposed to admit to: I wanted to see how my own reading of the future stacked up against the national science agency’s. Whether, in short, I was as clever as I had… 09 September 2026
- Data on Deck The difference between nice reading and a report worth paying for The difference between a report that reads nicely and one worth paying for is usually the method — the part that says how you know what you claim. Most people are never handed that expectation. I wasn’t either. I saw the gap most clearly in a piece of desk research I’d set a group of students. I asked them to… 08 September 2026
- Data on Deck Do I give away what I told the university to "sell"? The content is largely free now. Not because I think it should be — because it is. The models, the frameworks, the standing advice to check everything: none of it is behind a wall, and most of it is a search away. That is the fact this series has been circling. What’s worth paying for is the part that can’t… 08 September 2026
- NEXUS III Two university systems, and what it's all for - or better: who. Where you stand changes what this argument is. Two universities mark the poles. Humboldt, in Berlin, is public and state-funded. It charges no tuition, to anyone, and treats education as Bildung — a public good, the forming of a person. Humboldt is no accident here — the history kept pointing back to him, and, by chance, I studied there myself. 08 September 2026
- NEXUS III How you could build the modern university None of that — inquiry, judgement, resilience, the check on the machine — is built by a better lecture. It is built by real work, real dependence, and honest feedback. The same idea in three settings: a real-world problem where someone downstream depends on what you produce; a small piece of live research, handed over early; and the university as… 08 September 2026
- NEXUS III What's gone, and what's gone with it When the content is free, the obvious thing goes first: the university’s oldest job, passing on knowledge, can be done outside it, faster and cheaper. Reduce a university to delivering content, or to making people job-ready, and you have built a trade school with worse economics. A second thing has gone, more quietly. Forming a person — independent, resilient, willing… 08 September 2026
- NEXUS III Three times the ground has shifted The lecture was built for a world short of books. This is not the first time the ground under the university has moved. It is the third. Start with the word. “University” never meant universal knowledge. Universitas was a guild — a union of masters and scholars. Bologna, usually called the first, was a guild of students who hired their… 08 September 2026
- NEXUS III What is a university for when the content is free? Almost everything a university teaches, you can now find online. Cheaper, faster, often free. Sometimes better. So what is a university for? Start with the oldest habit in the building: the lecture. The word means a reading-aloud — lectio. For most of the university’s history, books were scarce, copied out by hand, one at a time. So the master read… 08 September 2026
- NEXUS III The road to a symposium on Higher Education Thriving in Uncertain Futures: Education, Employability and Professional Agility — a symposium at the University of Melbourne The food-scenarios work convinced me of one thing: the hardest part of the next twenty-five years is not technical. It is the not knowing what’s coming. And we do nothing meaningful to prepare our youth for this. I have one key personal flaw. 02 September 2026
- Field Notes Science4Life is closing. Years ago it helped start a company everyone said was dead on arrival. The German Life Science Startup Programme Science4Life is winding down. After more than twenty-five years, the sponsor’s backing ended yesterday, and the team steps away. It ran Germany’s leading business plan competition for the life sciences, and by its own count it helped more than fifteen hundred companies to the point of existing at all. It’s been a key part… 01 September 2026
- HBTX HBTX - A crazy idea, a real problem, a team of near-strangers building a business prototype from scratch. A few months ago, none of this existed. Just a banana nobody wanted and a hunch that it could become something more. Yet, at the beginning of August, we submitted a real application to a national startup programme for Australian-grown innovation. And we have a project serious enough to have real industry conversations. The problem that shouldn’t exist - but… 20 August 2026
- SHRMP.bio The day the SHRMP students went fully AquaCore For some university projects, the students never have to leave the room. Or look up from their computer. Especially if it’s pure “knowledge work”. They get an assignment, they may meet on campus, they may present to the person who gave them the assignment, and get a mark. A SHRMP.bio project is not that. And our students went for a… 13 August 2026
- HBTX The day we made strangers eat our Banana ideas Four biotech students, three prototypes, and the fist Banana Innovation Day that Melbourne - the whole world - has ever seen. Today my HBTX students ran the first ever BioScience Banana Innovation Day — an event they booked, invited, and built themselves — and put a Blue Banana, a Tuxedo Banana, and three banana sounds in front of a first… 12 August 2026
- HBTX A third of Australia's bananas never make it to a shelf Australia throws away about a third of its bananas before they reach a shelf. Not because they’re bad. Because they’re bent, or freckled, or too short, or too long, or curved the wrong way for the box. The fruit is fine — it fails an audition, not a food-safety test. Roughly 30% of the crop is turned away for looking… 28 July 2026
- SHRMP.bio The future of seafood is on land. And now it needs a lab. In late 2024 I sat down to work out what the world would eat in 2050, and whether SHRMP.bio was a silly idea. The work is all online — four scenarios, the population maths, the trade picture, the technology trends. Around seven billion people in cities by mid-century, a lot of them old. Arable land moving north and south, out… 24 July 2026
- Field Notes Why a shrimp company got me interested in education In mid 2024 I spent a few months building scenarios for what the world eats in 2050. Twenty-five years out. Which sounds like a long time, and reads like somebody else’s problem, right up until you turn it around. Twenty-five years back is Y2K. Most people my age can tell you where they were that night. It does not feel… 22 July 2026
- Field Notes From Brain Implants to Wilderness Trails: A Day at Outdoors Victoria 2025 "By 2050, there will be quite a few people with brain-computer interfaces out there. And I think this could be a problem - because we may not know what is uploaded into their brains anymore and how this could unconsciously change their behaviour." The most forward-looking strategic thinking I have seen in a long time around here. Not a biotech… 19 August 2025
- Field Notes Aurora Sailing... into the Unknown (following Curiosity) For now, this is just a teaser of a story that could not have been planned this way, and it is not entirely clear yet where it will take us. What started a few years back with the simple idea of “let’s buy a small boat so we can go sailing as a family” is turning into an adventure in… 13 August 2025