The day we made strangers eat our Banana ideas
12 August 2026
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 audience at the University of Melbourne.
Why we built our own Innovation Day
The short version: twice we’d lined up someone else’s stage to show this work, and twice it vanished — nothing we could control. So we built our own. We booked the B-HIVE at the University of Melbourne, invited the biotech and food-science students, and built the afternoon around one question — does anyone actually want what we make — asked three times, in three very different ways.
And it was fun. The audience had no idea what was coming, and got three very different reveals. Every one got a questionnaire before the discussion opened: vote first, with your gut, then we talk. Ask people what they think after you’ve explained your intent and they hand your intent back to you. Ask before, and you may get the truth.
Chandana Chandran did three jobs across the project so far. She started on the commercial sourcing options — moved into the lab and prototyped alongside Binyu, and then organised the innovation day itself. Deciding to build your own event was easy (for me!); the hard part is turning that decision into a real hour with real strangers in real seats, and Chandana produced the show:
Reveal one — Blue Banana: Welcome to the Age of Action Fruits
The most unreasonable of the three. A whole banana with a coffee’s worth of caffeine in it, built for the fridge next to the energy drinks rather than the fruit section. The prototype on the day was… rough — but beautiful. The colour and finish are action-ready. And it did its job. We’re not selling it (yet), we’re finding out whether the idea survives contact with someone who’s never heard of anything as special, or as good, as a Blue Banana.
Reveal two — the Tuxedo: the “After Eight” for a Sophisticated Night Out
The other end of the range: a crunchy banana in a dark, delicious tuxedo jacket, aimed at the after-dinner, share-a-box-with-a-glass-of-wine end of things rather than a servo grab-and-go. Same drill — but this time, taste it first. Yes. Taste it. Then rate it, then talk. The gap between how much people liked the idea and how much they liked it after tasting is the number we cared about, and we’re still crunching the data.
Binyu Shen drove the product development that got us from a potentially unlucky banana to two working formats — the idea generation, the direction, the “what if we tried it this way” that turns a concept into something you can put in a mouth. Binyu and Chandana worked from the biotech lab, to the food-science lab, to the kitchen prototyping hand-in-hand.
Reveal three — the Banana Sound: Yes, Really
Tim (Tingsong) Lu took apart twenty of the most recognisable sound logos in the world — the Netflix ta-dum, the Intel bong, the Nokia guitar phrase — worked out what makes a two-second sound stick, and built three candidate marks for HBTX from scratch. He played all three, took the audience’s votes cold, and then explained the thinking. Then they voted again, generating data from a biotech project nobody saw coming.
The hard part, taken seriously
Joe Clark owned the single hardest question behind the Blue Banana — the one almost nobody in the audience saw, and the one the whole product depends on. In a Masters full of biology, Joe is the one putting the technology into the biotechnology. It’s the least glamorous work on the project: no show, no reveal, just the quiet problem that has to be solved before there’s anything to reveal at all. What he found, we’re keeping to ourselves for now.
What I learned (while the team crunches the data)
The team is still crunching the numbers, so this is just me, n=1, an audience of one - completely unbiased as project sponsor and supervisor. The shape of it is already clear: it’s curved. Hockeystick was 2010 - Banana shape (up!) is 2026. The students survived contact with strangers, and so did their creations. One of the sounds - prototype or not - is already on the HBTX.art website right now - click a button and you can experience it. And the Tuxedo? So good that I’m finishing every batch they make before I even make it off campus - every time. That one may be entirely my failing, and maybe not the most reliable data point.
Nobody could have predicted a BioScience Banana Innovation Day when we set off on our industry project back in March. But that’s what “not a university assignment” means: real strangers, real data, real products, and student names on the parts they each built.
Innovation, going bananas at university. And one day, maybe, in a fridge right next to the Red Bull.
With thanks to…
The Banana Innovation Day would not have been possible without the generous support and openness to a new kind of Biotech Masters Project of Daniel Czech, Greg Kubik and Kate Howell and the teams behind them.