What a journey! We’ve just wrapped up InnovationACT 2026 and are excited to celebrate the incredible founders, ideas, and achievements that made this year so memorable.
InnovationACT is our premier and the oldest running annual student entrepreneurship competition in the ACT. Students and staff across our Canberra tertiary institutions: ANU, UC, CIT, UNSW Canberra, AIE, and ACU Canberra bring forward their passions and projects, and through a two-week intensive program encompassing workshops engage in the full start-up journey, from ideation, to customer validation, prototyping, and then pitching to a panel for up to $10,000 in seed money. This year, we brought together 186 participants across 31 teams, with 14 teams making it through to the finals.
🏆 Winner: PreDAW
PreDAW is an all-in-one mobile app for music ideation, collaboration, and inspiration on iOS and Android. Built for independent songwriters, producers, and artists, it addresses the common problem of lost creative ideas buried in generic recording apps. Unfinished recordings are often saved with names like "New Recording 214", with no title, key, tempo, lyrics, or context, making them difficult to find and reuse. PreDAW keeps ideas organised and identifiable from the start. It also helps bands and collaborators track progress between rehearsals, centralise feedback, and ensure valuable material isn't lost along the way.
🥈 Second Place: ALIS Wear
ALIS Wear is on a mission to make water safety affordable, compact, and accessible to everyone. Recognising that drowning remains a significant global issue, the team identified that many existing safety devices are underused because they are bulky, rely on hazardous CO₂ cartridges, or are impractical for everyday and ocean use. To address this, ALIS Wear has developed a patentable, non-pressurised chemical reaction technology that replaces traditional CO₂ cartridges, enabling the creation of a lightweight wearable armband that transforms into a rescue tube on demand. The technology has been successfully tested in a laboratory setting, and with a focus on social adoption, ALIS Wear is designing products that are sleek, fashionable, affordable, and accessible enough for anyone to wear.
🌟 Runners-Ups: SemesterHQ Convenor, Renewise AI, VREC, and SkillFill
SemesterHQ Convenor is a tool that does all the in-between administration work involved in teaching, course design, student and staff management, assessment and grading coordination. SemesterHQ Convenor focuses on the role of university Course Convenor - giving the convenor time back to improve their teaching practice and research activities valued by the university.
The founders of Renewise AI read about how utility providers have a ‘loyalty tax’ where consumers who don’t switch end up paying more each year, so they came up with the idea for an AI-powered website that can automatically recommend (and if you grant authority to our platform, switch you to) the cheapest/best fitting electricity provider.
VREC is a virtual reality platform designed to help clinicians identify early signs of trauma and measure progress during PTSD treatment. It combines user monitoring during immersive VR tasks with data analytics that may provide potential biomarkers of stress and cognitive change, generating quantifiable evidence over time that complements clinical conversations, validated self-report measures, and existing assessment practices.
SkillFill connects hospitality, tourism, and events businesses with trusted, experienced workers for shifts, short-term crews, and ongoing roles. The platform brings transparency to hiring by verifying experience, preserving work history, and providing clear pay information, helping employers quickly find reliable staff while giving workers recognition for their skills and experience.
A huge congratulations to our winners and to every team who took an idea, tested it, pitched it, and made InnovationACT what it was. Over the coming weeks, we will do a couple of blogposts where we hear about their experiences as founders going through the InnovationACT program.
Thank you to our judges, Kerrie Jackson, Georgia von Guttner, Faraz Hasan, and Deanna Barwick, for their time, insights, and thoughtful feedback throughout the program.
And a special shout-out to the CBRIN team: Anneysha Sarkar, Irene Zhen, Craig Davis, Shashank Bokil, Elijah Howe, and Ryan Tan, whose hard work behind the scenes helped deliver another successful InnovationACT program.
