Gippsland Business Awards

Innovation Excellence – Outlook Industries Australia, Yinnar

Outlook Industries Australia is a standout example of a small team using innovation, resilience and purpose-driven goals to achieve growth, operating in a highly specialised, sophisticated and challenging sector. The team has overcome significant hurdles, embraced cutting-edge technology and built a values-led culture that supports projects both locally and beyond. With defence clients, they are making a meaningful impact locally and beyond.

The Teams work in creating GUS- Ground Uncrewed Systems- has brought about a way to obtain surveillance without endangering lives and covering a wide amount of territory. Its application is far reaching. It gives the team much satisfaction to produce.

Receiving the Gippsland Business Awards for Innovation reaffirms that Gippsland as the home to engineering excellence.

Luke Townsend is the CEO and the following are highlights from his acceptance speech.

“Well golly gosh! You know, I grew up in the Strzelecki Ranges not far from here and my Dad said to me once, “You know Luke, if you tuck your trouser leg into your sock and get around like that, people are going to expect less of you!”

I took that to heart for my life and so I surround myself with people who are far more capable than me. So I couldn’t come up here in all reasonableness without bringing Hasitha and Duncan my brother, who have done all the leg work. I just do the talking.

Firstly, A big round of applause for the people who put The Gippsland Business Awards on.

We get quite a bit of bad news, on occasion, in Gippsland, and were working hard to bring work back here. Having things like this, where we get to dress up, feel good about ourselves, and hear these amazing inspiring stories is absolutely crucial, so a massive thank you to everyone involved.

The second thing I’d like to say is about our community. We are in Yinnar. It is not exactly competing with Silicon Valley yet, but we have an incredible community there. We are making robots for defence and we are helped by retirees coming in every day, offering us their assistance, just to be part of the team, because it is exciting! We are doing things!

Thanks to our community in Yinnar and even more broadly our community. When we were nominated for this award we didn’t even know how that had happened. A bloke rang me said ‘Look you’ve been nominated!’ and I didn’t believe him, because I didn’t know how this had happened, and it turned out our community had nominated us. So Trehana and Dinusha, thank you for nominating us and I really appreciate that.

Finally, I just want to say: The Team. We crack a lot of jokes and we really enjoy what we do, but we don’t forget the seriousness of what we are doing. We are attempting to save lives in the defence sector. I carry memories of people with me, who I don’t get to celebrate this with. I want to thank my team and Mrs Townsend for making my mission their own”.