Mr Michael Pollitt
Michael hails from a distinguished defence service family and brings over twenty years experience in program delivery, strategy development, technology architecture, solutions design, grant and private funding, and building successful new business collaborations.
Michael was based in the UK for over a decade before returning to his native Australia in 2010 and has served in corporate leadership roles across the UK, US and Australasia. He has served as a founder, director, investor of seven new businesses, and Board advisor to over thirty others across a number of sectors from bootstrap to new entities inside Government corporations.
During his time in the UK Michael presented to the IEEE in Nice on AI ethics, to ICIST KAIST in South Korea, IIT in Mumbai, and Fortune Brainstorm Tech in California on robotics where he led commercial partnerships with Google and Amazon founders, Howard Hughes Research Lab, NASA and ESA to develop the first prototype fully anthropomorphic robotic manipulators for the Eurobot program and DARPA challenge.
In 2019 Michael led partnership endeavours with the University of Edinburgh, FinTech Scotland, and Scottish Business Resilience Centre, as well as a range of private technology and solutions providers, to produce fraud reduction technology grant funding submissions to Scottish Enterprise and EIT Digital, the European Innovation collaboration to support growth of deep tech startups.
More recently Michael supported a leading Australian innovation hub through merger and CEO transition, conducting national and global startup industry research, and leading service delivery as “Head of Product, Investor Relations Lead, and Startup Business Mentor“.
In addition to joining CADRE-OCE as “Industry Engagement Manager”, Michael maintains advisory roles to two leading AI scaleups, a leadership coaching consultancy, and a MedTech scaleup via his own consulting business.
Michael is primary inventor and author of three patent families, a TechDiversity Awards judge, and an experienced songwriter, performer, and educator leading music performance programs for children.