Profile: Peter Forbes
Mallee Regional Innovation Centre has quickly become a lightning rod for longer-term innovation, according to one of the Strategic Advisory Panel’s foundational members Peter Forbes.
Peter has been involved in many of the Centre’s projects and now sits on the Mallee Hydrogen Technology Cluster.
He is also Regional Development Victoria’s planning and regional coordination manager, working to discover what is important for the regions’ community and economic development and helping to realise these ideas.
“In the Centre’s short life, it has become a leading partner in the Victoria Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub, the site of the Mallee Hydrogen Technology Cluster, and most recently the Mildura regional hub of the One Basin Cooperative Research Centre,” Peter said.
“Added to this is the wonderfully successful Growing Smarter in the Mallee ag tech summit.
It is fair to say that if MRIC had not been established, none of this activity would have been brought to the Mallee. But as a result, the Mallee is starting to become recognised as a place on the move.
Having lived and worked in Bendigo and Mildura over the past 30 years, Peter's heart belongs to north-west Victoria.
“I love the attitude of the people, their self-reliance and can-do nature, which are attributes that lend themselves to innovation,” he said.
“As the Centre builds trusted relationships across the region, I can see this natural tendency towards innovation being captured.”
In his role at Regional Development Victoria, Peter supports the Loddon Mallee Regional Development Australia Committee as well as the Mallee Regional Partnership, which worked with the University of Melbourne in 2016 to develop the concept that became MRIC two years later.
“Regional development and innovation go hand in hand,” Peter said.
“As a regional economy advances, it becomes less dependent on the local factors of production – in our case, irrigation water, sun and soil – and increasingly reliant on innovation to drive productivity increases.
“To maintain our prosperity, we will have to move from productivity driven by increased resource usage to productivity increases due to innovation.
“I see the establishment of MRIC as an investment in our future prosperity.”
Read more about Peter and our other Strategic Advisory Panel members here.