Current projects that involve CRIC researchers are in the areas of Sustainable Tourism, Clustering, Action Research, Enterprise Development, Connectivity, and Agricultural and Horticulture business marketing. CRIC is breaking new ground in the field of regional innovation and competitiveness, particularly with a specific focus on the use of clustering at a regional level. Some of our projects are summarised below.

For further information, please contact the individual researchers.

Solar Cities - Evaluating Changes to Energy Consumption

Chief Investigators:Dr Steven McEachern & Prof. Julian Lowe

The Solar Cities project will recruit at least 2500 households and 100 business across the Loddon Mallee and Grampians regions and monitor changes to their energy consumption over a period of 7 years (until 2013) through the installation of solar hot water, photovoltaic cells, together with demand and behaviour change.

The data to be collected for both residential and commercial premises will be used to not only measure the behaviour changes that result from technical, educational and economic measures, but more importantly can identify how these specific measures affect overall changes in the demand for power, and which combinations of measures achieve targeted demand reductions.

MySmartGreen: An Entrepreneurial Approach to Greening Small Business

Chief Investigators: Dr Patrice Braun& Prof. Julian Lowe

This is an AusIndustry project in collaboration with the National Centre for Sustainability to developa comprehensive program of entrepreneurial training and mentoring to increase supply-side capability. Through a process of auditing and training of demand-side businesses the program also identifies and increases the demand for these services. The program then clusters available expertise, information and learning in the MySmartGreen^tm portal to provide access to environmental products and services and encourage small businesses across the region to become part of a recognised Green Cluster Code of Practice.

As part of this project CRIC undertook a survey of Ballarat environmental industries to assess demand and interest to undertake a training and mentoring program. Such training will incorporate general sustainability and environmental audit information, business planning, how to import/export, collaborate with other green businesses, expand customer base and marketing.