early stage commercialisation

Looking for something out of left field. Maybe a government grant? I know MST has received tax credits in the past, but have they received a Commercialisation Australia grant before?

Commercialisation Australia program (started 4 January 2010. replaced some other grant program);

Purpose: To bring a new product, process or service to market

Grant Amount: $50,000 to $2 million

Minimum Contribution: Participants contribute 50%

Types of eligible expenditure are:

Labour
Contracting
Plant
Prototyping
Intellectual property protection

This expenditure can be incurred for a range of activities including, but not limited to, product development, tooling-up for full scale production, market validation and execution of IP strategy.

Applications are assessed on a continuous basis - this means you can apply at any time.

Application assessment criteria:

Need for Funding - All applicants need to satisfy the Board that they don't have sufficient funding to undertake all the required commercialisation activities and it would be unreasonable to expect the applicant to raise all of the necessary funding otherwise.

Only applications that demonstrate a genuine need for funding will be assessed against the other criteria:

- Market opportunity for the outcomes of the project.

- Compelling value proposition for the new product, process or service (including an explanation of why customers will purchase it).

- Sound execution plan.

- Management capability.

- National benefits resulting from the project.

---
Despite how open and easy the criteria may sound, it's actually very difficult being a successful applicant imo. Finding a grant that you are eligible for is very difficult. Or from the other side, for the grant managers, finding a qualifying business is very difficult. Grant managers are assessed on how much money they give out! Give out more money to approved applicants = higher job performance rating. Because the criteria is written to exclude 99.9% off all businesses! imo, 99% would fail to meet the first criteria! Proving the need for funding would be a lot harder than it first sounds.

Anyway, I'd say MST is a slam dunk for this grant. The low turn out for the recent capital raising means mst just met criteria one! And what I really like:

'tooling-up for full scale production'

'explanation of why customers will purchase it' - I'd say the interest/demand from Australian police goes a long way for this and 'National benefits'

IF, IF mst did apply months ago, something like this grant could be approved before Australia closes down for summer, or else next Feb.

This type of grant fixes the problem of needing a customer to buy to pay for manufacturing the product for a customer to try before buying!