Transforming Research Governance for Australia’s Marine Biosciences Program

We partnered with the Marine Biosciences Cooperative Research Centre Program, a federally funded initiative that brings together Australia’s top universities, researchers, and industry partners, to design the digital infrastructure supporting their national blueprint for marine bioproducts innovation.

The program’s mission is ambitious: to transform marine waste and cultivated biomass into high-value, zero-waste products. To deliver on this, NBCRC needed more than a database. They required a scalable, structured platform to map capabilities, manage data governance, and coordinate contributors across multiple sectors.

We delivered a system that:

• Allows researchers and organisational admins to propose profile updates through a controlled approval flow
• Provides CRC staff with dashboards to track submission status and monitor organisation-wide progress
• Includes contextual help and video walkthroughs to guide users through each stage of onboarding and engagement
• Enables national research alignment through FOOR-based capability tagging and discovery tools

We also set up an integration with n8n to connect the platform to an AI service via webhook. This allows profile inputs such as keywords, FOOR codes, and researcher context to generate a draft capability statement that aligns with the program’s blueprint objectives.

With audit trails, structured workflows, and a dedicated support framework, we helped turn a fragile prototype into a platform built to support a nationally significant research mission. It is already in use and ready to grow with the program.