From producing e-learning content for the BBC in London to taking people into the Australian rainforest at night, wearing military grade night vision goggles, Wendy Bithell (MSc Advanced Learning Technologies, 2004) is thriving through innovation and has been awarded two patents along the way.

Let’s face it, 2020 has been a tough year for almost everyone. But when the going gets tough, this Lancaster Uni graduate gets innovating. Wendy came to Lancaster to do her two year MSc in Advanced Learning Technologies in 2003. She undertook this study as a part of her professional development as an E-learning producer at the BBC where she was producing some innovative E-learning content, mostly in TV and radio production subject areas. Her study at Lancaster gave her some deeper knowledge and gave her some innovative ideas for content. It also put some names to the theories and processes she was using instinctively.

In 2005 Wendy returned to Australia (her old stomping ground) and she soon found employment in Sydney working for a leading interactive agency MassMedia Studios, where she created award winning, innovative E-learning content.

Soon Wendy felt a yearning to leave the city life and get back to nature. But what could she do? Her first degree was in Natural Resource Management (Environmental Science) from the University of Canberra. So, she donned her innovation thinking cap and came up with the idea of running an eco-tourism business in Byron Bay. She liked the idea of taking people to find the plethora of nocturnal animals, but didn’t like the traditional method of spotlighting (shinning a torch at the animals eyes) as this scares and disturbs the wildlife. She then applied some of her technical innovation nous and thought that if night vision goggles enabled soldiers to move about without being detected, they should do the same for people looking for nocturnal wildlife. The idea was so new and innovative she was awarded her first innovative patent.

Wendy rode the ups and downs of managing a small eco tourism business when she was confronted by the catastrophic Australian bushfires followed closely by the COVID19 pandemic. She would have to put her innovation thinking cap on again and see what ideas she could muster. During the lockdown she came up with the idea of doing virtual tour, both pre-recorded and live, via Zoom. Her virtual koala tour via zoom became quite popular, giving people from different countries an opportunity to go looking for koalas in the wild.

After the lockdown her face-to-face tours resumed, but she would have to innovate and pivot again as prior to the lockdown 70% of her customers came from overseas. She now had a captive New South Wales audience and people from Sydney. She re positioned her tours again to appeal to domestic audience and they boomed. July-October have been super busy and in fact October has been her busiest month in terms of sales, customers and number of tours, since she started her business 13 years ago.

Never one to take it easy or rest on her laurels, the impact of the Australian bushfires was still fresh in her memory. For the past three years she has been planting koala food trees to help with the habitat loss of these iconic Aussie marsupials, and being a bit nerdy, she came up with a formula in an excel spreadsheet to calculate her carbon footprint and then added her tree planting efforts and her net impact turned out to be -6000kg Co2 (this means her efforts take out 6 tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere). So, she came up with the idea of creating a local carbon calculator, allowing people to calculate their footprint and then offsetting by connecting with local tree planting events and conserving trees on private land. She was awarded her second innovative patent for this idea. Wendy has been participating in a pre-accelerator programme to develop the idea and very shortly she will be pitching to Venture Capitalists to help her fund it.

Who knows what the future holds, but Wendy’s ability to create innovative technical solutions, which was partly fostered by her study at Lancaster will no doubt come in quite handy.