The Western Australian Government has opened applications for the WA Innovators of the Year (WAIOTY) awards, creating opportunities to spotlight mining and resources focused startups and emerging businesses.
This year a new category has been added to spotlight young innovators.
The 2025 awards are offering over $280,000 in prizes for winning innovators, and potentially opens doors to increased investment, business and media opportunities.
The new Western Australia’s Young Innovators of the Year will be awarded to a high school-aged individual or team who have developed an outstanding innovative product, technology, process or service that clearly demonstrates an economic, social or environmental benefit to WA.
The objectives of the WAIOTY program is to promote and acknowledge the success of local innovators, encourage support from the industry, strengthen industry-government collaborations, engage the community with innovations and promote job creation.
This award program is particularly helpful for resources innovators for their drive towards shaping the current mining sector through the lens of sustainability, digital transformation, and regional development.
Following recent government developments to mitigate environmental concerns in the mining sector, the prize pool may help bolster new innovations.
As reported by Mining.com.au, the Western Australian government rolled out a $30 million venture capital funding in September 2024 to aid start-ups across several industries including a focus on mining and mining equipment, technology and services.
Along with the prize pool incentive, two of the seven award categories offer accelerator programs to help business growth for the recipients of the WA Government Innovation award and the YEA WA Young Innovators Platinum award.
Science and Innovation Minister Stephen Dawson says the awards act as an opportunity to celebrate local innovators and showcase ideas.
“Diversity also continues to grow in our innovation sector with last year’s awards seeing the greatest ever increase of applications from female founders, up more than 40% from the previous years,” he says.
Applications for the WAIOTY awards are now open, with differing categories due between June and July 2025.
Write to Maddison Elliott at Mining.com.au
Images: WA Government
