Learning from 'Pitching Research' Competition Winners: Insights and Reflections

TWENTY16 has been a BIG year! As a companion to Faff (2015, 2016), the current paper reviews experiences and draws insights from a series of workshops, pitch days, competitions, webinars and other events based on the “pitching research” template tool. With close to 80 unique events conducted throughout the calendar year 2016, this intense program of activity culminated in the Final of a “pitching” competition at the University of Queensland sponsored by the UQ Association of Postgraduate Students (UQuAPS). Like its inaugural version the previous year, the UQuAPS 2016 event captured the full spectrum of academic discipline areas: from human movements to … telehealth to … architecture and more. Other similar major events held and activity in 2016 include: the SIRCA “pitching symposium”, the FIRN “pitch my research” competition, the ANZAM Doctoral workshop and the AIC2016 pre-conference pitching workshop. A review of these events is contained within, with a particular focus on the winning pitches and the winning pitchers.