The Future of Orbost and District Project innovation working group for the National Seeds Institute proposal met for the 9^th time in March to proceed with the work on developing a business case for the establishment of a National Seeds Institute in Orbost. The proposed institute may incorporate the following attributes:

• Laboratory
• Glasshouses
• Seed storage
• Processing capability
• Trial farm
• Education and research facility

The working group have commissioned a market research and preliminary scoping project to:

• link potential roles with clients/users by matching needs to capabilities and resources,
• map a range of potential services and offerings that fit current and predicted capability and resource bases to ow market needs and
• undertake a brief investigation of direct and indirect competing/overlapping service providers and their current capacity to service the market needs identified.

During April the innovation working group will then make some decisions are the realistic potential of the proposed facility and move to a market testing stage with surveys and interviews to be undertaken with a range of local, intra and interstate companies and institutions. This will lead to the mapping out of a basic business case for deliberation before potentially moving to the development of an investment case, economic impact analysis and completed business plan.

One of the early findings within the market research is that the proposal to service the corn sector is still on the table, however the focus may broaden to cater for a new emerging market in Australian agriculture. We will be sharing more on this at our next community update event.