National Survey of Research Commercialisation - Australian ...

Professor Nugent began developing his concept six years ago, using ARC funding, and in
1999 took out a patent and under a licence from the University of Melbourne, a private
investor, Mr Vincent Thiang, established IATIA.
PRODUCT SUCCESS STORIES
The company began operating in 2000, hiring staff, setting up manufacturing facilities,
and marketing QPm worldwide.
To this point, ARC grants funding this and related ideas amount to $765,600. In April
2002, the company was floated with a market capitalisation of around $30 million, and
employing 30 staff.
QSR
The initiative to write a computer program when none existed at the time of a major
qualitative social research project by La Trobe University in 1982 was the starting point
for one of Australia’s most successful export software companies, QSR International Pty
Ltd.
It is today the recognised world leader in qualitative research software and services. QSR
develops and markets a suite of products for analysing text and other non-numerical data.
QSR has its origins at La Trobe University, where the first commercial product, NUD*IST
software, was created by Tom Richards to support a social research project by Lyn
Richards.
NUD*IST draws its name from the program they developed for handling ‘Nonnumerical
Unstructured Data by techniques of Indexing Searching and Theorizing’. It
quickly became the front-line innovator in the qualitative computing field and was being
used in 20 countries before it was ever advertised.
Before this development, in the 1980s, computers simply couldn’t handle non-numeric
data, so qualitative research still required pen and paper.
In May 1994, QSR was formed and became part of an incubator centre at the La Trobe
University Technology Park. In 1995, the company was restructured in a management
buy-out. It also eventually outgrew its university location and moved to premises in the
Melbourne light-industrial suburb of Doncaster.
During this time, the program continued to evolve and, in 1999, QSR released a second
product, NVivo, which pioneered new methods of accessing and linking data. It was
widely regarded at the time as ushering in a new generation in qualitative software. By
the year 2000 both NUD*IST (by now Version 6) and NVivo were selling as first-choice
research tools in 80 countries.
QSR products are used by researchers and managers in academic, business, government
and non-government organisations undertaking health and medical research, social
science, education, evaluation, market research, counselling, software engineering,
criminology, management studies, economics and many other fields of study and work.
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