Have the time to think. We take care of everything else, so you can create the innovations of tomorrow. Twelve months, a laboratory, a machine shop and a suite of your own in Cremorne. No teaching load. No grant cycle. No committee deciding what is worth working on.
200
Fellowships a year
12
Months, then it ends
$480,000
Of building and instruments
$0
You pay in cash
The fellowship
Everything below is provided. All of it is paid for.
Your suite
A desk, a workstation and a direct line to the laboratories below. Yours for the twelve months, with a window in an external wall and a view out of it.
The ground plane
Fabrication, prototyping, test rigs and shared instrumentation, available without a queue and without a booking war.
Compute
A metered allocation of the hardware here, logged against your registered activities, with the allocation set in advance and yours to spend.
The common table
Fed at Ad Astra’s expense. The Mouseion at Alexandria fed its scholars at the royal table, and so does this.
Gymnasium
On site and included. The gymnasium was a place of thought for a long time before it was one of exercise.
Your company
Intellectual property assigned to it, patents drafted in house and filed by registered attorneys, grant applications written and lodged for you.
The year
Twelve months is a deadline. Short enough that nothing can be deferred, long enough to reach a filing. It ends whether the work is finished or not.
M00
Commencement
Entity incorporated, intellectual property assigned, research plan lodged
M03
Gate one
Prior art search complete, inventive concept recorded, disclosure controls set
M06
Gate two
Result reproduced by a second operator, invention disclosure written
M09
Gate three
Freedom to operate opinion, claims drafted, continue or cut decision
M12
Gate four
Provisional filed, and one signed letter of intent, paid pilot or term sheet
Every gate is recorded in Excelsior, the research system every Fellow works inside, on the day it is passed. Month nine is a real decision point: a Fellow who cannot produce a draftable specification by then is cut. If you want longer than a year you reapply against the same bar as everyone else.
Excelsior
Excelsior is the research system Ad Astra built and every Fellow works inside. It is a laboratory notebook with one rule added: you write down what you expect before you find out. That single habit is what turns a year of work into a funded claim, a lodged grant application and a filed patent application without you assembling any of it.
Before the run
You cannot open an experiment until you have written what you expect and why the answer is not already knowable. Excelsior timestamps that statement and closes it. Nobody approves it and nobody edits it, including you.
During the year
Every run records what you did, what you saw and what you concluded. The runs that did not work are all kept, because they are the proof the question was genuinely open when you asked it.
At the end
The registration, the expenditure schedule and the evidence file print from the same dated entries. Excelsior prepares and lodges your grant applications, and drafts the provisional patent specification and instructs a registered patent attorney to file it.
Excelsior also meters time, instrument bookings and compute jobs, and locks them weekly. That is not supervision of you, it is how the building substantiates what it spent on your research, measured as it happens and locked weekly. The record is yours: it stays with your company, and it is the file a patent attorney, a grant assessor or an acquirer will want to read.
The arrangement
You pay nothing in cash, ever. The suite, the laboratories, the compute and the patent attorneys who draft your filing are all carried by Ad Astra.
What you pay
The programme fee is charged to your company, and it is funded from the research and development refund your company receives on its own expenditure.
What we take
Ad Astra Industries holds a convertible note over the part of the fee not met in cash. At the end of the fellowship it converts into a minority stake of 39 per cent. You keep the majority, and you keep the company.
What you keep
Everything you invent is assigned to your company on day one and stays there. You leave with the company, the filing and control of both.
The full terms, including the fee, the note and the conversion, are set out in writing to shortlisted candidates before any interview. Nothing is signed until you have seen every number and taken your own advice. Eligibility of the fee for the research and development incentive is a position Ad Astra has taken, and Ad Astra will obtain a private ruling from the Commissioner on it.
Selection
People who think for themselves, who hold an unfashionable position because the evidence supports it, and who can carry it past where anyone else has taken it. No referral list. No back channel. Every place is won from an open application, and most Fellows are found at the point they would otherwise begin a degree.
How you get in
No nomination, no introduction, no alumni route, and no degree required or expected. The application is the only door and it is the same door for everyone.
The bar
Tell us something you believe that most of your field does not, and why the evidence is on your side. How you think and what you taught yourself decide this. Credentials, publications and employers carry no weight here.
Unaffiliated
No current employer, university or investor with a claim on what you produce. It keeps the intellectual property clean and it keeps you free.
The panel
A written research proposal, a position on the prior art, and a defence before people who can judge the science. No committee and no quota.
Apply
One email, attachments welcome, no form to fill in. We read everything and reply to everyone.
fellows@joinadastra.com51-57 Cubitt Street, Cremorne, Victoria
Investors
You buy the suite module itself and hold a registered lease of the space it occupies. The rent is contracted and it is funded by government research and development refunds, not by the residential cycle in Cremorne. You house the innovators of the future. Modern day patronage, with a registered lease behind it.
Title
The module is yours as a chattel, with a registered twenty five year lease of the space it occupies, the freehold mortgagee’s consent and a non disturbance covenant. Your title is to an identified module at an identified address.
Income
Your rent is funded by the research and development refunds the resident companies receive, so it does not track vacancy or the residential cycle in Cremorne. The private ruling on eligibility is disclosed before you exchange.
Entry
Most of the price is financed on terms you are free to source elsewhere, and the goods and services tax credit goes straight to principal.
Management
Letting, housekeeping, maintenance, compliance and the relationship with every resident sit with the operator for a fixed site rent and a stated management fee.
Conversion
The envelope is built to Class 2 from day one and the walls between suites are demountable, so the building reconfigures into luxury two and three bedroom apartments as a fitout. On a conversion your facility is repaid in full from the proceeds, your contribution comes back indexed, and you take a quarter of the surplus.
The point of it
Two hundred companies a year that did not exist in January, each carrying research to a filed patent. The building is the instrument and your suite is part of it.
Suites are offered only to wholesale and sophisticated investors within the meaning of section 708 of the Corporations Act 2001. The commercial terms, the figures and the risks are set out in full in the information memorandum, which is issued after an accountant’s certificate is held.