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STELLA ENGINEERING

Design drives Stella Engineering’s shift from making parts to creating value through innovation and collaboration.

Stella Engineering is a privately owned advanced manufacturing company based in regional New South Wales, employing around twenty-five people. Founded by Mike Woodcock, the company has grown over the past two decades from a traditional precision machining firm into a vertically integrated business offering end-to-end manufacturing solutions. What makes Stella unique is its deep commitment to partnership, investment, and people. Rather than relying on external skills or outsourcing, Stella Engineering has deliberately built its own capability in collaboration with its customers. This approach allows them to develop bespoke solutions, maintain exceptional quality control, and respond quickly to changing customer needs.

A central aspect of Stella’s success lies in their ability to listen deeply to their customers’ pain points. They invest the time to understand the challenges their clients face, not just technically, but operationally and strategically, before proposing any solution. This ability to listen, empathise, and co-define the real problem is what underpins their value as a trusted partner. Stella also recognises that a critical success factor in creating these kinds of partnerships is having large firms that are open to collaboration, allowing suppliers like Stella the time and access to truly understand their operations and constraints.

Their vertical integration means that many manufacturing processes are brought in-house, giving them oversight across design, production, and delivery. The result is a business that thrives on relationships, talent development, and the pursuit of excellence in advanced manufacturing, a rare achievement for a regional Australian enterprise.

Planet Innovation

DESIGN AT THE HEART OF HEALTH TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMATION

Planet Innovation is an Australian organisation that has built its reputation on creating breakthrough health technologies and the commercially successful businesses needed to sustain them.

Co-founder and Head of Innovation, Samuel Lanyon, describes the company as a contract developer and manufacturer with a distinctive approach to design. For him, design is a commercially oriented discipline that begins with deep understanding of stakeholders, context and opportunity.

It demands curiosity, rigorous insight and the ability to balance complex trade-offs so that solutions genuinely improve the lives of clinicians, patients and users. This definition of design has shaped the company from its earliest days and continues to anchor its mission to positively transform global healthcare.

Planet Innovation operates within the global health technology sector, an industry under immense pressure as diagnostics and therapies become more sophisticated while health systems struggle to deliver more with less. Costs are rising, expectations for healthier, longer lives are increasing and both local and global markets demand solutions that are effective, economically viable and simple to adopt. Australia adds further complexity with a small domestic market that requires innovators to think globally from the outset.

Planet Innovation has become a leader in this environment because it responds to these pressures directly. The company looks beyond individual products and works at the level of entire businesses, ensuring that the solutions it creates are grounded in real needs, deep insight and long-term commercial potential.

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