The seeds for research ventures do not always grow with the intention to commercialise, but rather, a curiosity to develop ideas, a drive to move them forward, and a team of innovators that each bring their own vision to the process. This is how Ludolio, a digital games distribution platform that makes commercial video games accessible for educational instutitions, libraries, and researchers, has been brought to life. A collaboration between Professor Marcus Carter (ARC Future Fellow, School of Architecture, Design and Planning) and Associate Professor Jen Scott Curwood (Associate Professor, Sydney School of Education and Social Work, Professor Eduardo Velloso (Deputy Head of School, Faculty of Engineering), and Dr Ben Egliston (DECRA Research Fellow, Discipline of Media and Communication), the team has received Proof of Concept funding from the University of Sydney’s Commercialisation Office and is currently live for students at the University of Sydney.

Conceptualised by Professor Carter, Ludolio was founded through interdisciplinary interests even before he formed the project team. Bringing together ideas from his ARC Future Fellowship that examines the monetisation of children in the digital games industry, his vision started to take form. “I had these three problems: safely making games available to students, the way financial structures were making the games available to young people worse, and the difficulty of using games in university teaching,” he says. “Because I'd been stewing with all of them, I realised one thing could potentially solve them together.”

Be open and curious 

Finding the right collaborators happened, as Professor Carter puts it, simply from exposure. As co-author to many papers, he was already on the path to bringing the right people on board. 

“Ben and I have a Discovery Project together, we've written books together and we talk constantly,” he says. “Jen and I were already working together on the Games in Schools project. Eduardo had just joined the University of Sydney from the University of Melbourne and had a stronger technical background than I do. I knew I could go to him and say, 'How would we build this? Could we build it?' It was kind of an Avengers Assemble thing. I'd had all my solo movies and then I brought everybody together.”

As a teacher in the Midwest of the United States nearly three decades ago, Associate Professor Curwood followed opportunities as the signposts on her road to academia and eventually, Ludolio. “It's a bit like improv: the first rule is to say yes.”

“I didn't come into it as a gamer, but as a literacy researcher working in the learning sciences, I could see how powerful games were for self-sponsored learning, collaboration, and multimodal meaning making,” she says. “I did some work with games during my PhD, then when I first came to the University, I was more focused on literacy and technology. But I had the good fortune to meet Marcus during a workshop. We found a lot of common ground – he's very much a game studies scholar but was really interested in how games could be used in formal and informal learning contexts. Our collaboration evolved over the years.” 

Lucky chance only turns into impactful research collaborations through steady relationship-building, which Professor Carter emphasises involves a lot of mutual respect. “You don't know the immediate ROI of participating in the university community,” he says. “Don't treat those relationships as quid pro quo exchanges. Think intellectually: what can this person in another faculty teach you? What can you share with them? You don't know where that relationship might go years later.”

The building blocks of research backgrounds

For a venture that spans an array of disciplines, each founder brings their own assets to the pool of expertise that is building it. For example, Associate Professor Curwood’s education background has informed Ludolio’s co-design with teachers, which helps the team to understand how a gaming distribution platform will work in the everyday reality of a classroom. 

“Eduardo is very good at eliciting what the design of a platform should be,” says Professor Carter. “He got us in a room and made us think about what people actually need to be able to do, which helped build the feature set.

“Ben has a deep understanding of the financial side of the games industry and brings that knowledge into conversations with game developers. We've had a horrible chicken-and-egg problem: if you don't have games, you can't get universities, and if you don't have universities, you can't get games. Ben managed to convince around 20 game developers to provide games before we had customers and before they were going to make money from the platform.”

As Dr Egliston attests, collaboration with the industry is essential to the development of the project, which he brings alongside his research background on game monetisation. "Because Ludolio is built around licensing commercial videogames for teaching, working closely with game developers has been fundamental to the project,” says Dr Egliston. “It has meant sitting down with developers and really trying to understand what they actually want from a partnership like this. Those conversations have helped us build a model that creates genuine value for developers, rather than, in an extractive sense, treating industry as a simple source of content."

From research to commercial knowledge

The endeavour has compelled everyone in the project to learn new skills to complement their academic knowledge base. Associate Professor Curwood acknowledges the incredible opportunities to learn within the commercialisation space. “The opportunity with Ludolio is really exciting – the chance to create something that could make a tangible difference in the lives of teachers and students,” she says. “It's meant learning a lot more about entrepreneurship.”

“Last year I received a scholarship from Westpac and participated in a program called Tech Ready Women, which helped me think about what it means to be a woman entrepreneur and positioned me to lead our Australian Economic Accelerator grant application.” Ludolio was recently named a semi-finalist in the Australian Technologies Competition’s ed tech category, and the award winners will be announced in August 2026.

After receiving an $80,000 grant from the University’s Commercialisation Office, the expansion into new learning intensified. “When you go through commercialisation, there are new considerations you wouldn't face with a standard internal research grant – intellectual property, licensing, timelines, legal consultations on both sides,” says Associate Professor Curwood. “The Commercialisation Office has been supportive, but because it's new territory for us as researchers, it's definitely been a learning curve.

“One thing researchers would understand if they thought about it: our intellectual property is initially owned by the University, so we've had to work through what that means when we're creating something external – what we can do, what we can't, and when.”

Professor Carter insists that the skillset involved in entrepreneurship crosses over significantly with those required for research, and it’s just a matter of picking it up. “You manage your workload, remain motivated, think strategically about your time and constantly learn new things,” he says. “I didn't know what QuickBooks was. I do now. But that's also what made me successful as an academic: you're not scared of learning a new domain of knowledge.”

User feedback is essential for integrity

When asked about turning research into something scalable, Associate Professor Curwood insists that the process of working with stakeholders is indispensable. “My own research often takes a design-based perspective – you develop something, engage in co-design to integrate the perspectives of diverse stakeholders, iterate, try it again, and go through the cycle multiple times,” she says. “You don't just want to build something and hope they will come – it might not have the right features at first, it might not be fully accessible, it might not be as intuitive as it needs to be. 

This is especially relevant as the team works on moving the venture from universities into secondary schools, where the complexities rise and co-design is what facilitates the growth of the project. “Across government, independent, and Catholic schools in Australia, there are very different approaches to what technology is available and how students can access it – some have Chromebooks, some have Macs, some allow easy software downloads, others absolutely don't,” says Associate Professor Curwood. “That's why we're being mindful this year to start with universities, refine the platform, and then aim to implement it in schools next year.”

Professor Carter reflects on how this works in practice: “A Year 11 English class in Sydney has already integrated Wayward Strand, where you play a 14-year-old girl accompanying her mother to work at a hospice. We hosted a Q&A with some of the game's developers, and the questions the students asked were incredible and deeply connected to the themes of the story. We're working with that teacher to understand how the interface can support her pedagogically and using the experience as a case study for other schools.”

For Professor Velloso, this is exactly what inspired him to get on board with the project. "What was exciting to me about working on Ludolio was the opportunity to create a technology that adapts the learning activities to the actual game experience of the student," he says. "This opens up a whole new space of technology-enabled pedagogies."

Find your collaboration tribe

When it comes to advice for researchers who are sitting on an idea that could become something bigger, Professor Carter puts it simply: “Don’t do it alone.”

“Find people you trust and people who bring different things to the problem. Build relationships across the University without constantly asking what the immediate return is going to be. There's a long tail to those relationships.”

Alongside curiosity, Associate Professor Curwood credits interdisciplinary connections for her journey into commercialisation and advises researchers to seek out the rewards collaboration can bring. 

However, Associate Professor Curwood advises that it’s important to find the right people. 
“Be very intentional,” she says. “I really like the people I collaborate with, and the feeling is mutual. Relationships sometimes build over years. Finding good people does involve some trial and error. Before committing to a grant together, write an article first. See whether they do what they say they'll do by the time they say they'll do it. If you're having to chase someone up on a conference paper or a short article, imagine how that scales across a three-year research project.”

Ludolio’s development shows how a chance encounter can become the starting point for something much larger, when it is followed by sustained relationship-building, complementary expertise, and a shared commitment to moving an idea forward. The project grew through years of collaboration, conversations across disciplines, and a team willing to learn from one another, take on unfamiliar challenges, and contribute different strengths to a common problem.

For researchers with an idea that could have broader impact, the message is to be active and intentional: seek out conversations beyond your immediate field, understand what others bring, and be clear about what you can offer in return. Interdisciplinary collaboration takes trust, follow-through, openness to feedback, and a willingness to iterate, but with that effort, a research idea can grow into something with far greater reach and practical impact.

A screenshot from Ludolio