JAMES THOMSON:
Veteran corporate leader David Gonski says the NSW government has seized on the urgency created by the pandemic to rapidly deploy a new business grant program steered by some of the state’s biggest corporate luminaries.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian will today announce $24 million of funding for the first two years of the government’s new Small Business Innovation Research program.
It is the first initiative flowing from the state’s action plan for accelerating research and development, which was led by Gabrielle Upton, Parliamentary Secretary to the Premier, and launched in late January.
The program will aim to use the power of government procurement spending to turbocharge commercialisation. Small businesses will be encouraged to submit ideas based around five specific problems the government wants help with. These problems include how to handle the avalanche of used personal protective equipment created by COVID-19, cleaning up waste water in the health system, and counting the state’s koala population. Other issues the government hopes to fix are improving communications in rural and remote areas and helping passengers with vision impairments access public transport.
New ideas will receive funding in stages from a feasibility study, for example, through to scoping and commercialisation activities—with the ultimate aim of the NSW government becoming an early customer.
“It was the way that government can play a really powerful role,” Ms Upton said. “We have the problems, we spend the money, why should we just buy a product off the shelf when we can create new ideas and new jobs?”.
Mr Gonski, who chaired an advisory council that included Commonwealth Bank chairman Catherine Livingstone, company director Jillian Broadbent, quantum computing leader Michelle Simmons, Business Council CEO Jennifer Westacott, venture capitalist Daniel Petre and former Telstra boss David Thodey, said the program can play a role in fostering what he calls translational research.
While NSW has no shortage of great research coming out of the state’s 11 universities and is good at helping established businesses grow, Mr Gonski argued it is the part “in between, taking that idea and translating it into something that will go forward, where we are not great”.
He praised Ms Upton and Ms Berejiklian for moving quickly to roll out the new program. “It’s important at any time but coming out of COVID I think that we need opportunities to go forward,” he said. “This is a step to the future. What are the things that we’ve got that we can use to take the state forward and the lives of the community forward?”.
Mr Thodey, who also chairs the CSIRO, said the council had tried to avoid “boiling the ocean with good policy” and instead wanted to focus on a small number of initiatives where taxpayers could get the best bang for their buck. Tapping the government’s vast procurement power to help SMEs with the eternal problem of finding initial customers for their ideas was a smart solution, he said.
“This is a classic example of where governments can step into a place where there’s market failure,” Mr Thodey said.
The new program will be run by R&D NSW, an arm of the new state development agency, Invest NSW.