JENNIFER HEWETT:
The NSW government is attempting to fill the gap in Australia’s very disjointed approach to research and development by announcing a new advisory council today to be chaired by David Gonski.
The official brief is to make NSW “the R&D leader within Australia and a world-class contributor”.
“R&D in NSW already has strengths in a range of fields, supported by NSW’s world-class universities and industry, for instance, in advanced manufacturing and in agri-business,” Premier Gladys Berejiklian says. “Now is the time to step up our efforts and to lead the nation.”
That leadership claim will certainly be disputed, not least by the Andrews government in Victoria. But the need for more national co-ordination is obvious and Jennifer Westacott, chief of the Business Council and a member of the advisory council, calls the NSW initiative “a real breakthrough”.
It’s true Australian industry – and universities – have very belatedly started to co-operate more actively on R&D that can be commercialised. But the economy clearly doesn’t have the number of big technology companies pouring money into R&D, while many smaller businesses find it difficult to know where to start in accessing or investing in academic research that could be useful.
Bill Ferris, who did a report for the federal government on “Prosperity Through Innovation”, found that business spending on R&D is an area where Australia is a global laggard and becoming more so due to the increases elsewhere.
That makes the co-ordinating capability and financial contributions of governments, state and federal, even more important – but the efforts are often fragmented and misdirected. Businesses also find it hard to navigate the system despite the establishment of special “precincts” and ecosystems.
Add in Australia’s big universities, which traditionally compete rather than collaborate. Their main interest in using the massive income from international student numbers to fund individual university research to climb global rankings to attract more international students.
That doesn’t necessarily translate into research useful for the Australian economy or the biggest domestic dilemmas facing governments. And naturally, there’s always a degree of interstate rivalry, with the common view that Victoria takes a more co-ordinated and focused approach than NSW to attracting investment.
Australia has fallen to 22nd in the latest Global Innovation Index, which measures a country’s inventiveness from R&D investments and international patent and trademark applications, to mobile-phone app creation and high-tech exports.
It’s that reality behind the NSW government’s move to try to speed up co-ordination in research and development to tackle some of its major policy challenges. David Gonski is chancellor of the University of NSW as well as chairman of ANZ and the council includes a range of other university chancellors and business leaders – along with the state’s chief scientist, Hugh Durrant-Whyte.
“We want to use this group to focus on the big public policy challenges”
Gabrielle Upton, Parliamentary Secretary to the NSW Premier
Gabrielle Upton, Parliamentary Secretary to the NSW Premier and a former deputy chancellor, says there’s every good reason for NSW to rate better than it does on R&D given its leading universities.
That means making it easier for universities, governments and businesses to work together in a strategic way, including when applying for grants or policy changes. While NSW has been good at building hard infrastructure, she says, the state needs to develop more soft infrastructure to connect it all up.
“We want to use this group to focus on the big public policy challenges we need to grapple with,” she tells the Australian Financial Review. “We know that R&D is not the whole answer to having an innovation economy but we can road test some of the gaps and learn how we can do better.”
Durrant-Whyte has a favourite quote he recites to state government ministers: “Vision without execution is hallucination.” That seems even more valid now than it did when Thomas Edison came up with it.
Durrant-Whyte is also familiar with the intersection of business and academia, having led the R&D behind the automation of Port Botany, as well as contributed to the automation of iron ore mines in the Pilbara in his previous role as professor of robotics and automation at the University of Sydney.
What excites him, he says, is to look at challenges but also business and research opportunities in key areas – like the energy transition or water and drought resilience or efficiency in health – to see how R&D can be made to work for the economy.
He wants to accelerate the work of the Waratah Research Network established in the past year to better co-ordinate departmental needs and research with that of universities to become more of a partnership.
“Universities are a very important part of the economic system, developing research as well as delivering a supply of skilled people,” he says. “Academics have become more interested in translational research in the last 10 to 15 years with about 30 per cent of the revenue for research now coming from companies rather than government grants.”
“But are we as quick and agile as some other states? Probably not yet.”
Upton says it has been hard to measure figures but the best estimate in terms of NSW state government spending on R&D is about $400 million out of a total investment of about $5 billion last year.
“There’s more research than there is development to help communities and businesses solve social and economic problems,” she says. “Is there a way that the government can help that translational piece?”
What intrigues Gonski is the “ability to co-ordinate and extend what NSW is doing in R&D to maximise the availability of funds and true focus”.
Execution, as ever, is the key.