Duncan Jones, Executive Director, Science Industry Australia (SIA) and Australasian Laboratory Managers Association (ALMA)
Industry relies on a constant flow of innovation for new
products and product development, and our publicly-funded research
agencies (PFRAs), but linkages between the PFRAs and industry are
broken. Both industry and academia widely acknowledge this
situation as the 'innovation gap'.
Australian-developed IP and innovation is not being
commercialised domestically at anywhere near the rate industry
needs and our economy demands. Academic assessments of the value
and importance of their IP are vastly overstated and current PFRA
commercialisation practices serve only to frustrate and impede the
process of communication with business. Additionally, business
cannot operate on academic timelines.
So why bother? Simply put, it's about jobs - long term,
sustainable, real, here and contributing to the economy.
The science industry manufacturing sector currently employs
approximately 8500 Australians. The industry is characterised as a
low volume, very high value add industry (previous bureaucracies
used the terminology 'elaborately transformed manufactured goods'
to describe our output). Labour costs are a relatively minor
component of COGS (cost of goods sold). We do not need to shift
manufacturing overseas to source cheaper labour. Jobs thus created
stay in Australia. New start-ups can be based here and not
offshore.
We need to break the bottleneck by enabling communication
between PFRAs and industry in a language that both can understand.
Empower the commercialisation arms of PFRAs with a tool that
enables this communication to occur in a simplified, structured,
standardised and timely manner.
This tool could be a completed 'proof of concept' (PoC)
checklist describing the innovation/IP and its market potential.
PoC acts as a simplified business plan that bridges the gap between
academic imperatives and business practicalities. PoC helps
maximise the ROI of government monies invested in PFRAs and will
drive the commercialisation of Australian-generated IP in
Australia.
The use of the PoC checklist should be mandated across the
panoply of PFRAs. Use the number of PoCs developed as a valid
metric to assess academic performance/output, and link PoCs
developed to funding outcomes as an additional metric, in contrast
to the current situation where the published number of
peer-reviewed papers is the fundamental metric by which funding is
allocated.
