More commercial research needed, says advanced manufacturing chief

Andrew Stevens, the former IBM Australia chief executive who chairs the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre, said federal research spending was mainly driven by research priorities and the curiosity of individual researchers, but making Australian companies globally competitive should be a higher priority.

He said “a very small proportion” was driven by the competitiveness of a given industry sector and the growth centre wanted to shift that balance so a larger share was devoted to boosting the competitiveness of companies  in their industries, fields and markets.

“Rather than saying ‘I am interested in this’, more researchers should be saying ‘There is a market for this and if we can solve this or that problem, we can be competitive’,” said Stevens.

The federal government annually spends about $2.5 billion through research and development tax breaks and more than $7 billion on research at the CSIRO, university and cooperative research centres.

Stevens did not dispute comments by Pat Boland, co-founder of Melbourne-based automated machine tool exporter ANCA, that CRCs were bureaucratic and wasteful, and that a company needed to design a product that people wanted to buy and sell it overseas before thinking about “advanced manufacturing”.

Stevens, the first of the Abbott government’s five growth centre chairmen to outline a broad plan in public, said other top companies said the same and did their own specialised research and development based on customers’ needs.

The centre’s plan aims to do more to connect promising manufacturers with global supply chains of multinational manufacturers such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and to overcome the ‘valley of death’ between basic research where Australia excels and commercialisation where Australia badly lags behind other rich countries.

He said the growth centre was asking the Innovative Manufacturing CRC — which has an interim board and management team — to explain the competitiveness outcomes of programs it was pursuing with universities and other partners.

“They are formulating their program and before the funding is released, they need to sign a memorandum of understanding with us,” he said.

“We are raising the priority of competitiveness in their programs and project structures and resource allocation,” he said.

“We are helping to define the problem as competitiveness rather than just innovation.”

University and CSIRO researchers may bristle at increased direction but CRCs are meant to have a commercial focus and Stevens’ ideas are consistent with recommendations of a review of CRCs unveiled by Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane in May along with $731 million in budget funding. This included $34 million for resource extraction.

University of Technology Sydney Dean of Business Roy Green, who advised the former Labor government on innovation policy, said this was also consistent with Education Minister Christopher Pyne’s review of university research but the danger was that the pendulum could swing too far in the direction of industry-led research at the expense of basic research.

“That would be a mistake because a lot of the really interesting breakthroughs come from basic research,” said Green.

Source: AFR.