The nation’s peak industry lobby AiGroup has called for immediate and substantial structural changes to Australia’s R&D system, with a key focus on commercialisation efforts, rather than simply pouring more money into research.
In its submission to the federal government’s Strategic Examination of R&D (SERD), AiGroup has called for the creation of a Ministerial Council on Innovation, Science and Technology to coordinate policy across portfolios and between governments.
It also wants to see new performance metrics developed across the system that directly link R&D programs to GDP, productivity gains and commercialisation success rates.
While university and technical lobby groups have almost universally called for government to develop credible plans increase national spending on R&D to 3 per cent of GDP, AiGroup says flatly that this alone will not work.
“Calls to increase research funding to 3 per cent of GDP are divorced from economic reality if the commercialisation imperative is not addressed,” AiGroup chief executive Innes Willox said in a letter to Robyn Denholm, who is chair of the SERD expert panel.
“Simply pouring more funding into a dysfunctional system won’t enhance its effectiveness or lift national productivity,” he said.
“What Australia desperately needs isn’t more of the same, but rather a fundamentally new approach for how R&D translates into commercial outcomes that drive productivity growth across our economy.”
Australia’s total spending on R&D is about 1.7 per cent of GDP, well below the OECD average of 2.7 per cent and a long way behind leaders like South Korea (5.2 per cent) and Israel (6 per cent).
Mr Willox urged the SERD expert panel to put commercialisation at the centre of any reform agenda for the R&D system. Without an improved commercial pathway for Australian research, the system will continue to stagnate, he said.
Among 19 recommendations to the expert panel, AiGroup has called on government to create a national IP Bank as a central repository for all intellectual property developed through public funding.
Further, it wants a public IP/Commercialisation Scorecard to be set up for Australian research institutions to benchmark their effectiveness.
Australia is at a crossroads in relation to its R&D capability, the submission says, faced with converging challenges of decarbonisation, diversification, and digitalisation.
It is not enough to generate IP in Australia, it has to be commercialised as well – and that is where government should direct its policy attention, the industry group urged.
“What Australia desperately needs isn’t more of the same, but rather a fundamentally new approach for how R&D translates into commercial outcomes that drive productivity growth across our economy,” the submission says.
“The time for incremental change has passed.”
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