Australia Pty Ltd is still missing out commercially on Innovation – that is the verdict in CSIRO’s latest Report titled The Value of science and technology released late last month.

So why do (Ideas + Patents) not always generate (Dollars + Euro + Yen)…

Whilst .com.au is strong in R&D, it has not been as successful in consistently translating this research commercially into valuable economic outputs – ultimately a failure in the commercialisation process.

The CSIRO Futures Report authored by Katherine Wynn, Stephanie Lukins and Beni Delaval, with contributions from business, government and research leaders, examines the opportunities for Australia to overcome its inherent innovation challenges and realise greater value from these innovation investments.

The Value of science and technology according to CSIRO Futures

According to the Report, there are four main barriers to commercial successes as I’ll share below: having an increasing professional involvement around commercialisation of precise positioning technologies, I’ve also included some personal insights (in italics).

• 1) Declining innovation investment: this has declined 30% in the past decade as businesses seek long-term clarity on what to invest in and are instead investing smaller amounts on shorter-term goals.
• My take => The benefits of an agile yet reactive investment approach have enabled organisations to respond relatively safely to the micro-trends that appear, whilst minimising investment failures as its priority. Unfortunately the proactive approach of better planning for larger phased investments is often deemed too risky when unrealistic or incorrect metrics are used to measure success. Consider the activity of bulk shipping; a leviathanic Panamax-class ship will get a LOT of product to Port A to Port B albeit slowly – ultimately in an efficient and profitable manner; an armada of speedboats can get tiny amounts of the product quickly to Port B (C, D et al if necessary) but not in large quantities – ultimately inefficiently and unprofitably. => Agile yet reactive is the speedboat shipping approach moving limited products and severely limiting profitability. => Agile and proactive is a fleet of mid-size ships moving sufficient product with minimal risk at an acceptable profit.
• 2) Poor research commercialisation: While Australia is home to world-class researchers, we struggle to commercialise breakthroughs in the lab into innovative products in market, exacerbated by a cultural aversion to risk and low collaboration between research and industry.
• => Agree – the ability (or permission) to ‘fail safely’ in projects has all but disappeared. Failure is such a toxic word across our society and industries, compounded with the application of overcautious risk profiles and lashings of finely-tuned marketing spin, has scared the word away from daily discourse.
• Skills gap: Australian education is high quality by international standards, but we don’t have a culture of ongoing training for employees outside of formal education.
• => Agreed – continuing professional development (CPD) is heavily promoted for the greater good whilst generating a significant service revenue for private industry, but is it really worthwhile? Training this depends a lot on the content, style and context of the training; is it theoretical and given in a classroom? Is it pragmatic and applied alongside a real-life role? Is it commercially grounded with direct input from industry?
• 3) Resistant to overseas ideas: Businesses invest in keeping up with competitors in Australia, but rarely keep up with overseas competitors, placing us behind them on customer value and productivity gains.
• => Not so much resistant to overseas competition, maybe more unaware of what is been done overseas due to limited resources to follow global trends which ultimately leads to….
• 4) Wariness of new technologies: Investing in innovation can be seen as the road to automating jobs, widening the gap between the most profitable and least profitable businesses, and resulting in big royalties for a few but bigger losses for others.
• => Concur – not everyone wants jobs automated nor needs to automate. Consider that many mega-corporations get mega-rich from Australian activities but rarely pay the proportionate taxes here, so the ‘value’ is not seen fiscally at the bottom line by Treasury – indeed income taxes could lower with less humanisation. Successful businesses can co-exist with humans. Not sure if the ‘Hipster-Barista-3000’ will become commonplace before 2025; maybe Australia could ‘brew up’ a niche industry around their manufacture to kickstart this.

CSIRO’s Proposals

The Report identifies several solutions to help businesses overcome the key barriers, drive economic recovery and build future resilience as follows.

• Mission-led innovation: By forming collaborative coalitions of business, research and government partners around common challenges, investment can be shared, aligned, and for the long term. For example, CSIRO has recently launched a portfolio of proposed missions (as seen in the following table) which endeavour to highlight key initiatives where gains are sought.

• => A number of these missions are smart in that they provide a clear goal, in many cases with an emotional twist ‘Help our famers overcome drought..’ and ‘.. so they keep saving lives’. Other mission examples include the numerous projects launching Australian businesses into space courtesy of the Australian Space Agency, and the forthcoming 2030 Space and Spatial Industry Roadmap.
• Dismantling siloes and building networks: By building stronger connections between researchers, entrepreneurs, business, investors, and education providers, ideas can be moved more easily from the lab bench to the customer, and skills can be developed in the process.
• => Australia has a great record of building networks between academia government and industry, with the CRC Programme being a stellar example. However one major weaknesses is often that CRCs are too research focused at the expense of industry contact and appreciation; there is not always sustained involvement from industry to effect a sustainable commercialisation success. Obtaining patents and kudos is one thing, generating mid- to long-term revenues from a comprehensive product suite is another thing.
• Collaborate to compete: Looking beyond borders, there is value to be captured by focusing on international collaboration to remain competitive, while also focusing our national resources around areas of unique value and global differentiation.
• => I suggest another – ‘Standing on the shoulder of giants’ – Aussie success stories such as Atlassian, CSL, BHP et al should be incentivised to promote and incorporate Aussie innovations as part of their international engagement.

Again the national aversion to risk overpowers the opportunity to ‘fail safely’ and of course very few organisations will proactively admit to failures as doing so risks their share price and ranking.

So can (Ideas + Patents + Commercialisation) = (Dollars + Euros + Yen)?

Businesses can realise greater value from innovation by driving purposeful and solutions-focused innovation, sectoral and international collaboration, and fostering a ‘growth through innovation’ culture.

A worthy statement of recommendation given in the CSIRO Report segues nicely with the very last item on their Mission List as featured in the above table – “Double the number of SMEs utilising Australian R&D to become a collaboration nation.”

This ultimate point finally starts to raise the critical task of utilisation (or Adoption and Diffusion if we use the Report’s terminology). Utilisation needs to be taken very seriously, and defined seriously too; it means having a clear need for the innovation and an even clearer need for using that new tool. Essentially ‘a clear motivation to use a capability in order to obtain a benefit’.

How about trying ((Ideas + Patents) x Collammercialisation) to grab those Dollars, Euro and Yen…

Whilst the role call in the Report’s stated Highlights of Australian Innovations (Appendix D) is unarguably impressive (cochlear implants, WiFi, Google Maps to name but a few), it is worrying that the most recent one – the Seabin Project – is from way back in 2015.

This gap of 5 years is concerning to say the least and hopefully up and coming innovators can break this drought.

Strawberry Fields Forever (or at least Forthenext4years)

Expectations around President-elect Biden’s renewables investment drive should become the second focus (after COVID-19) for Australia Pty Ltd to capitalise on as investment streams will mushroom from a more liberal and rational minded Administration. Together with our ambitions to become a renewable energy superpower, our native capabilities should be paraded front and centre when considering the field of low-hanging opportunities which could easily be supported, nurtured and harvested. Developing a home grown energy storage industry using Aussie resources directly is in my mind a no-brainer.

In-country pre-processing of mineral resources using renewable energies (solar, wind, hydro) from locally made tech (solar panels, turbines for wind and wave) made from Aussie resources would be a game-changer.

One such as LAVO (with their hybrid storage system) making use of native metal hydride and lithium, and home-grown hydrogen to boot, can help to kickstart the economy in the right ways.

Solutions must be selected for (CSIRO) Missions which Australia is uniquely equipped to provide such as cellulose from the seaweed growing around our huge coastline – the 7th longest in the world. Desalination plants powered by renewables should not be impossible to commercialise with the right backing, focus and policy.

Solutions-focused Proposals for Successful ‘Collammercialisation’ in Australia

1. Prime the ‘Collabornation’ – set-up frameworks driven by industry to identify, select and focus on the greatest challenges in their sectors.
2. Find real problems that need solving – let’s be serious, there are many many issues that it would be great to solve, eliminate, fix or even just mitigate somewhat. Develop Commercialisation strategies that are better aligned to what industry and market needs are, less of what capabilities are achievable.
3. Agile ‘proactive’ investments – enable to build confidence across R&D, and more importantly across those industries who wish to invest in ‘applied’ innovations.
4. Protect the IP – indeed Government policy has to empower these missions to generate revenue for them, keep track of Australian IP and development.
5. Empower the Educators – support, facilitate and empower our educators (both academic and industrial) with mentors and supporters on objective commercialisation, so that this emboldens them.
6. ‘A Fail-safe, Safe to fail Mindset’ – create a mindset and ecosystem that supports and indeed promotes ‘Fail-safe, Safe to fail’ experiences, and ensure that objective lessons learned from failures can be summarised and shared across the community.

Wishing upon a Blessing of Unicorns

Hopefully, the recent lockdowns across all states and territories has gone some way for the collective brain-trust of researchers, inventors and backyard creators to come up with some very clever ideas. You never know, perhaps as Melbournites emerge from the long winter of their back-to-back lock-downs and may even be preparing to release a blessing of unicorns. Here’s to hoping so!

Whilst developing commercial ideas, with application to the circular economy, sovereign supply and capabilities, CSIRO’s mantra going forward must be: Research, Innovate and Employ locally, Market regionally and Sell globally.

Keywords

#collabornation #collammercialisation #trueblueinnovation #innovation #commercialisation #CSIRO #collaborationnation

The CSIRO Futures Value of science and technology report as referred to in this post is available at www.csiro.au/valueofscienceandtechnology

PS Fancy being a ‘Commercialisation Account Manager’ with CSIRO? Stop the Press! A brand new posting for a CSIRO-CAM was posted – help make that difference!