[Muanet] Research and CRCs

[Dion Giles]

The following article, scanned from The Australian's Higher Education 
supplement in 2000, may be of interest in the light of current changes to 
research funding guidelines.

Dion Giles

---------------

HIGHER EDUCATION  (The Australian)
August 16  2000

Mediocrity by bureaucracy

Have we still got it wrong on encouraging science and technology?

Yes, writes Barry Ninham

IT looks as if the Prime Minister's Science Engineering and Innovation 
Council may have put the cart before the horse, as have all its 
predecessors during the past 40 years (HES, August 9).

Several years ago, as national chairman of Chemical Engineering of Sweden, 
I chaired a review of  basic engineering sciences research in that country.

We sought advice from the top research managers of eight Swedish 
multinationals. on which the economy is critically dependent.

Swedish policy until then had followed much the same path as ours, 
dominated by a massive bureaucracy called NUTEK, pushing co-operative 
research centres, university-industry collaboration, and commercialisation 
of research.

We expected  the standard bleat about government support  for industry. Not 
so. The opening statement from the lead-off guy was: "Stop this f . . . ng 
academic prostitution."

Then these normally conservative businessmen went berserk for four hours. 
Stop these ridiculous CRCs, they said. Their message, on which they all 
passionately agreed, was: "We know applied research, we know product 
development, we know marketing and the market.

"What we desperately need and cannot get enough of is top-quality PhDs. It 
does not matter what field, only that the discipline is intellectually 
rigorous."

Several years before, Swedish industry did go along with an analogue of 
CRCs, called competence centres, whose main function is training PhDs, 
funded by a one-off pool of money for research acquired by a tax on 
industry. They did so reluctantly -- to get their money back and with 
little expectation of outcomes.

Fortunately for that country, the bureaucracy of NUTEK has since been 
severely truncated. There are no tax incentives in Sweden.

A multinational such as Proctor and Gamble  has something like 8000 PhDs. 
They spend about  $5.2 billion a year on research and development. The same 
is true for other companies. And they rigorously protect their intellectual 
property.

Most of them  --  chemists, biologists, engineers  --  have far more 
freedom to do research than any Australian academic, and infinite 
resources. Commercialisation of known science is not a competitive goer in 
such a climate. So  we are looking at new, unanticipated science.

The difficulties for university technology transfer companies, with or 
without tax incentives, are several.  Since their salaries (very low) are 
paid independently of outcome, they are not really in business but 
parasitic. All power to those who make a buck. But success depends on risk 
capital, their bucks, not mine.

And by and large, their levels of technical competence are such that they 
do not even know the words of science and engineering, let alone have the 
capacity to recognise a key advance.

Consequent]y, they are susceptible to snakeoil scientists, as are CRC 
committees. Committees that write papers on commercialisation of science 
are dominated by people not in science or who left the cutting edge of 
research years ago.

The shortage of venture capital ($1.50 per head vs $33 in the US) is 
laughable and an almost insuperable inhibition to commercialisation of ideas.

Present policy-makers still assume that the university scientist or 
engineer is a whitecoated, inarticulate idiot devoid of entrepreneurial 
skills, to be locked up, overloaded  with  lectures,  grant 
applications  and  accountability statements, underpaid, without tenure, 
yet expected to feed out ideas on demand at the base of a giant pyramid of 
planners, entrepreneurs, economists,  stakeholders, environmentalists, 
bureaucrats and boards that magically produce commercialisation.

They have got it wrong and they continue to do so. The key problem was 
identified by our Swedish businessmen-research  managers.  Produce 
top-quality PhDs and leave them in a good environment to do basic science. 
It is only by getting that side of the mix right that we will stumble 
across and identify paradigm shifts that matter.

Any really good new science will automatically be commercialised.  It is 
only mediocre stuff, and lack of top researchers, that is the difficulty. 
Our present policies are designed to foster mediocrity.

Putting the horse in front of cart does require government investment in 
universities for the knowledge society. Barry Jones knows it,  the Swedes 
know it, so do the Americans, Canadians, Germans,  Singaporeans, the Swiss 
and even the French - but few Australians.

[Barry Ninham is foundation professor and head of applied mathematics in 
the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University.]