A few years back, the Productivity Commission questioned Australia’s need to invest in research and development. Did such investment produce enough productivity and economic returns to the country, or should we stop and focus on incremental innovation, innovation that naturally happens?
As a policy nerd, I responded to that with the analogy of lighting. Incremental innovation would probably mean we’d have a better candle today, but disruptive innovation is why we have light bulbs. And I constantly think through that lens of what choices we want to make in innovation. Do we just want to keep improving gradually, or do we dramatically change the system for the better? This is something we need to look at as a research and innovation community.
Whenever people ask me about the sector, I point to four key ingredients: the fundamental research that produces the intellectual property; the infrastructure that allows us to demonstrate the validity of the idea; taking that idea and turning it into a product or service for the community; and, most important, the people who make it happen. The idea generators, the commercialisation experts, the business leaders, the clinicians, the people who work at the coalface and the pipeline of talent who come through.
If those four don’t work in sync, we don’t have an innovation ecosystem. That’s probably the biggest opportunity for having an Office of Medical Research and Innovation (OMRI) in the WA Department of Health. Instead of all of them fragmented and happening in isolation, you can bring together an umbrella system.
I’m a firm believer that the most valuable discoveries, especially if they’re disruptive, happen by accident. So how do we create a culture and an environment that allows this to happen? That’s where our programs matter a lot.
For example, one of the key funding programs in Australia, the National Health & Medical Research Council (NHMRC), has the Ideas Grant, which is meant to be about the idea. Complementing that are the Investigator Grants, meant to be about the people. But are the Ideas Grants backing the ideas, or are they taking the risk-averse aspect of looking at the investigators, their environment, their capabilities, and finally diluting the value of the idea?
Because, if you are focusing on discovery research, it has to be about the idea. And if you trace back the biggest successful discoveries or Nobel Prizes, it’s often been by people in their 20s. So how do we put in place frameworks that allow that free thinking and risk-averse attitude?
