THE Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) believes there is an urgent need to strengthen Australia’s national innovation system and has called for a 10-year strategic plan to increase Australian innovation.
This strategic plan should include investment milestones and performance indicators and its development should engage all key stakeholders, ATSE said in its response to the Review of the National Innovation System chaired by Dr Terry Cutler.
A priority is to develop a strategic national intelligence capability that explores critical emerging issues through horizon scanning, technology roadmaps and foresight — and provides findings that can be understood and acted on.
It is also a key to recognise the high costs and risks in later stages of technological innovation and provide assistance measures that will address this need.
ATSE believes that Australian support for innovation is presently too focused on assisting research. New mechanisms are required to support innovation.
ATSE also believes that Australia must increase collaboration between private and public sectors, and between research providers and the users of research outcomes.
This will require top-down facilitation including additional funding. It will also require the creation of an environment in which bottom-up collaboration increases. Business should be able to readily access public sector research skills, ATSE says.
ATSE also calls for greater cooperation between Commonwealth, State, Territory and local government in encouraging innovation.
It says the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) Program is valuable and should be retained, as it has achieved excellent outcomes and helped to improve research management in Australia. The CRC Program should be continued, expanded and diversified.
There is scope for two (or possibly more) categories of CRCs, each with some common characteristics but having different guidelines, depending on their objectives.
There should be scope for both CRCs with commercially focused outcomes and CRCs that are primarily directed towards non-commercial objectives.
More flexibility is required in the Program to accommodate different sizes and funding durations for CRCs.
It calls for a new class of research funding through the establishment of a new mechanism to fund collaborative research for projects that are smaller (and involve shorter time frames) than a CRC, but are bigger than Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage grant funding provides.
ATSE also calls for revised financial incentives for innovation — an increase the R&D tax concession to 200 per cent, a higher turnover limit for the R&D Tax Offset and other improvements to fiscal incentives in order to increase business expenditure on R&D.
Other key aspects of the ATSE response include recommendations to:
- Assist firms (especially small and medium-sized enterprises — SMEs) to develop products that government agencies are interested in buying.
- Increase the numbers of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates from Australian universities by mechanisms such as reducing fees in these disciplines.
- Improve the teaching of STEM in Australian schools by making teaching more attractive to STEM graduates and providing better teaching resources.
- Establish an annual Prime Minister’s prize for innovation based on the application of Australian-developed scientific discoveries.
- Improve the commercialisation of public sector research results by supporting training and adoption of best practice in knowledge commercialisation.
- Include an element in the new university block funding formula which rewards investment in proof-of-concept and innovation/commercialisation activities.
For more information visit the website: www.atse.org.au