HIGH FLYERS THINK TANK

National Research Priorities Strategic Forum

The Shine Dome, Canberra, 26-27 June 2002

What happens next?
by Robin Batterham

Robin Batterham is Chief Scientist of the Commonwealth of Australia and provides advice to the Federal Government on science and innovation matters. He plays a major role in promoting linkages between science, industry and government and helps to ensure public investment in science and technology is properly focused on issues of national priority. He is the Executive Officer of the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council and is currently Chair of the Consultative Panel that is seeking input from the community on national research priorities. The nine Panel members have a broad range of experience and expertise and their task, now coming into its concluding phase, has been to stimulate debate about priorities towards which Australia might choose to focus extra attention. He is a member of the Australian Research Council, the Cooperative Research Centres Committee and the Advisory Panel for the Australian Institute for Commercialisation.

I think a lot has come out in the discussion, and much has been particularly useful. What I would like to do now is just pull out a few key points that I have picked up and that represent the state of play at the moment and how it is going forward.

First of all, just to put it into context: David Strangway was talking this morning about the Canadian experience. I think the Canadian 1,000 New Research Chairs has been pillaging much of Australia's talent as well as talent from around the world. We are all aware of that. But, overall. I think the Canadian experience is rather a splendid one, and I point to just two things.

First, the comment that it has regenerated a sense of optimism in government, in the public and amongst the R&D community. The second one is that it is very interesting that in their own way they have learnt the vital role of outcome reporting – outcome reporting to the wider public, to the politicians, to the funding bodies and so on. There we have two bits of context that I think it is impossible to ignore, in terms of their experience, a somewhat different path although there are a lot of similarities to where we are at the moment.

Are we talking about priorities or, as Tim Besley would have it, areas of national importance? I think 'areas of national importance' has got a lot to commend it, because it does focus the mind. 'Priorities' can be a rather divisive debate; nevertheless, we will probably stick with that title for now.  We have a system, a whole innovation system and the R&D that sits behind it, that has had a significant change in direction in the last couple of years, and the question is now what more is going to happen. We are still faced with the fact that the future of Australia rests on its knowledge intensity and how that is integrated into the whole community, and how the whole community is involved by many but not all – nowhere near all. So how do we get it further up on the agenda?

I see national research priorities, or areas of national importance, as one such significant step, along the way – one that might in time generate a lot of positive outcomes, not the least of which might ultimately be more funding in some areas.

Therefore, if you see it in this context that it is part of Australia moving to a more knowledge-intense society then you must say, 'Look, these areas need three features' and they're dead simple. One: to be well recognisable. If you need a sentence to describe it and it is full of jargon words, forget it. They have to be well recognisable, not just by the science and R&D population whom they should and will excite, but also by the wider population. Two: to be adequately resourced, and recognised as being adequately resourced. Whether it is in the popular jargon – well, we've got our best brains working on it – or whatever, and I don't want to push that line too far, I'm not particularly worried. So, well-recognised, well-resourced, and, three: great expectations. There should simply be great expectations that we are going to deliver results and we have outcomes that people will value. I keep talking about outcomes. It is so important.

How quantifiable some of the targets should be, I think becomes a second-order effort. It needs to be doable when you start getting down into some of the more specific plans.

Let me move on. I would hope that out of the process of consultation we do get some bounded suggestions – thematic priorities and there might be some structural, which is much more the Canadian style – that point to wider vision. I don't think we have to wait, nor should we, until the wider vision is fully articulated. One of the hallmarks of Australian life is that we have never, as Australians, been too good at posting 'national visions'. Our national vision is almost not to have a national vision. The last attempt that I am aware of was spaghetti-and-meatballed out of existence, and as you go back, the track record is not so good. Nevertheless, at the top end, these themes should be visionary, they should be something that it is easy to subscribe to. At the lower end they should have a lot of hooks, of areas that can be hung on to them, hooks that cover the social sciences and humanities. They are the fortunate few: as the recipients of 8 per cent or so of Australia's funding, they get the chance to double-dip in this process. Not only are they involved in this round, because they will inevitably contribute to some of the thematic priorities, but they get their own separate crack at it next year. 

I would like to move on to say something about the process from here on.

From my perspective, what we are involved in at the moment is the stage that involves a Consultative Panel, or two parts of a Consultative Panel, that have been doing the length-and-breadth-of-the-country consultations.  This focused discussion runs parallel, and I thank the Academies for pulling it together.

So how do the various priority setting schemes, because that is how the CSIRO Flagship Projects and the Rural R&D Corporations, with their strategic plans and a host of others all fit in to this – or how does this fit in to them? You have heard in some detail of the NHMRC and the CSIRO processes. Well, this is essentially an across-government exercise, targeting areas where we can secure added focus and added outcomes by moving across the silos. That is, in and of itself, what it is about. It is not about saying one particular area is so important, everybody should down tools and work on that. It is picking areas where there is the possibility of whole-of-government approach generating more worthwhile outcomes for Australia than what we have at the moment with a silo-type approach. I would hope that in so doing, fairly obviously, it is going to build on strengths, albeit identifying some areas where structurally we need to make some changes. So it may well have quite some regional focus in some cases. It is undoubtedly going to leave in place the essential base which supports the more thematic areas. It would be a nonsense to put all the eggs into a series of thematic priorities by removing the resources from the more basic areas. That is clear.

It will be looking for co-investments with the States. I understand you heard some figures yesterday on the relative input of states into R&D, versus the Commonwealth versus industry. The figures I am broadly familiar with are that there is about $0.8 billion per annum that the States put in, the vast majority of which is into the agricultural, primary industries, as opposed to $5 billion which the Commonwealth puts in and a similar amount which private industry spends. So State-Commonwealth co-investment opportunities are important, that is fairly clear. We have had some good models, and it is interesting how well they have grown over the last three years or so that I have been observing it closely. Whether it is through MNRFs or CRCs or special centres of excellence or the Plant Functional Genomics Centre recently approved, you are starting to see a pattern of regular State and Commonwealth and, in many cases, other institutions and industry, investment - very much along that Canadian model. I would hope that we move much more along that path than where we are at the moment.

If necessary, to enable some of the cross-silo behaviour, Acts that various bodies operate under can and should and undoubtedly will be changed. It always amused me, in looking at some of the government-funded research agencies, how it seemed to be an inverse law: the smaller they were, the easier they seemed to find it to change their Acts of parliament – or to request that they be changed. The bigger they were, and of course there is only one end of town there, the more – in years past, but not now – they hid behind the defence, 'Our Act says this, therefore you can't touch us.' That was the corollary. And I must say that that language has, very pleasantly, now disappeared.

So where does this leave us? CSIRO priorities: you would expect some equivalence there with the national priorities. You would be very surprised if there wasn't, but I wouldn't expect it to be 100 per cent. Social sciences and humanities I have commented on. They are involved in this process, and of course have a separate go next year.

I want to emphasise, in closing, two further points. One is mechanical, about higher education and the like, but the other is more fundamental. So let me do the more fundamental one first.

Several speakers today, and undoubtedly yesterday, have talked one way or another about outcomes. It seems to me we have a dilemma in this country, and many others, that when you talk about innovation, when you talk about R&D, when you talk about knowledge intensity, all these worthwhile activities, and you point to the public expenditure side, you can come up with study after study of good-news stories that says, 'X dollars invested there; showed a return of 30 per cent, 40 per cent equivalent internal rate of return.' Now, that's enough to get you a P/E in business roughly twice where most businesses operate at the moment. And yet, when you look at the public investment into the area, it is not having much impact – it is having some, but not much. And that is a bit of a dilemma. So I track it down, I follow this analysis of why, although individual study after study points to the benefits, we don't see a much more compelling trend to say, 'Well, let's have more, rather than less' – or, by the way, if the studies show, 'Here's what the returns really are,' and they are not worth having, then 'Let's have less,' as the case may be.

It seems to me it is because we don't have much of a common ground in terms of the sort of framework which CSIRO utilised recently through its work with the Centre for International Economics, but the sort of framework that they are using is not in common usage. I look at it and simply say, 'Okay, at least for the priority areas, let's get it into use. Let's evolve it, and let's just systematically, year on year, as we hand out the money, ask for the reporting.' Now, I know that in some cases the outcomes will not appear for 15, 20, 25 years or whatever, but some of them are going to appear a lot faster than that. I know also that if we have what I would call a wholesome approach to outcome reporting, there will not be the inane rush to go for the quick outputs – rather than outcomes – such as the amount of external dollars that you are generating, because that is one that you can hold up and say, 'Look, we've measured it and here it is, and this year is better than last year.' But it is like building up networks: it sounds formidable, but if you don't start doing it, then five years down the track, or two election time frames down the track, or one generation down the track, you don't have the data that you can point back to and say, 'See? Told you so,' or, 'See? We really ought to be doing more of this,' or, 'Actually, that wasn't really worth much, so let's reduce it.' I am not talking about single-area here, I am talking about the totality of Australia's innovation system and this key part of it, the R&D part of it.

So I would see this exercise as a chance of raising the overall profile – that's important – and getting outcome language in as a matter of routine. The NHMRC outcome framework was referred to, and that is clear leadership. Let's spread that type of approach across the whole spectrum.

My second closing point was just to comment on a few of the basics. Higher education is under review on at the moment. The block funded part of research, which is – depending on your estimates – the best part of $2 billion, is not part of this priority setting process, but I would see that if we get priority setting right, then it sets the trend that says more competitive funding rather than less. And I go to the hallmarks of competitive funding – which many of you have heard me on with monotonous regularity, but I am at least consistent. If it is taxpayers' money funding R&D, you go for excellence, you go for collaboration and you go for connectivity. By connectivity I mean connectivity through to commercialisation, if that is the appropriate thing for that R&D. If it is not, then connectivity through to end users so that it is picked up and used, whether it is in policy or in the wider community or whatever: excellence, collaboration and connectivity. I would see much more put in the competitive pot with those drivers as part of the priority process.

How often do you have to go through what we have just gone through? I don't know the answer to that. I know in the commercial world - wearing a Rio Tinto hat – how often we look at the longer-term and large-scale priorities. We are aware, as was intimated for BHP Billiton, that there are some things you have to let run for quite some while before you decide whether you are on the right track or not. And I think a lot of areas that we could be looking at here are going to generate results anyway. So we have to leave things run. But that doesn't mean you leave it run for 10 years before you come back. It says that you might come back on about a three-year time scale, and you may well decide, at that point, that the settings are right: you don't want to add any, and you don't want to remove any. But you would come back at regular intervals – and I suspect three years is about right – to review the situation.

Equally, how much is a question that you can't answer at the moment. The 'how much?' question as to how much of our total effort should be in the priority areas assumes all sorts of things about the base: whether we are expanding or contracting, how important these areas are, whether these areas capture the imagination in the way that I suggested and whether these areas are able to generate plausible and credible outcomes on both the shorter and the longer time scales. And it is only when you start to get a feel for all of those factors that you can say how much. That, to me, urges a certain sense of conservatism, in terms of how much is in the priority area for these whole-of-government areas versus being terribly connected and saying, 'Well, if you can justify the priority area' – assuming we keep then one separate priority for the base of supporting work – 'why wouldn't you put 100 per cent of your activity in it?' And I think the arguments are just so strong against that, that you come back to the much more conservative position that I have outlined.