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| CSIRO | SOLVE | Issue 9 | NOV 06 | |
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COVER STORY
VIEWPOINT:
The Big Challenge By Brad Collis
Time to unleash the power of scienceAs Australia's economic landscape is increasingly buffeted by global economic forces, one of the country's premier research bodies, CSIRO, has restructured its research management and reviewed the way it engages with industry. As she nears the end of her tenure as Board chairman, Catherine Livingstone explains why change within CSIRO is vital to Australia's capacity to ride increasingly rapid and pervasive global economic movements. In an interview with science writer Brad Collis, Catherine Livingstone outlines core issues and opportunities facing Australian industry. She warns against any temptation to simply hope the global economic dice will fall Australia's way, saying a capacity to trade aggressively in the new 'knowledge economy' is vital. In a recent poll conducted for the Lowy Institute, the Sydney-based independent international policy think-tank, global warming rated ahead of international terrorism as the primary threat to Australia's vital interest. The poll indicated that improving the global environment should be Australia's top foreign policy goal. Two-thirds of respondents wanted steps taken immediately to tackle global warming, even if the cost is high. The Lowy Institute poll is just part of the growing public debate on climate change, fuelled again in recent months by the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, presented by former US vice-president Al Gore. The documentary portrays a planet in environmental crisis, but reaction continues to range from alarm and frustration to scepticism or denial. Few, if any, have stood up to suggest that global warming could potentially also be an extraordinary technological opportunity. It is a viewpoint brimming with latent potential, which is why it is being raised by one of Australia's leading R&D figures. Catherine Livingstone, Chair of CSIRO and a Board Member of Telstra and Macquarie Bank, believes global warming could be one of the biggest opportunities this country has ever had. Her point is that global warming needs an unprecedented technological assault and as has been proven time and again, large-scale scientific programs tend to unearth a wealth of knowledge and industry potential. "The world is looking for solutions and technologies," she says. "It is an area in which Australia could take a lead with enormous economic rewards, if we are able to make it our knowledge and technologies that are sought out. "It would produce an innovation yield the likes of which we have never seen before. But it needs to be articulated at the national leadership level, and there needs to be a greater alertness in government and boardrooms to the power of science." Catherine Livingstone's determination to try to raise the profile of a technological response to climate change with both government and industry stems from her view that it transcends all other issues: "It affects everything and everyone." Part of the challenge, however, in bringing enough science to bear on issues as pervasive as climate change is finding a way to engender public debate that takes its cue from science. Catherine Livingstone still believes that CSIRO's reputation as a trusted organisation that is able to impartially inform the community is intact, even though recent restructuring and shifts in focus have met at times with an antagonistic response. She suggests that it may be time for a change in approach for science communication, because the hard reality today is that science is presenting people with increasing ambiguity. "Less and less are we able to give clear answers. With regard to global warming, for example, unequivocal answers to every question are just not possible because there is still so much more to know. "So the task is to communicate ambiguity scientifically; in a manner that makes the range of opinion itself understood and less easily seized on by vested interests." She says one obvious example of a debate that has slipped away from science is GM (genetically modified) crops, and she wonders if it can ever be brought back to the facts, despite the increasingly urgent need for crops that are tolerant to drought, or crops that can confer direct community health benefits. "CSIRO is well advanced with the technology that would allow plant breeders to give certain land crops the same genetic capability that makes marine plants (phytoplankton) produce long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. These are vital to healthy cell function in people and are only available at the moment by eating fish that have fed on phytoplankton. As a consequence we are depleting fish stocks all around the world. "We have the technology to redress this and to create important new agricultural and food industries, but the science and all potential commercial development have been hamstrung by a protracted and at times ill-informed debate."
The CSIRO Chair says she has similar concerns for the fate of nanotechnology, a science that could underpin the next generation of manufacturing, but which is already being misconstrued in some of the early media coverage and debate. She says that with all these there is still a bottom-line choice. You can grow GM crops or not grow them: "Climate change is not a matter of choice; that's why the first country that really starts to apply itself to developing solutions is going to harvest an unprecedented innovation yield." This, by default, means a much higher level of engagement between science and industry than has been the norm in Australia. It is likely to require them to be more willing to initiate R&D relationships, rather than scientists simply taking to the hustings to hawk their technologies and ideas to the highest (or least uninterested) bidder. Catherine Livingstone hopes that an imminent Productivity Commission report into science and innovation will trigger an extensive national debate on Australia's commitment to R&D – and be the catalyst for a more proactive approach to using science that can anchor economic and industry development in this country. "It comes back to the question: 'What are we trying to achieve…just commercialisation or real knowledge transfer?' If it is knowledge transfer then I think we can start to have a more productive conversation," she says. "To seek the benefit of intellectual property from its point of departure from a research institution is extraordinarily difficult, as evidenced by the fact that even in best-practice cases, barely two or three per cent of a research institution's income is derived from commercialisation or a royalty stream. "And it is not a matter of telling scientists to be more commercial. To a business, ideas at the point they leave a research institution have little value because until you put in the 400-times investment to develop and market the product, you don't have anything. So pushing the research sector to 'commercialise' runs the risk of merely perpetuating a tense relationship between industry and researchers. "But neither is it appropriate in a global context to simply say here is the IP, anyone can have it. It is public money that has been invested and we must have regard for the national interest." Catherine Livingstone says this whole issue is in fact an area that CSIRO is now exploring – different industry engagement models, that maximise the impact of its research in industry while also securing enough of a return flow of resources to make the business (of research) sustainable. She says different approaches will be needed according to the circumstances: "Where benefits are localised, then it might be in the best interests of the country to transfer the IP at no cost. Conversely, where an industry is mature and highly profitable, then that might be a different basis for engagement. "The question to be asked is what will maximise the national benefit?" She feels the impact of globalisation is still only partially understood, such has been the pace of change, but says it has enormous ramifications for Australian science and industry and their capacity to give a national economy enough resilience to withstand, or ride with, powerful global movements. Globalisation, in the modern sense, is considered by students of global affairs to have arrived in the mid-1990s on the back if what Thomas Friedman in The World Is Flat attributed to the lightning-swift advances in technology and communications. Within a very short period a large number of people had access to the internet and its information resources – a broadband pipe that is allowing enormous amounts of data to move almost instantaneously around the world – and mobile telephony. As Friedman describes it, globalisation has shifted from 'corporate' to 'individual', and Catherine Livingstone believes the central issue facing Australian industry is how it participates in the global economy: "It is a huge question that needs more conscious thought, public discussion and science–industry coordination than we ever previously had. "It is the global market now that allocates resources and it has no regard for Australia's national interest. And the more that our industry is globally oriented or organised, the less it too will be concerned with the national interest. This is a big change that has taken place, because it means government can no longer rely on market forces for the resource allocation that ensures the social and economic wellbeing of its citizens. "National governments, particularly in small, open economies such as Australia's, need to be thinking very hard about the consequences of a global market working its efficiency factors on a national environment." For the CSIRO Chair, these are huge issues and are already being manifested in skills shortages and increasing competition for students and researchers in higher education facilities.
To meet this competition, she is urging new and long-term government, industry and research sector partnerships: "We have to think together and the outcome must be the development of globally relevant research and knowledge that makes certain that Australia keeps its seat at the global table. "If we don't have technologies to trade, we will be forced to buy…what we probably won't be able to afford." Catherine Livingstone is quick to remind that for the moment Australia does have a research organisation, CSIRO, with a global reach. "For example, one of the emerging sectors of significance is the bio-economy and the OECD is in the process of establishing a governance framework. CSIRO is representing Australia in that process because of its internationally recognised capabilities." It is these capabilities that she wants industry and government to better understand and build on: "If not, economic gravity will drain Australia." The developments driving globalisation since the mid to late 1990s have changed the way people live, work, run industries and do research, and it was the perceived need to bring CSIRO's inner workings up to speed that prompted the restructuring that has taken place over the past few years. There was a sudden discontinuity with previous business systems and CSIRO was not alone in being caught lagging, particularly when its core business, research, has long lead times. There was a sense by the turn of the century, certainly in industry, that CSIRO was not aligning itself to the new environment. It was during this hiatus that Catherine Livingstone joined the CSIRO Board and in many ways her perspective on challenges like economic globalisation has come to reflect the way CSIRO's Board and management have redirected the organisation, which she says was only just starting to realise the need for some clear enunciation or 'meeting of minds' on its role in this new globalised world. "Like many in industry, I regarded CSIRO as having a virtuous approach to research and I was certainly mindful of all the anecdotal stories about 'he ones that got away'. "It was soon clear why that was the case. CSIRO comprised many disparate divisions working within, but not for, CSIRO. This was not sustainable at a time of mounting pressure on CSIRO to demonstrate what the government was getting for its investment – especially given that CSIRO was also no longer the only major research centre available. "But to be accountable you have to know, clearly, what your role is and reflect this to people you engage with, be they in government or industry. There was also not a great deal of understanding in government or industry about the value and role of CSIRO." She says the Board considered it CSIRO's responsibility to change this by developing and articulating a clear direction. It began by initiating a five-year (2003–07) strategic plan based on six overarching goals to:
"These goals required hard decisions about what we were doing, and also what we were not doing or would no longer do." CSIRO's research has become theme-based – with a focus on 'big picture' objectives from which flow research streams comprising specific research projects. "Organising CSIRO's research under 'themes' is a fundamental transformation for the organisation because they are making it more transparent, accountable, flexible and relevant." Investment is at the theme-level based on a Science Investment Planning (SIP) process, which involves a systematic whole-of-organisation review of the science being done and the 'path to market' potential. The new approach seeks to harness and deploy CSIRO's multidisciplinary capacity onto national research priorities by making it flexible enough to respond quickly to community or industry needs, by increasing its global reach, and also by clarifying its fundamental reason for existing. "The theme approach improves our flexibility and responsiveness because it allows CSIRO to form multidisciplinary teams to respond rapidly and with enormous capacity," Catherine Livingstone says.
The National Research Flagships initiative has become the expression of this new approach, with considerable Australian Government backing. Flagships are research partnerships with industry, governments and other research bodies, tackling large-scale national objectives in health, water, energy, food, light metals and oceans. "As part of our response to climate change, for example, the Energy Transformed Flagship research program is developing clean affordable energy and transport technologies to try to help halve Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The Light Metals Flagship is exploring new ways to produce alumina, aluminium, magnesium and titanium, and the products made from them, so that manufacturers can reduce costs and pollution, plus lift their competitive performance." The CSIRO Board has also sought to make the organisation's own performance more transparent under the themes approach, because they have clear output goals against which every downstream research project can be monitored: "If a particular project hits a dead end, you stop it and redeploy the money and knowledge gained to that point into other parts of the stream that are contributing to the theme's goals." However, in the course of developing a new management model and with talk of becoming more commercial, CSIRO has been criticised in some quarters for moving away from 'public good' and 'blue sky' research in favour of contract research that is industry problem-solving rather than knowledge-building. Catherine Livingstone argues, however, that defining its role strengthens CSIRO's long-term commitment to pure research: "The difference between now and five years ago is that at any given moment we can actually say how much of a theme's research streams are being directed to short- or long-term goals, or to public good research versus specific industry support. "And CSIRO still has the same mandate to take risks for Australian society and industry – it just can't have all of its research directed at high-risk horizons." As for industry-oriented research, she says the objective continues to be the development of long-term relationships with industry sectors. "Having a good understanding of where an industry is going, and the challenges it is likely to face, puts us in a position where we can help both the sector and individual businesses within it. There are already very good examples of this in CSIRO's long-term relationships with the mining and agricultural sectors. "However, new or emerging sectors require even more of an effort to build these relationships. The biotechnology sector is a case in point, and is probably an area where CSIRO needs to go much further than halfway to engage with the industry and businesses and encourage people to ask us the questions that will prepare us for a supporting role. "The other opportunity that is presenting itself is to identify areas in which CSIRO can develop competencies that are anchored in Australia and that create a whole new space in which Australian industry can grow. This is behind the work being done, for example, in the Light Metals Flagship, and is starting to give shape to what could become a whole new industry. "This is where we want to be; in a position to deploy good science that builds industry, strengthens our environment and creates the economic vigour that ensures the wellbeing of the community as a whole." For further information contact: |
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