Why reviews of R&D fail – by Mark Dodgson

The federal government has announced a strategic examination of R&D, the latest in a series of inquiries into Australia’s faltering innovation system. Here Mark Dodgson looks at why previous reviews have failed to have real impact.

The history of reviews of research and innovation in Australia[1] follows a predictable and disheartening cycle.

It starts with momentum building about the need to do something about our poor performance. This usually builds around a switched-on politician with some academic input but rarely from demands from business.

A review is announced with bold ambitions and timid terms of reference. Chairs and panels are created, and mountains of information—usually partial and rarely independent—are compiled.

There’s noise from interested parties—from the ‘commercialisation’ and ‘R&D tax incentive’ industries to the universities—but seldom from mainstream business.

Reports are written whose conclusions are more or less predictable beforehand. Governments promise to respond by doing some minor tinkering, and the reports join others, collecting dust on the shelves of a few sad academics like myself.

I very much hope the current Strategic Examination of R&D severs this cycle. If it doesn’t, then it would be much quicker and cheaper to get it done using ChatGPT. To do so, it needs, in my opinion, to address four main problems.

Lack of connection to the everyday concerns of citizens.

Talk to the average person on the street about research and innovation, and what jumps to mind will be a boffin in a lab coat or a fledgling entrepreneur prattling on in a coffee shop about their digital start-up.

What will not come to mind is that research and innovation will make their journey to work easier by sorting out transport problems, will get their granny’s hip replaced more quickly and safely, will provide their children access to information and skills to improve their life choices, and will build better and cheaper homes.

Unless the connection is made between research and the everyday experiences of citizens (and not ‘building future industries’ or ‘ensuring future competitiveness’), then they will not create the enthusiasm of voters so necessary to get influential politicians engaged with actually changing things.

When I became involved in the first of these cycles in the 1980s, in discussions with people of the status and authority of John Button and Ralph Slatyer, they always presumed the trades unions would be involved; indeed, at the time, the ACTU sometimes led the national discussion on the need for new technological investments and skills.

The voice of working people has rarely been heard on this subject since. Such disengagement and openness to accusations of elitism is most unwise in the present political climate.

That’s not to say the discussion about research and innovation needs only to be grounded in the day-to-day to get people’s attention. Referring to the excitement of discovery, exploration of the unknown, and thrill of the new is universally inspiring.

Lack of authoritative voices from business.

I recall, many years ago, Margaret Thatcher taking the axe to UK universities to the shouts of outrage from academics.

She only stopped when Sir John Harvey-Jones, Chairman of ICI, told her that if the cuts continued, he would move his company’s considerable research budget offshore.

Politicians listen more to CEOs than Vice-Chancellors. In all my years researching this field in Australia, I have known fewer than half a dozen business leaders of the calibre of Catherine Livingstone and David Thodey, capable of inspiring action on research and innovation in government on behalf of the nation as well as business.

The Business Council of Australia has been lamentable in this regard, always preferring a whinge about industrial relations over a forceful and articulate voice for creating Australian businesses fit for a modern technological economy.

Lack of organisational memory.

I once asked a PhD student to go through the 100 or so reports on innovation in Australia I had on my shelf (gathering dust) to look for cross-references. She found four or five. Previous research is ignored.

This is partly a problem in government where there simply isn’t the capacity to collect, absorb, and curate what is already known. There probably hasn’t been since the dissolution of the Australian Science and Technology Council in 1997, although its capacities were steadily cut back over the years since its foundation 20 years previously.

All government has to listen to is the Productivity Commission, for whom research and innovation, as the major motors of productivity in all modern economies, are a bit of a mystery, best ignored.

It is also a condemnation of the universities and the ARC, which continually argue about the importance of what they do but have never created a sustainable independent research capacity in this field to properly assess what is known and learn from our and others’ experiences of what works.

I recall an eminent scientist writing in an Academy publication that such research is unnecessary in Australia as it is conducted in the USA, perhaps failing to notice we weren’t living in Silicon Valley.

This is an example of the kind of roadblock to the creation of independent, research-based information relevant to Australia, not based on lobbying power or special pleading: independent and Australian.

Not only do we not know what we don’t know, we don’t even know what we do know because we don’t ask and can’t remember.

It’s about management, stupid.

STEM skills are important, but so are the skills that put them to productive use. Innovation management skills in Australia are impoverished.

These are the crucial skills that take research into application, successfully applying new ideas to create value.

If the concern lies in the connections between research and business, look at the vectors: the managers in research institutions, businesses, and their intermediaries that encourage and enable transfers and exchanges to occur.

Our business schools are culpable, very much more attuned to teaching cutting up the cake rather than growing it.

There are more innovation researchers in Harvard Business School than in the whole of Australia. There are teaching programs on entrepreneurship and a few on innovation management, but not using cutting-edge Australian research and insights, taught by academics immersed in business problems and solutions who test their ideas through the challenge of peer-reviewed publications.

It’s also a problem of being what you can’t see. Look around the Boards of most significant Australian businesses, and you will see lawyers and accountants: lots of them.

What you won’t see is many people who have built their careers through research and innovation. When research and innovation are seen as variable costs vulnerable to be cut, rather than sustained investments creating exciting futures, you’re hardly likely to attract the cream of management talent.

All the reviews in this area have not failed in the stark sense implied in the title of this article.

There is progress after every review, albeit not at the scale their efforts warrant.

What they have failed to do is get the politicians and policymakers that matter to take the subject seriously because it isn’t meaningful for voters, and they lack an urgent, informed voice from business.

They have failed because they haven’t learned from previous reviews, they’re swamped with special pleading, and they usually duck the problem that we’re very poor at researching and teaching research and innovation management and just as bad at practicing it.

Further reading:
25 years of R&D reviews – By Dr John Howard
Download the ebook of @AuManufacturing’s editorial series Towards 3% – turbocharging Australia’s innovation efforts here.

Mark Dodgson AO has advised governments and businesses in Australia on research and innovation for nearly 40 years. (www.markdodgson.org). Mark is Emeritus Professor at University of Queensland. This article first appeared in the Acton Institute for Policy Research and Innovation (AIPRI) here and is republished with permission.

Picture: Mark Dodgson