Australia's Nobel Laureates III State of Our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond by One Mandate Group

Australia’s

Nobel Laureates

Vol III

State of Our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

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Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

Australia’s

Nobel Laureates

Vol III

State of Our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

ISBN: 978-0-646-83095-7 Company Background Dedicated to the exposition of knowledge, the promotion of innovative ideas and new communication technologies, One Mandate Group (1MG) began in Australia in 1982 when International Media Representatives was founded in Sydney and Hong Kong. Today, it has evolved to incorporate a wide domestic and international group of thinkers, specialists, and writers. Across many endeavours for nearly 40 years, its principal focus has been Science, Technology, Innovation, and Education. The company is propelled by the experience and intellectual property of companies founded and owned by present-day management – in research, magazine and book publishing, television, special project publishing, marketing, web, digital and software operations, events and conferences. Since 2015, 1MG has operated as a NFP Social Enterprise. Previously Published The Australian Farmer – Annually updated digital book/resource – continuously published 2017 onwards Boundless Plains to Share: Australia’s Agribusiness Partnership with Asia – Century 21 – 2017 Australia’s Nobel Laureates: Adventures in Innovation, Volume 2 – 2012 Rethinking Innovation; in collaboration with IBM, New York – 2010 Melbourne: Global Smart City – 2009 Private Word magazine, in collaboration with NAB – 2008–2011 In Case of Emergency – 2008 To Build a Nation – 2007 Sustainable Nation: Managing Australia’s Future – 2006 Fast Thinking; quarterly innovation journal – 2005–2012 Waterfront Spectacular – 2005 Champions in Sport and Life – 2004 Australia’s Nobel Laureates: Adventures in Innovation, Volume 1 – 2003 Australian Business and Investment Explorer – 2002, 2003 Australian Business and Investment Guide – 1990 The Australian Adventure – 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992

Copyright © 2021 by One Mandate Group Pty Ltd, Australia All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner. Use of this book's contents is, however, encouraged and can be readily obtained: solutions@onemandate.com. We welcome requests for appropriate use.

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

DEDICATED TO BARRY JONES We are proud to dedicate this volume and its accompanying science and innovation campaign to the Honourable Dr Barry Jones AC.

he Honourable Dr Barry Jones AC is a bestselling writer, a respected broadcaster and one of Australia’s brightest minds who was Australia’s longest-serving Science Minister, from 1983 to 1990. He is a former Labor member of both the Victorian and federal parliaments who was the National President of the Australian Labor Party from 1992 to 2000, and then again from 2005 to 2006 when he was the first politician to raise public awareness of global warming, the "post-industrial" society, the IT revolution, biotechnology, the rise of "the Third Age" and the need to preserve Antarctica as a wilderness. Previously, he has served on the executive board of UNESCO in Paris from 1991 to 1995, was vice president of the World Heritage Committee from 1995 to 1996 and was a senior consultant to the OECD. Dr Jones is also the only Australian to have been elected Fellow of all four Australian learned academies – in Technological Sciences and Engineering in 1992, Humanities in 1993, Science in 1996, and Social Sciences in 2003. He was awarded an Order of Australia (AO) in 1993, was named as one of Australia’s 100 "living national treasures" in 1997, and in 2014 was awarded a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for his outstanding services as a leading intellectual in public life.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

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Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

FOREWORD

tories of discovery and innovation in both oral and written form have captured the collective imagination of our continent for more than 60,000 years. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities developed an intimate knowledge of the natural world by living within it. They developed sophisticated methods of land management. They understood the weather patterns, and the climate, and the movements of celestial bodies. They maintained their health, and nurtured relationships with the lives of animals and plants, and carefully observed weather patterns and seasons. As Adam Nicholson captured in his book, The Mighty Dead – Why Homer Matters, it is the telling and the retelling of the stories of remarkable human leaders and their achievements that define the tradition of the epic, through the creation of multiple acts of memory that bind humanity across the millennia. This present book reflects this tradition. It reconnects us with the stories of the discoveries and achievements of Australia’s Nobel Prize winners. It captures how these remarkable individuals pushed against the existing boundaries of human knowledge to reconfigure literature, art, science, and medicine, to advocate for humanity’s right to a peaceful existence. In the first section of the book, we become aware of the power of new knowledge, innovation, and disruption to change the future irrevocably. In the next section and over 90 distinguished and often disruptive leaders from across research, industry, and government reflect on the future of the "state of our Innovation Nation, 2023 and beyond’. This section celebrates Australia as a nation that continues to deliver new knowledge with enormous global potential, and which challenges us to embrace the opportunities of innovation. We ask questions on how the value afforded by research and innovation can connect to drive new supply chains, deliver equitable prosperity,

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

address climate change, improve our health and longevity, and deliver better outcomes for all. If Australia is to navigate the economic and the social transitions necessary for future success, we must respond early and effectively to the challenges posed by our most recent innovation and commercialisation performance measures. It is a challenge, but one that we as Australians can address with optimism. That is the way we are. We know that we need a diversity of ideas from talented individuals of different backgrounds, cultures, and abilities to generate the diversity of solutions necessary to fuel continued innovation. This book is an epic. It is intended to create an act of memory and become a key source text on innovation in Australia. But it should not rest easy on the coffee table. We have identified the challenges for the state of the Innovation Nation in 2023 and beyond. The time has come to confront them.

Professor Caroline McMillen AO Chief Scientist South Australia

ADVISORY BOARD

The Hon. Arthur Sinodinos AO The Hon Arthur Sinodinos AO is Australia’s Ambassador to the United States of America, having taken up his posting in Washington in February 2020. Ambassador Sinodinos was previously Australia’s Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science and was a Senator for New South Wales in the Australian Parliament from 2011 to 2019. During his parliamentary career, he also held other key roles both in and outside Cabinet, including Cabinet Secretary and Assistant Treasurer. In 2008 Ambassador Sinodinos was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for his service to politics, through the executive function of government, and to the development of economic policy and reform, and the Greek community.

Dr Peter Farrell AM Dr Peter Farrell, PhD, DSc, AM is founder and executive chairman of ResMed, a global leader in sleep health. Before founding ResMed in June 1989, he served as vice-president of R&D at various subsidiaries of Baxter International from 1984 to 1989, before stepping into the role of managing director of the Baxter Centre for Medical Research, a role in which he remained from 1985 to 1989. He currently serves on visiting committees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, and he was recently admitted to the US National Academy of Engineering. In 2001 he established the Farrell Family Foundation to contribute to the betterment of society through the support of education, health, human welfare, and the arts.

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

Professor Caroline McMillen AO Professor Caroline McMillen AO commenced in the role of Chief Scientist, South Australia in October 2018 after having served as vice-chancellor and president of the University of Newcastle between 2011 and 2018. She is an Officer of the Order of Australia, a fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, a Bragg Member of the Royal Institution of Australia, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales. She has served on international and national research, education, and innovation policy and review bodies and was a member of the Expert Advisory Group for Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE).

Martin Haese Martin Haese was the Lord Mayor of Adelaide from 2014 to 2018. He has served as a presiding member, chairman, and director on the boards of several commercial, community, and government organisations. He holds an MBA (with honours) from the Australian Institute of Business and is a keen entrepreneur. He is also the CEO of Business SA, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s body in South Australia. He is the chair of the Premier’s Climate Change Council and a founding member of the Australian Broadband Advisory Council, and is a member of the University of Adelaide’s Rhodes Scholarship Selection Committee for Oxford University.

Professor Roy Green Roy Green is emeritus professor and chair of the Innovation Council at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), where he was previously dean of the UTS Business School. He has a PhD in economics from the University of Cambridge and has worked in universities, business, and government in Australia and overseas. He has published widely in the areas of innovation policy and management, including research projects with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation. He is currently chair of the Port of Newcastle, chair of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Hub, and a board member of the Innovative Manufactur-ing Cooperative Research Centre.

Ron Gauci Ron Gauci has been the CEO of the Australian Information Industry Association, the peak industry body for the digital industry in Australia, since December 2018. Previously, he has served as co-opt vice chairman of the Asian–Oceanian Computing Industry Organization; as a non-executive direc-tor and chairman of Vicsport, Brad Teal Real Estate, AusMuse, CAMSF, and Softball Australia; and as CEO and managing director of the Melbourne Storm Rugby League Club from July 2010 to May 2013. He has also been a partner of IBM Australia, vice president and managing director of Verizon Business, and interim CEO of both Melbourne Polytechnic (formerly the Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE) and Fed Square Pty Ltd. He is a former fellow of the Australian Institute of Management and a former member of the International CEO Forum, and has previously held a position on the board of governors for the American Chamber of Commerce.

Dr Tony Lindsay Dr Tony Lindsay currently serves as Australian director of Lockheed Martin’s STELaRLab, Lockheed’s first R&D lab outside of the US. He has previously worked for the Department of Defence Science Technology as a researcher in electronic warfare; as a counsellor in defence science for the Australian Embassy in Washington, DC; as part of a diplomatic posting from December 2005 to February 2008, and as a division chief; before moving to Lockheed Martin as one of Australia’s most respected defence scientists. Jeff Lang Jeff Lang is the managing director and founder of Titomic Ltd, an Australian additive manufacturing specialist that serves defence, aerospace, automotive, construction, mining, and transport industries across Australia, Europe, the US, and Asia. He has previously served as vice president and board director of Matrix Sportgoods Co., Ltd, where he was awarded Best Foreign Expat in the Ningbo region, and Force Industries Pty Ltd, where he served as both managing director and chief technology officer of product development and won a European ISPO award for best new innovative sports product.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Professor Vasso Apostolopoulos Professor Vasso Apostolopoulos was awarded her PhD in 1995 from the University of Melbourne and an Ad-vanced Certificate in Protein Crystallography from the University of London. Her expertise is in the areas of immunology, crystallography, cellular biology, translational research, and development of drugs and vaccines. She has directed several research programs at the Austin Research Institute, the Burnet Institute, the Centre for Chronic Disease at Victoria University (VU), and the Institute for Health and Sport at VU. She was the Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research (interim) and the Pro Vice-Chancellor, Research Partnerships, and is currently the Associate Provost, Research Partnerships, at VU. She has received 100 awards, published 405 research papers, and is an inventor of 18 patents and 90 sub-patents. Her current interests are treating chronic diseases with an immunological focus. More recently, her lab has been working on developing drugs against the SARSCoV-2 virus.

Anne Nalder Anne Nalder is the Founder and CEO of Small Business Association of Australia. Anne was previously a member of the Women’s Royal Australian Airforce and had a lengthy career with major domestic airline Trans Australia Airlines leading special events. Amongst notable achievements was the first female president of the prestigious The Southport School Foundation and Chair of the Board. Following many years running her small business, Anne founded the Small Business Association of Australia (SBAA), a national organisation that supports and advocates for small business. The SBAA is a progressive association achieving a number of firsts in the area of advocacy including the Small Business Charter of Australia, which is currently before the Commonwealth Government as this will have a positive impact for Australian small businesses. Anne is committee member on numerous government and private enterprise businesses that allows her to be the true voice of small business and invited to be speaker on behalf of small business nationally and internationally. Professor Heather Cavanagh Professor Heather Cavanagh has a long history of developing and supporting education and research, and held the positions of Associate Dean (Deputy Dean) and Acting Executive Dean of Science prior to her appointment as the inaugural Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Global Engagement (Research & Partnerships) at Charles Sturt University. Over many years, Professor Cavanagh has been instrumental in leading and developing offshore programs, developing and maintaining strong research relationships with international institutions, and developing partnerships and pathways for domestic and international students. Frank Seeley AM Frank Seeley AM is the executive chairman and founder of Seeley International. Founded in 1972, Seeley International is known for its technical innovation and product leadership, and has become Australia’s leading manufacturer of heating and cooling systems. He was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2001, was named South Australian Entrepreneur of the Year in 2005, and in 2010 was the state winner of the Jason Lea Award at the South Australian Family Business of the Year Awards. Seeley International was also named the national winner of the First-Generation Family Business of the Year Award in 2010. In 2012 he was recognised for dedicating his life to Australian manufacturing and won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Manufacturer’s Monthly Endeavour Awards.

Harley Paroulakis Harley Paroulakis is the CEO of the Darwin-based Paspalis Corporation and is responsible for the company’s investment management program and the Darwin Innovation Hub. He is a respected member of the Australian Investment Council and established the Northern Territory’s first two venture capital funds in 2018 and 2020. He has previously held senior positions with Bank of America Merrill Lynch (Singapore), Foundation Capital and Honeywell International. Professor Ian Brighthope Professor Ian Brighthope is the founder and managing director of Entoura (medicinal cannabis) and the current president of Brighthope Health Limited. After graduating from Monash University, in agricultural science in 1965 and in medicine and surgery in 1974, he established the Brighthope Clinics and Biocentres in the late 1970s. In 1979 he founded the Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine, where he helped to educate medical practitioners on the principles and practice of nutritional and environmental medicine and pioneered the first postgraduate medical course in nutrition in Australia. He is currently the director of nutritional and environmental medicine at the National Institute of Integrative Medicine. Wendy McMillan Wendy McMillan is President, Australia and New Zealand at Bombardier Transportation and has over 30 years’ experience in executive management positions, within both the public and the private sectors, in transport, infrastructure, construction, resources, and agribusiness. She brings executive experience gained in the government, rail, infrastructure, and consulting sectors and in senior roles at Queensland Rail, Everything Infrastructure Group, John Holland Group, and the Port of Brisbane Corporation. She is also a past director of Queensland Rail. Ben Kehoe Ben Kehoe has worked for four decades at the coal-face of Australian business. He pioneered strategy and learning in business in the 1980s, coaching business leaders in the early 1990s and the establishment of Advisory Boards in the late 1990s into 2000s. In that time, he has spent approximately 20,000 hours in strategic conversations with the leaders of over 250 different Australian business. In December 2019, he self-published Innovation in Australia -Creating Prosperity For Future Generations - the first ever book on Australian Innovation. Ben has chaired numerous Business Advisory Boards and has served in the governance of Rugby (ARU and QRU), the Australian Institute of Company Directors, and the Australian Institute of Training and Development.

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

SPONSORS The publishers extend our profound thanks to the fine and forward-looking companies and organisations that acted as sponsors of this book and its attendant “knowledge campaign”. Without their involvement, the scope of this effort would have been significantly reduced. In our view, they have made a positive contribution to Australian society. Platinum

DiverseCo

Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources

Elders Ltd

The Australian Technology Network of Universities

Epson Australia

Gold Blackmores Ltd Entoura Pty Ltd Johnson & Johnson Medical Pty Ltd ResMed Titomic Ltd CRC TIME Silver Adbri Ltd Aerometrex Ltd Alertness CRC ANCA Amiga Engineering Aspen Medical AstraZeneca Australia Post Australian Ethical Investment Ltd Beston Global Food Company Ltd Bombardier Boral Ltd Brickworks Ltd Bulla Dairy Foods Business SA Canberra Data Centres Casella Family Brands Cisco Systems Australia Pty Ltd City of Bunbury Cochlear Ltd CRC for Water Sensitive Cities Ltd Defence Science and Technology Device Technologies Diamantina Institute

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Electro Optic Systems Pty Ltd Esri Australia FrontierSi Icon Group Innovative Manufacturing CRC Intuit Janssen-Cilag Pty Ltd La Trobe University Lego Australia Pty Ltd Lions Eye Institute Lockheed Martin Australia Pty Ltd Low Carbon Living CRC Maserati Meat & Livestock Australia Merck Healthcare Pty Ltd and Merck Pty Ltd Micro Focus Australia Pty Ltd OpenLearning Ltd Paspalis Group Pfizer Australia Philmac Pty Ltd QANTM Intellectual Property Ltd Sentek Technologies Shoal Group Pty Ltd Soil CRC South Australian Research and Development Institute Southern Cross University Spruson & Ferguson TechnologyOne Ltd The Institute of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys of Australia TransGrid Victoria University Waite Research Institute Wollongong City Council

ALLIANCE PARTNERS The publishers warmly thank the many score of enthusiastic cooperating organisations across Australia. They continue to act as ambassadors for the overall pro-science and innovation campaign of which this book is the centrepiece. They have provided advice, authorship, and, significantly, distribution support. Australia's Nobel Laureates Volume III is a dynamic knowledge campaign, comprising an easy-to-access online tome, and leveraged by proprietary digital methods and social media, as well as the delivery of deluxe print books. In this manner, various parts of the book, such as "Women in Science", and other sections will be distributed as standalone items, targeting specific audiences, for several years. Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes Association of Independent Schools of South Australia Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine Australian Academy of Science Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering Australian Association of Uncrewed Systems Australian Council of Recycling Australian Dairy Products Federation Australian Electric Vehicle Association Australian Healthcare & Hospitals Association Australian Information Industry Association Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology Australian Maritime College The Australian Institute of Project Management Australian Local Government Association Australian Manufacturing Technology Institute Ltd Australian Packaging and Processing Machinery Association Australian Packaging Covenant Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association Australian Science Teachers Association Australian Technology Network Australian Water Association Australian Water Partnership Boral Ltd Burnet Institute Business SA The CEO Institute Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport Clean Energy Council Climate Change Authority Committee for Economic Development of Australia CRC for Transformations in Mining Economies Defence Science and Technology Defence Teaming Centre Deloitte Australia Energy Networks Australia

The Financial Services Institute of Australasia Fred Hollows Foundation Hargraves Institute Heart Research Institute Hewlett Packard Enterprise Hydrogen Society of Australia Independent Schools Queensland Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation Infrastructure SA Infrastructure Sustainability Council Innovative Manufacturing CRC The Institute of Patent and Trade Mark Attorneys of Australia Meat and Livestock Australia Medical Technology Association of Australia Medicines Australia Minerals Council of Australia Northern Territory Farmers Association Paspalis Group Powerhouse Museum Queensland Museum Questacon – National Science and Technology Centre Regional Universities Network ResMed Responsible Investment Association Australasia Robotics Australia Group Royal Aeronautical Society Australian Division Small Business Association of Australia Sport Australia Startup Victoria Supply Chain & Logistics Association of Australia Surface Coatings Association Sustainable Economic Growth for Regional Australia Waite Research Institute

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

CONTENTS DEDICAT I O N : BAR R Y J O N E S

ON E M AN DAT E GR O U P

F OREWO R D

A DVIS O R Y BOAR D

SPONS O R S

A LLI AN CE PAR T N ER S

AUSTRALIA’S NOBEL LAUREATES

NOBEL AU S T R ALI AN S

WILLI AM H EN R Y BR AGG , W I L L I A M L AW R E N C E B R AG G

HOWAR D WALT ER FLO R EY

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1945

F RA N K M ACFAR LAN E BU R N E T

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1960

JOHN CAR EW ECCLES

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1963

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

CONTENTS AL EKSA NDR MI K H AI LOVI CH P R O K H O R OV

Nobel Prize in Physics, 1964

BE R NA RD KAT Z

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1970

PATRIC K WHI T E

Nobel Prize in Literature, 1973

J OHN WA RC U P CO R N FO R T H

110

Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1975

P E TER DOHER T Y

122

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1996

J ROBIN WA R R EN , BAR R Y J M AR S H A L L

134

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2005

E LIZA BETH HELEN BLACK BU R N

14 6

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2009

B RIA N PAUL S CH M I DT

158

Nobel Prize in Physics, 2011

ICAN: INTERNAT I O N AL CAM PAI GN TO A B O L I SH N UC L E A R W EA PON S

16 8

Nobel Peace Prize, 2017

STATE OF OUR I N N OVAT I O N N AT I O N 2 0 23 A N D B E YO N D

18 0

Professors, politicians, entrepreneurs, and experts examine their own piece of Australia’s innovation puzzle, exploring the question: how can Australia improve its innovation outcomes?

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

STATE OF OUR INNOVATION NATION: 2023 AND BEYOND 212 CU LT U R E CH AN G E How can Australia build a more innovative business culture, that embraces risks?

24 0 FU N DI N G O U R FU T UR E Who pays for innovation, and how? And where should Australia invest for the highest innovation gains?

2 72 S M AR T ER CI T I ES We have more datapoints than ever before. How can we make use of this information to better plan, shape, and reinvent our cities and regions, getting the most from our human capital?

298 R EVI TALI S I N G M AN U FAC T UR I N G What will Australia choose to manufacture in a world which has seen the fragility of global supply chains brutally exposed by a global pandemic?

A BR I GH T ER S PAR K I N A CH AN G I N G CLI M AT E :

312

Energy, Agriculture, and Water - How can innovation be embraced to secure Australia’s prosperity, ensuring resources are appropriately managed for future generations?

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

350 KNOW LEDGE I S P O WER How can Australia improve its education delivery, promote the diverse skill-sets that drive innovation, and maximise the output of its universities?

3 78 RESPEC T T H E S CI EN CE Australia’s top scientists give the inside account on how to improve the cutting-edge of innovation.

REC A LIBR AT I N G FO R T H E IN DUSTR I ES O F T H E FU T U R E

402

Space technology, quantum computing, and AI will be fiercely contested in the coming decades. How should Australia compete?

HEA LTH, BI OT ECH , AN D MEDIC INE

428

How do we speed up the process of commercialisation, moving from R&D to innovation in the marketplace?

IN N OVATI O N I N P R ACT I CE

464

Case studies of innovation across Australian businesses, institutions, and the public sector.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

494 T R AN S FO R M AT I O N S I N M I N I N G ECO N O M I ES

642 S P OT LI GH T : S O U T H AU S T R ALI A What makes South Australia's innovation ecosystem unique?

S P OT LI GH T : N O R T H E R N AU S T R ALI A

6 76

The Northern Territory exists on Asia's doorstep and has immense room for growth. How is innovation being embraced to grow the region?

WO M EN I N S T EM

692

First-person accounts from Australia's leading and emerging women across science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and leadership.

73 2 T H E I N N OVAT I VE H O USE H O L D The bigger view of the innovative household sees an emerging nexus of design, technology, new materials, connectivity, convenience and creativity for better living.

LEADER S S P EAK 20

73 8

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

NOBEL AUSTRALIANS By Stephan Wellink

he tyranny of distance has resulted in Australia becoming a nation of innovators. The achievements of Australia’s Nobel Laureates reflects the country’s inventiveness and drive. The year of 1901 is significant for both Australia and the Nobel prize. This was the year when Australia achieved nationhood and also the year when the first Nobel Prizes were awarded. Both Australia and the Nobel Prize have grown up together, jointly celebrating their centennial year. The Nobel Prizes are renowned throughout the world and bring the recipients great kudos and fame. The legacy of Alfred Bernhard Nobel (183396) rested with the fact he was able to combine his background in science with the vision of an industrialist and the drive of an entrepreneur. Nobel wrote literary works and was a keen observer of social matters and issues surrounding world peace. His legacy, the Nobel Prizes, reflect the interest he held during his life. Nobel nominated five areas for recognition: physics, chemistry, peace, literature, and physiology or medical works. Another award, the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, was established in 1968 and first awarded in 1969. CELEBRITY STATUS Each year, the announcement of the winners of the Nobel prizes causes great interest and excitement. It is the chance for scientists, writers, economists, and peace advocates to gain recognition for excellence in their spheres of intellectual pursuit. For a small window of time in October through December each year, the recipients acquire the celebrity of a sports champion or film star.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Contemporary Australia is recognised as an inventive and creative nation and these attributes can be traced back to our First Nations Peoples prior to 1768 when Captain James Cook was given command of the HMAS Endeavour. Cook's orders were to take scientists on an expedition from England via Tahiti and New Zealand in 1770 that subsequently led to the colonisation of Australia in 1788. It can be said that modern Australia was founded as a result of scientific expedition. The tyranny of distance has made it difficult for Australians to obtain, collaborate and share their knowledge outside of Australia’s shores. The introduction of air travel and the information technology revolution have greatly assisted Australia in contributing to the stock of human knowledge from home. PhDs were first awarded in Australia as recently as 1948 when Sir R.H. Myers became the first Australian to receive one. In the same year, Erica Wolff, an immigrant from Germany, was the first woman to receive a PhD in this country. Both graduated from the University of Melbourne. Until this time, Australians had to travel overseas for their doctorates and to do collaborative research. In spite of this disadvantage, Australia has built an excellent research infrastructure and has since trained many eminent researchers who have made – and will continue to make – significant impacts internationally. Why should we laud Australian recipients of the Prize and who are they? To answer these questions there is a need to understand the impact of the Prize itself. No other award in the world brings the prestige that a Nobel award deliveres. The Prize is seen as the watershed for all awards that honour

scientists and significant achievers in literature, peace, and economics. The honourees are those who have completed a piece of work that is considered by the Nobel committee to be a breakthrough and a significant contribution of new knowledge for the benefit of society. Australia has produced Nobel laureates in Chemistry (John Cornforth), Medicine or Physiology (John Eccles, Bernard Katz, Howard Florey, Frank Macfarlane Burnet, Peter Doherty, Barry Marshall, Robin Warren and Elizabeth Blackburn), Physics (Lawrence and William Bragg, Aleksandr Prokhorov and Brian Schmidt), Literature (Patrick White) and Peace (ICAN). Each Australian Laureate is unique, and their achievements transcend politics, prejudice, physical impairment, and refugee status. With the exception of Patrick White, all of the Australian laureates have been scientists. Like many great people, they have been comfortable in themselves and have not sought public recognition. Patrick White also possessed this quality. David Marr, author, and biographer of Patrick White related the story of how the Swedish Ambassador to Australia tried to contact White to advise him of this Nobel Prize win for Literature. White, a very private man, had an unlisted telephone number and even when his friends and colleagues were contacted, they would not break White’s rule about giving out his number. According to Marr’s book, Patrick White: A Life, if White’s rule were broken, “ …chaos followed". Australia’s Nobel Laureates seeks to raise awareness of the contribution these great Australians have made to society and acknowledge the credit they have brought to Australia through their achievements. These people flourished in an era when our country was growing up and finding its character. The country relied on allowing immigrants to enter and contribute to the welfare of the nation. Australia was a very different place last century. Katz and Prokhorov were both refugees. Katz (Physiology or Medicine 1970) found a home here after being persecuted as a Jew in Germany. He served in the Royal Australian Air Force in World War II. Prokhorov (Physics 1964) was born in Atherton, Queensland. His parents fled Russia at about the time of the Tsarist revolution and returned in 1923.

NOBEL LINKS There have been other Nobel laureates with links to Australia. An American, Daniel Gajdusek (Physiology or Medicine 1976), was an investigator at the Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne in the 1950’s when he began the work that would lead to his being awarded the Nobel Prize. John Harsanyi was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994, shared with John Nash Jnr and Reinhard Selten, for their pioneering analyses of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games. Although residing in the United States at the time, he had completed a master’s degree at the University of Sydney (1953) and had also worked in a research position at the Australian National University. The 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to South African born John Maxwell Coetzee who resides in Australia, where he is attached to the University of Adelaide. In times past, Australians have been compelled to pursue their careers abroad in order to be recognised as successes at home. This need to compete, combined with the quest for knowledge and creative pursuit, has meant Australians punch well above their weight in cultural, sporting, and scientific activities. Much has been written about the exploits of our sporting heroes and movie stars. This book attempts to go some way towards raising the awareness of a different type of hero, to celebrate their achievements and provide inspiration. Hungarian scientist professor Istvan Hargittai states in his book The Road to Stockholm that, from very early on, the Nobel prizes have been surrounded by an “aura” and that science in particular needs icons. The Australians featured in this book have all been high achievers who were rewarded by the ultimate recognition of excellence: the Nobel Prize.

Stephen Wellink is an associate with consulting and training company Calibre Communications and former director of Research and Commercialisation, University of Technology, Sydney. THE NOBEL PRIZE MEDAL Each medal features a different image depicting what the award is for. The medals for Physics and Chemistry feature an image that represents Nature

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

WILLIAM HENRY BRAGG Nobel Prize in Physics 1915

WILLIAM LAWRENCE BRAGG Nobel Prize in Physics 1915

HOWARD WALTER FLOREY Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1945

FRANK MACFARLANE BURNET Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1960

JOHN CARFEW ECCLES Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1963

ALEKSANDR MIKHAILOVICH PROKHOROV Nobel Prize in Physics 1964

BERNARD KATZ Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1970

PATRICK WHITE Nobel Prize in Literature 1973

JOHN WARCUP CORNSFORTH Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1975

PETER CHARLES DOHERTY Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1996

BARRY MARSHALL Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2005

ROBIN WARREN Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2005

ELIZABETH BLACKBURN Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009

BRIAN PAUL SCHMIDT Nobel Prize in Physics 2011

ICAN Nobel Peace Prize 2017

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

THE NOBEL PRIZE MEDAL Each medal features a different image depicting what the award is for. The medals for Physics and Chemistry feature an image that represents nature in the form of a goddess resembling Isis emerging from the clouds, holding a cornucopia in her arms. The veil which covers her face is held up by the Genius of Science. It is the medal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The Genius of Medicine holds an open book in her lap on the medal for Physiology or Medicine. She is collecting the water pouring out from a rock in order to quench a sick girl’s thirst. This is the medal of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute. The medal for Literature depicts a young man sitting under a laurel tree writing down the song of a muse. It is the medal of the Swedish Academy. Each of these three medals features the Latin inscription inventas vitam juvat excoluisse per artes, meaning “Inventions enhance life, which is beautiful through art”. The image on the Peace medal depicts a group of three men forming a fraternal bond. Its Latin inscription is pro pace et fraternitate gentium which means: “For the peace and brotherhood of men”. It is the medal of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. The medal for Economics shows the North Star emblem of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, dating from 1815, with the words Kungliga Vetenskaps Akademien (The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) around the edge. Alfred Nobel’s face also features on one side of each medal. The image on the medals for Physics and Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine and Literature is the same, featuring a portrait of Alfred Nobel and the years of his birth and death in Latin. As seen here, the design of Alfred Nobel’s face on the medals for Peace and Economics is slightly different. WHAT IS THE NOBEL PRIZE? Each year, the world eagerly awaits the announcement of who will be awarded a Nobel Prize. But what is it and when did it first come into existence? The Nobel Prize is the first international award given yearly since 1901 for achievement in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. The prizes were instigated by Swedish scientist Alfred Nobel. When Nobel signed his last will and testament on November 27, 1895, he laid the foundation for what would become the Nobel Prizes. He stated in his will: “The whole of my remaining estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executers, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind”. Nobel added: “It is my express wish that concerning the award of a prize no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not.” The words ensured that the Nobel Prizes would be truly international awards.

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A private institution known as the Nobel Foundation was established in 1900 based on the will of Alfred Nobel. It manages the assets made available through the will for the awarding of the Nobel Prizes. In 1968, the Sveriges Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) instituted the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Eligibility To be considered eligible for an award, it is necessary to be nominated in writing by a person competent to make such a nomination. According to the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation, information about the nominations is not to be disclosed, publicly or privately, for a period of 50 years. The restriction not only concerns the nominees and nominators, but also investigations and opinions in the awarding of a prize.

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The Prize The Prize consists of a medal, a personal diploma, and a Prize amount. The announcement of the Nobel Prize winners for the year is made on the same day that the Prize awarding institutions choose from among the names recommended by the Nobel committees. This takes place in the month of October. Immediately after the vote, a press conference is held by the Prize-awarding institutions involved. These institutions are The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Prize in Physics, Chemistry and Economics), Karolinska Institute (Prize in Physiology or Medicine), The Swedish Academy (Prize in Literature) and The Norwegian Nobel Institute (Peace Prize).

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Prize Ceremonies The Prizes are all awarded on December 10 each year, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death. The Prize award ceremonies and banquets take place in Stockholm (for the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel), while the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony takes place in Oslo, Norway on the same date. At the Prize Award ceremony in Stockholm, His Majesty the King hands each Laureate a diploma and a medal. The Peace Prize is presented by the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in the presence of the King of Norway.

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Crystal clear

William Henry Bragg 1862–1942 Nobel Prize in Physics 1915 William Lawrence Bragg 1890–1971 Nobel Prize in Physics 1915

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg

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X-Ray crystallography By Kaspar Kallip - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 28

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

WILLIAM HENRY BRAGG AND WILLIAM LAWRENCE BRAGG

Father-and-son duo William and Lawrence Bragg combined mathematics knowledge with x-ray expertise to create a new method of analysis that is still used today: x-ray crystallography.

illiam and Lawrence Bragg are the only father-and-son team in the history of the Nobel Prize to have won a joint award. Lawrence Bragg is further distinguished by being the youngest person to have ever been awarded the Prize, aged 25. Although the work that won the award was carried out in the UK, Australia lays legitimate claim to share in the Braggs’ glory by virtue of the formative years they spent in Adelaide, where Lawrence Bragg was born and educated. His father, William Henry Bragg (to avoid confusion, the son was known by his second name, Lawrence, though they shared the first name William), was born in the English village of Westward, near Wigton in Cumberland. He was one of three sons to Robert and Mary Bragg. Robert was a farmer; Mary died when William was seven. The elder William was sent to live with his uncle (another William Bragg), a pharmacist in Leicestershire. A bright child, he was the youngest boy at the time to pass the local Oxford junior examinations, in 1873. At 13, he was sent to school on the Isle of Man, where his mother’s brother (another uncle, and not a William) was a teacher.

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William’s autobiography tells us that he was bullied at first, but went on to be reasonably happy. The religious background of his uncle’s home and the school appear to have had a strong influence on his attitudes during his life. As an adult he was a sceptical scientist, with great faith in fact, evidence, and scientific method. During his last school year, a religious storm swept the school with a focus on macabre stories of hellfire and damnation. Speaking in a lecture many years later, he said, “I am sure that I am not the only one to whom, when young, the literal interpretation of biblical texts caused years of acute misery and fear.” This was tempered by other statements he made, including, “From religion comes a man’s purpose; from science his power to achieve it.” A previous biography of William Bragg contended that he did well in maths, with an interest in music, sport, chess, and acting, and was appointed head prefect. He won a scholarship to go to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1881, where he studied maths and physics, achieving first class honours. He went on to work in the famous

The Bragg family, 1902. L to R: Lawrence, Gwendoline, Robert and William

Cavendish Laboratory in the Department of Physics at Cambridge University, which was headed at the time by JJ Thompson, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for identifying the electron. William played tennis with Thompson, who suggested that Bragg apply for the chair of maths and physics at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. From a field of 24 applicants, Bragg was shortlisted and interviewed in London. Thompson was among those on the selection committee. Bragg got the job and sailed for Adelaide, arriving there early in 1886 at the age of 23, having consumed physics textbooks on the journey to expand his knowledge for this new role. The university, although a pioneering one in Australia, was short of apparatus, so he apprenticed himself to a firm of scientific instrument makers to enable him to build his laboratory equipment. Although William was short on lecturing experience, he trained himself so well that he is remembered at Adelaide

for being a gifted and enthusiastic teacher who gave popular practical demonstrations of physics phenomena to students and the public alike. Noted talent William also had a musical ear and a talent for playing the flute, which blossomed into an interest in acoustics and led him to become involved in helping to design the organ case at the university’s Conservatorium of Music. Later, during the two Wars, both he and Lawrence worked on military acoustic sensing and ranging devices. William married Gwendoline Todd in 1889. He was 26, she was 18. Her father was Sir Charles Todd, who had risen from head of the Adelaide Observatory to become PostmasterGeneral of South Australia. Todd’s wife, Alice, was the source of the name given to the famous town of Alice Springs. William and Gwendoline had three children: two sons,

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WILLIAM HENRY BRAGG AND WILLIAM LAWRENCE BRAGG William Lawrence and Robert, and a daughter, Gwendolen. From all accounts, their marriage was a happy one. As a scientist, William Bragg was a relatively late bloomer and he began to consider doing original research only in his early 40s, around 1903 and 1904, when he became president of the physics section of the Australian Association of the Advancement of Science. That burst of creativity was sparked in part by the many extraordinary inventions and discoveries that were happening in physics at the time, which included wireless radio, telegraphy, and radioactivity. Most pertinent to the later story of the Braggs, however, was the accidental discovery in 1895 by the German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen of a mysterious form of radiation that he named “x-rays”. William kept up to date with these developments and pursued his own research, especially into radioactivity. He exchanged ideas with New Zealander Sir Ernest Rutherford (awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research into radioactivity) and made a striking discovery that when alpha particles were emitted by a radioactive source, the distance they travelled could be used to work out what kind of atomic nucleus they came from. International acclaim followed, and he was honoured in 1907 with election as a fellow of the prestigious Royal Society in the UK, having gained the support of Rutherford, among others. After 21 years, Adelaide could no longer hold him and, thanks to his original radiation research, William was awarded the post of Cavendish Professor at the University of Leeds in 1908. Here the focus of the Bragg story begins to turn to William’s eldest son. “Billy” (a nickname confusingly based on his first name) was a quiet, dreamy child. One of his favourite pastimes was shell collecting, which he did on family holidays by the sea. He even chanced upon a new “slender” cuttlefish, which was named Sepia braggii after him. Lawrence was educated at St Peter’s College, Adelaide – the very same school that later nurtured another great Australian Nobel Laureate, Howard Florey. Lawrence was so adept academically that he went to Adelaide University at the age of 15 and at 18, while other boys his age were still in high school, was awarded a first-class honours

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degree in maths. But, while ahead of his peers academically, Lawrence found social activities quite arduous. He once said to his sister Gwendolen, “You and I find ‘things’ easier than people, Gwendy.” Shift to physics With the family’s move to the UK, Lawrence transferred on a scholarship to Trinity College at Cambridge University, where in 1909 he changed his focus to physics. He graduated with first class honours in 1912. It was an exciting and fast-moving time in physics. Since Roentgen’s discovery of x-rays, a string of researchers had been probing their mysteries and had made important progress in understanding not only what they were but what they revealed about the nature of materials and their structure. The year before Lawrence graduated from Cambridge, the British physicist Charles Barkla had discovered that different metals scattered x-rays in different ways – in short, that each element makes its own peculiar kind of x-rays (an insight that won him the Nobel Prize in 1917). However, it was not known at the time whether x-rays were streams of particles or a wave-like radiation, more like light. The

Developed by William Henry Bragg, this x-ray spectrometer was used by him and his son to investigate the structure of crystals.

University of Adelaide staff (1906). William is seated front row, third from left

German physicist Max von Laue reasoned that passing x-rays through crystals to see whether they could be diffracted – that is, forced to change direction – might offer insight into that dilemma. In 1912 von Laue’s experiments revealed not only that the mystery rays could be diffracted but that they formed a pattern on a photographic plate that showed them to have the properties of waves, not particles – a discovery for which he, too, received a Nobel Prize in 1914. The newly graduated Lawrence Bragg had started actively studying von Laue’s findings as soon as they became known; his father had drawn his attention to them during a summer vacation. Lawrence returned to Cambridge and by November that year had published his first paper on the topic in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Importantly, he had conducted some ingenious experiments and worked out what is now known as the Bragg equation – that is, how to accurately calculate the wavelength of each type of x-ray from its diffracted pattern. It related the angle to which x-rays are deflected by a crystal to the distance between its orderly arranged atoms. William’s instrument-making skills then came to the fore,

and soon the pair had a purpose-built x-ray spectrometer available to put the maths to work and measure the deflection angles, again during their vacation time together. These instruments went on to be developed by using photographic film to record the diffraction patterns to electronics counters; until computers came along, though, it was tedious and time-consuming to use them for analysing three-dimensional structures. William and Lawrence studied the structures of many crystals, including proteins. Physicists soon jumped onto this marvellous new bandwagon for probing the secrets of matter. So did chemists, who had previously been confined to studying chemical reactions between compounds to try to determine their structures. This was especially important for methodically devising new pharmaceutical products, but it was laborious and slow. Now, with an x-ray spectrometer, they could study the compound of interest directly. Complementary skills The Braggs knew that they had discovered something profound, but they could have hardly foreseen the myriad uses to which their

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WILLIAM HENRY BRAGG AND WILLIAM LAWRENCE BRAGG

work would be put. William and Lawrence brought complementary interests and skills to their collaboration. The father’s experience, investigative expertise, and command of instruments were important, but his interest in diffraction related to what it revealed about x-rays. The son, however, had a rare intuitive insight and a great capacity to conceptualise problems and express them mathematically. “In saying something about the work for which we were awarded the Nobel Prize, I feel that I cannot but speak for both my father and myself,” Lawrence said in a speech in Stockholm in 1922. “It was with his inspiration and under his guidance that any contributions of my own were made, and it was one of the proudest moments of my life when I heard that you had associated my name with his and awarded the Prize to us jointly.” The generous and inclusive public praise and credit for his father apparently masked private tensions he felt about the issue. Even so, the Nobel Prize clearly meant a great deal to him, and he accepted it at such a young age with due humility, saying, “That you should have given me, at the very outset of my scientific career, even the most humble place amongst their ranks, is an honour of which I cannot but be very proud.” He also credited von Laue, “whom we owe the great discovery which has made possible all progress in a new realm of science, the study of the structure of matter by the diffraction of x-rays”. The pair won the Prize in Physics on November 12, 1915 for “a discovery of epoch-making significance”, as the Nobel citation speech put it, into x-ray crystallography. Put simply, it was a method for analysing the three-dimensional structure of crystals, atom by atom. Lawrence Bragg worked out the mathematics of how to do it, and his father invented the instrument – the x-ray spectrometer – that made such precise measurements possible. Together, they founded a new branch of science that is still in everyday use in laboratories the world over. It was a fundamental advance, an enabling technique with far-reaching consequences. It has since been used to unravel the structure of everything from diamonds to drugs, vitamins, insulin, bacteria, viruses, and countless other organisms, compounds, and materials. As such, it ushered in a revolution in physics,

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chemistry, and biology. In giving the citation speech, Professor Gustaf Granqvist, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said, “Thanks to the methods that the Braggs have devised for investigating crystal structures, an entirely new world has been opened and has already in part been explored.” In turn, this “new world” brought more Nobel Prizes for many other researchers who followed in their footsteps. Appropriately, in 1947 Lawrence Bragg helped to set up what became the Medical Research Council Laboratory of molecular biology at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. Under his direction, Francis Crick and James Watson famously used x-ray crystallography to work out the double-helix structure of DNA. William and Lawrence worked together from 1912 to 1914, investigating a range of crystal structures. They jointly

The first x-ray taken in Australia: William Bragg’s hand

The Braggs before departure from Adelaide

published the results in abridged form in 1915 in the paper – “X-rays and crystal structure” – for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize. From 1915 to 1919, Lawrence was involved in the war effort as a technical adviser in the map section of British army headquarters in France, on sound ranging or determining the distance of enemy artillery from the sound of their guns. He was serving there when he heard the news about his Prize. In 1921 he married Alice Hopkinson of Cambridge, and they had two sons and two daughters (their eldest son was to become chief scientist with Rolls Royce). He moved back to Cambridge as Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics from 1938 to 1953, and again served as a scientific advisor in the UK and Canada during World War II. There was also a string of other awards, honorary degrees, and fellowships, and in 1941 he was knighted. When William heard the news, he was delighted; in a letter to his sister-inlaw, Lorna Todd, on January 5, 1941, he wrote: “You will learn by newspaper cable that Willie is knighted. Isn’t that fine? ... He will have to be Sir Lawrence: we can’t have confusion worse than ever. I am so very glad for his sake. In spite of all care, people mix us up and are apt to give me first credit on occasions when he should have

it. I think he does not worry about that all now, and will never anyhow have cause to do so now. I think I am more relieved about that than he is.” Because he won his Nobel Prize when he was so young, Lawrence was one of the few Laureates able to celebrate the golden jubilee of his award, as a special guest at the awards ceremonies in Stockholm in 1965. While there, he delivered the first Nobel Guest Lecture, in which he reviewed developments in his field since 1915. William’s subsequent career and life were equally distinguished. After advising on anti-submarine matters during the War, he established a school of crystallographic research at University College, London, from 1915 to 1925. He then served as director of the UK’s Royal Institution and the Davy Faraday Research Laboratories in London, attracting and inspiring many young scientists who went on to great things. He maintained a broad and fruitful interest in research as well. As one biographer put it, “His research interests embraced a great many topics and he was adept at picking up a subject, almost casually, making an important contribution, then dropping it again.” In 1923 William became head of the Royal Institution, serving in that post for two decades, only to be succeeded by Lawrence. William was also a popular lecturer and writer about science. He became well known for giving Christmas lectures for children, which also became best-selling books. Sir William Bragg died in 1942. Those who knew him said he remained a simple, humble person as well as a proud father. When Lawrence succeeded William at the Royal Institution, he developed his father’s tradition by introducing year-round lectures that attracted some 20,000 schoolchildren a year. Lawrence also became a popular and successful lecturer who made many radio and television appearances. He retired in 1965 and quit the Royal Institution the following year, but continued to lecture there until his death in 1971. A fitting postscript to the lives of the two Braggs came from the winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Dorothy Hodgkin. She recalled in a 1988 BBC Radio interview how the Braggs and x-ray crystallography were fundamental not just to her winning the Prize but to her entire passion for, and career in, science.

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WILLIAM HENRY BRAGG AND WILLIAM LAWRENCE BRAGG

Vital statistics

Awards and accolades

Name: William Henry Bragg

1914: Appointed fellow and lecturer in natural sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge

Born: Cumberland, England Birthdate: July 2, 1862 Died: March 10, 1942 School: King William’s College, Isle of Man University: Trinity College, Cambridge Married: Gwendoline Todd in 1889 Children: Lawrence, Robert, and Gwendolen Lived: Mainly Cambridge, England Awards and accolades 1885: Elected professor of mathematics and physics in the University of Adelaide 1909: Cavendish Professor of Physics at Leeds (until 1915) 1915: Nobel Prize in Physics 1915: Quain Professor of Physics at University College, London (until 1925) 1916: Rumford Medal 1917: Awarded CBE 1920: Awarded a British knighthood 1930: Copley Medal 1931: Order of Merit 1935: Elected President of the Royal Society William Bragg was an honorary doctor of 16 universities and a member of numerous leading foreign societies. He was the author of many books, including Studies in Radioactivity: X-Rays and Crystal Structure; The World of Sound; Concerning the Nature of Things; Old Trades and New Knowledge; An Introduction to Crystal Analysis and The Universe of Light. Vital statistics Name: William Lawrence Bragg Born: South Australia Birthdate: March 31, 1890 Died: July 1, 1971 School: St Peter’s College, Adelaide University: Adelaide University; Trinity College, Cambridge Married: Alice Grace Jenny Hopkinson in 1921

1914: Barnard Medal 1915: Nobel Prize in Physics 1918: Awarded OBE and MC 1919: Langworthy Professor of Physics at Manchester University (until 1937) 1921: Elected fellow of the Royal Society 1931: Hughes Medal of the Royal Society 1937: Director of the National Physical Laboratory 1938: Cavendish Professor of Experimental Physics, Cambridge University 1941: Awarded a British knighthood 1946: Royal Medal of the Royal Society 1948: Roebling Medal of the Mineral Society of America 1958: Chairman of the Frequency Advisory Committee 1967: Companion of Honour Lawrence was awarded many honorary fellowships and was an honorary or foreign member of American, French, Swedish, Chinese, Dutch, and Belgian scientific academies, besides being Membre d’Honneur de la Société Française de Minéralogies et Cristallographie. Together with his father, he published various scientific papers on crystal structure. Why they were awarded the Nobel Prize The work of William Bragg and his son Lawrence in 1913–1914 founded a new branch of science of the greatest importance and significance: the analysis of crystal structure by means of x-rays. The use of x-rays as an instrument for the systematic revelation of the way in which crystals are built was entirely due to the Braggs. They devised a method for analysing the threedimensional structure of crystals, atom by atom. Lawrence worked out the mathematics behind it and William invented the instrument, the x-ray spectrometer. The branch of science that they founded is still used every day in laboratories all over the world.

Children: Stephen, David, Margaret, and Patience Lived: Mainly Cambridge, England

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Miracle mould Howard Walter Florey 1898–1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1945

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg

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Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

HOWARD WALTER FLOREY

For a man who was not thinking much about relieving human suffering while he was experimenting with penicillin, Sir Howard Florey made one of the greatest contributions to that quest.

f all of Australia’s Nobel Laureates, Howard Florey is arguably the one whose work has provided humankind with the most profound benefits. Former prime minister Sir Robert Menzies once said that Florey had a greater effect on the welfare of the world than any other Australian. Through his central role in bringing the lifesaving miracle of penicillin to the world, thereby ushering in the era of antibiotics, Florey’s enduring legacy ranks him as a genuine giant in the world of public health. Without antibiotics, millions of people – and countless domestic animals and livestock – would have died or suffered serious illnesses from bacterial infections. It is easy to forget that before antibiotics became available, common infections took an appalling toll on human life. Many infants and mothers died in, or soon after, childbirth; tuberculosis and bacterial pneumonia were often deadly; and one bacterium alone – the infamous golden staph (Staphylococcus aureus) – killed eight out of every 10 people infected after sustaining even the slightest wound. Yet Florey claimed such concerns did not motivate his research. “People sometimes think that I and the others worked on

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penicillin because we were interested in suffering humanity,” he told Hazel de Berg in 1967, in a taped interview at the National Library in Canberra. “I don’t think it ever crossed our minds about suffering humanity. This was an interesting scientific exercise, and, because it was of some use in medicine, is very gratifying, but this was not the reason that we started working on it.” Sensitive scientist This comment highlights the complexities of the individual behind the legend. His letters and the recollections of friends and colleagues point to a man who was a chainsmoker, inwardly shy, sensitive enough to be moved to tears by a musical performance, unpretentious, self-deprecating, and possessed of great integrity. He hated nationalism and was deeply concerned for the plight of the dispossessed and hungry. Yet he was notorious for being gruff, driven, uncompromising, blunt, overbearing, and, at times, callous to others. He once unceremoniously sacked a technician for theft, yet quietly found the man another job. For all his achievement, he humbly attributed much of it to luck and to the hard work of those around

Portrait of the young scientist Howard Florey in laboratory coat sitting beside a microscope, 1930s

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HOWARD WALTER FLOREY him. A long-time colleague once commented that he never heard Florey utter a word in praise of himself. Florey was born in suburban Adelaide on September 24, 1989, the only son (he had four older sisters) of Joseph and Bertha Florey. Joseph was widowed when his first wife, Charlotte, died from tuberculosis, but his early business success as a footwear manufacturer meant that Howard had a comfortable start in life. In 1906 his father’s growing wealth enabled the family to move into Coreega, a two-storey, 16-room sandstone house in the well-to-do suburb of Mitcham. It was obvious from an early age that the young Florey was an exceptional individual. Between 1908 and 1910, he attended Kyre College Preparatory School – now Scotch College – and later St Peter’s College. He soon emerged as a genuine all-rounder with diverse intellectual and physical talents – a strong character with leadership qualities. He won medals in gymnastics, sprinting, and hurdles, and he captained tennis, cricket, and football teams. At high school he was secretary of the debating society and was made head prefect in 1916. He regularly topped his classes academically and excelled in both science and the humanities, winning prizes in chemistry and history, among other awards. He was inspired by his chemistry teacher, “Sneaker” Thompson – the same man who had earlier sparked the intellect of another outstanding student from the same school who also went on to become a Nobel Laureate, Lawrence Bragg. Florey decided to study medicine at the University of Adelaide in 1917, but in the following year tragedy struck the family: not only did Joseph Florey lose all his wealth when his business failed, but he died soon after, of a heart attack. Despite more straitened circumstances, Florey was able to continue his studies with the help of scholarships, and he again excelled in sport and academically at university. It was there that he met Ethel Reed, the bright, attractive, and outgoing young woman who was to become his wife and a key member of his research team. She had begun studying medicine in 1919 and was the only female in her cohort. Florey took his final exams in 1921 and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. He left Australia in December of that year for Oxford

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University – working as a ship’s doctor for his passage – where he studied physiology and was awarded a Bachelor of Science in 1924. He did not make friends easily, writing home in one letter, “Sometimes I think I am liked here. At others, I get most depressed about it, and revile the English.” He knew himself well enough, though, to concede, “I may not be able to throw off my selfishness and domineering manner.” Those doubts were later scotched by his success in forming and leading an exceptional research team. Florey’s adventurous spirit saw him join a university expedition to Antarctica in 1924 – by repute, the first to fly and crash-land an aircraft on the continent. Switching to Cambridge University, he became a research student and instructor while he completed his doctoral studies. A Rockefeller Grant in 1925 took him for a time to America, where he rubbed shoulders with prominent scientists

Florey was a rough, tough Australian, completely uncompromising, rather prickly, very energetic, and tense as a coiled spring and honed his intellect and research skills before returning to Cambridge. All the while he corresponded with Reed, writing more than 150 letters to her up to 1926, when she began working at Royal Adelaide Hospital. Having suffered pleurisy and tuberculosis, she was steadily losing her hearing, but their letters at the time reveal that they were discussing marriage. She joined him in England in September 1927, and they were married the following month – with a haste that later proved ill-advised, since the marriage became a rocky one. Nevertheless, they remained together and had a daughter, Paquita, two years later, and a son, Charles, in 1939. From 1930 to 34, Florey was professor of pathology at Sheffield University, and in 1935 he was appointed director of the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford, which he came to lead and dominate for the next three decades. There he began to assemble the team – in

Florey at the official opening of the John Curtin School of Medical Research, at the Australian National University in Canberra.

itself an unusual approach in those more individualistic days – that would crack the bacterial infection problem. As one of his biographers, the late Robert Gwyn McFarlane (Howard Florey: The Making of a Great Scientist), said: “Florey was a rough, tough Australian, completely uncompromising, rather prickly, very energetic, and tense as a coiled spring. And he brought to his work this extraordinary dedication which was very infectious, in such a way that he really could collect a team of people who became almost as dedicated and enthusiastic as himself.” Often forgotten behind the drama of the penicillin story is that Florey’s other scientific contributions were significant, including important research into immune responses that helped pave the way for vaccination. Indeed, at 43 he had published so many important research papers that he was elected to the UK’s prestigious Royal Society. Two decades later, Florey was elected its president, the first pathologist and the first Australian to obtain that post. Florey’s interest in penicillin was born amid a broader surge of scientific inquiry into the drug-making potential of biological compounds produced by the human body, animals, and plants. At Oxford, Florey hired Ernst

Chain, a German biochemist, to supplement his own technical skills. Chain was working on snake venom, but Florey and others attracted his interest to a substance known as lysozyme, an antibacterial enzyme found in tears and nasal secretions. Together, Chain and Florey decided to systematically survey all known natural antibacterial substances. Among those substances was a simple mould that had been discovered years earlier in London by the Scottish researcher Alexander Fleming, in one of the greatest and most famous pieces of luck in medical research. Fleming returned to his laboratory from a two-week holiday in 1928 to find, on an uncovered Petri dish containing a culture of bacteria, a mould spore that had grown to about the size of a 20-cent coin. Around the rim of the mould, the bacteria were dead. Mouldy musings At first, Fleming merely noticed the mould, then threw it into a bucket. He later retrieved it and tinkered with it experimentally. He had earlier made a study of different antibacterial substances and discovered the antibacterial enzyme lysozyme, so the mould interested him enough to cultivate it. The green

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

HOWARD WALTER FLOREY

mass that grew on the surface of a broth had such a strong effect on bacteria that even when diluted 500–800 times, it completely prevented the growth of staphylococci bacteria. It turned out to be a species of the penicillium group of moulds – Penicillium notatum – that had been described for the first time only in 1911. Fleming discovered that penicillin was highly effective against many different kinds of bacteria. He performed basic tests on white blood cells and mice to show that it was not toxic and had some success testing its effect on infected wounds. He published a brief scientific report about it in 1929, but, believing it to be too difficult to work with and not showing enough promise beyond being a possible disinfectant of skin wounds, he moved on. However, luck again intervened, as Lennard Bickel, a Florey biographer, recalled in a 1998 ABC Radio interview: “Chain was reading Fleming’s old paper of 15 lines when he had a vision of a woman, one of the ladies who worked at the Dunn School of Pathology, walking along a corridor with a dish in her hand on which a mould was growing. He went to see this lady and said to her, ‘This mould that I saw you with …’. She said, ‘Yes?’ He said, ‘What is it?’ She told him it was Penicillium notatum, this species of mould, and he said, ‘That is the very mould that Fleming found in 1928.’ She said, ‘Yes, he cultured it and he gave us a piece of it, and we’ve kept it alive ever since.’ Science is so full of pieces of serendipity.” In 1938 Florey and Chain began to study the mould more closely and found that it grew slowly and had special needs. They experimented with different growing mixtures, including Marmite, malt extract, meat, and yeast extracts and studied its growth rate. They began to work out how to extract the active penicillin compound from the brown juice that accumulated beneath the surface layer of green mould. Funds were short, despite Florey’s many urgings for more financial support, so in the Australian tradition of making do with whatever materials were to hand, he encouraged his team to experiment with growing the mould in biscuit tins and various dishes and pans. Hospital bedpans turned out to be the best-shaped growing containers. Old dairy equipment, a letterbox and an aquarium pump were among the

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items pressed into service to make the first penicillin. It turned out to be highly unstable stuff. The scientists quickly moved on from filtering the juice through parachute silk to a more sophisticated extraction process involving solvents. Chain worked out a series of steps to isolate, purify, and concentrate the penicillin in the liquid, but another member of the team improved the process so that soon they were able to extract and produce penicillin as a brown powder in small but useful quantities. Now the team could experiment with the powder to test its effects. Chain dissolved some in water and injected it into two mice that survived the experience, despite the highly impure state of the penicillin. Working with increasing strengths of the powder, Florey’s team tested it on blood, hormones, and living cells. The turning point came, however, one morning in May 1940, when Florey

injected a lethal dose of Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria into eight mice, but injected four of them with penicillin as well. The team anxiously watched the mice. By the middle

The team anxiously watched the mice. By the middle of that night – just 16 hours later – all of unprotected mice were dead while those that had received penicillin remained alive and well

Penicillin manufacturing

of that night – just 16 hours later – all of the unprotected mice were dead, while those that had received penicillin remained alive and well. Chain is said to have almost danced with glee, and even the understated Florey gave in to excitement when he later called his assistant Margaret Jennings to report the outcome of the experiment, saying, “It looks like a miracle.” The team duly reported to

other scientists that penicillin was a therapeutic agent able to kill sensitive germs in a living body and, with so many people suffering war wounds, a race began to work out ways to make enough of the stuff to test it on people. Not until February 1941 was there sufficient funding to do that. A policeman named Albert Alexander, near death from an infection sustained when he had pricked himself on a rose thorn, was selected as the first recipient of penicillin. Within a day, Alexander was showing dramatic signs of recovery – but there was no more penicillin available to give him further treatment. Despite heroic efforts to filter his urine to recapture any excreted penicillin, Alexander’s infection took hold again and he died. It became apparent that a course of several treatments was needed to kill off germs thoroughly, and Florey firmly decided that only when supplies of penicillin were great enough to effect a cure would the substance be tested on anyone else. With British funds limited due to the war effort, Florey and a colleague took the risk

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HOWARD WALTER FLOREY

of flying a blacked-out aircraft to the United States a few months later to seek help in boosting production of the drug. Better ways of growing the mould were soon found, and another species of it – Penicillium chrysogenum – was discovered having infected a cantaloupe melon, by Mary Hunt (an enthusiastic seeker of new moulds known as “Mouldy Mary”). This turned out to be a much better producer of penicillin. Florey returned to England, and the first penicillin to be used in a war zone – in Cairo – was administered in 1942. The next year, in belated recognition of the significance of his work, the British Government finally gave Florey’s team full funding. His wife Ethel was a vital member of the team during this time, working long hours with Florey on experiments and testing the drug and publishing the results jointly with him. His laboratory now became a makeshift penicillin factory, with teams of workers tending hundreds of jars of mould. By October that year, the first supplies went to the British Army. With better extraction and greater production came increasing success in human use, with most war wounds now being cured of infection. By 1945 enough penicillin was being produced, including by drug companies in the United States and Australia – notably the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories in Melbourne – to take penicillin to the wider community. In 1944 Australia was the first country to offer it for civilian use.

June 6, 1967, Lord Florey married again, to Dr Margaret Jennings, a member of his team and his special assistant for more than three decades. Just eight months later, on February 21, 1968, he died in Oxford of a heart attack, aged 69. (Lady Margaret Florey died in 1994.) In the eulogy at Westminster Abbey, Lord Adrian said of him: “Florey inspired the research and made it succeed. We have still to adjust our ideas to the extent of the revolution in medical treatment that Florey brought to success.” Norman Heatley, a key worker in the Oxford team, wrote of Florey’s “genius in leading his colleagues and providing at the right times the encouragement, advice, inspiration, and realism which kept the team working constructively throughout”.

The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle by Eric Lax

Increasing resistance Within a few years, in a foretaste of today’s global problem with antibiotic resistance, several strains of bacteria started to become resistant to natural penicillin, and the pharmacological spotlight soon turned to making synthetic forms, which were developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Florey’s remarkable achievement was quickly recognised. He was knighted by Britain in 1944 and honoured as well by France, the US, and Australia for having such an unforeseen but undeniable influence on the course of the War and on medicine. In December 1945 Florey, Chain, and Fleming were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “the discovery of penicillin and its curative effects in various infectious diseases”. In 1966 Lady Ethel Florey died at home. In London on

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Mass production of penicillin in the 1940s

Perhaps the last word should go to one of his friends, Sir Alan Drury, who recalled Florey coming to the UK: “His drive and ambition were manifest almost from the day he arrived. A great fire seemed to burn within him, and his many-sided character was never concealed. We could all see the power in him and wondered whether he would ever find the right outlets for this greatness.” Florey recognised that his success was due to a team effort, and for this reason he always acknowledged the team in his publications, usually listing them in alphabetical order. He disliked the public spotlight and, unlike Fleming, shunned media attention to the extent that Fleming’s name is still far better known for the discovery of penicillin than Florey’s. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Fleming acknowledged the role of luck in his discovery. He said: “My only merit is that I did not neglect that chance observation and pursued it as a bacteriologist. The first practical use was to sort out bacteria that were sensitive from those that were not. We tried to

concentrate it, but found, as others did later, that it was easily destroyed – and, to all intents and purposes, we failed.” In his oration, Florey lauded his team and its scientific approach, and looked forward to the revolution that penicillin and other probiotics promised to bring. Other scientists followed in his path, discovering new moulds and other types of antibiotics, some of them with the help of Florey’s team. In his Nobel Prize presentation speech, professor Göran Liljestrand, of the Royal Caroline Institute, saw Florey’s work in stark contrast to the bloody war that had just ended: “To overcome the numerous obstacles, all this work demanded not only assistance from many different quarters but also an unusual amount of scientific enthusiasm and a firm belief in an idea. In a time when annihilation and destruction through the inventions of man have been greater than ever before in history, the introduction of penicillin is a brilliant demonstration that human genius is just as well able to save life and combat disease.”

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HOWARD WALTER FLOREY

Vital statistics Name: Howard Walter Florey Born: Adelaide, South Australia Birthdate: September 24, 1898 Died: February 21, 1968, Oxford, England School: St Peter’s College, Adelaide University: University of Adelaide; Oxford University; Cambridge University Married: Mary Ethel Hater Reed, in October 1927; Ethel died in 1966. Married Dr Margaret Jennings in June 1967 Children: Paquita and Charles Lived: Mainly in Oxford, England Awards and accolades 1935: Professor of pathology and fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford 1944: Nuffield visiting professor to Australia and New Zealand 1944: Created a Knight Bachelor 1945: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1946: Honorary Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge 1949: Contributor to, and editor of, Antibiotics. Also had many papers published on physiology and pathology

Other honours include the Lister Medal of the Royal College of Surgeons, the Berzelius Medal of the Swedish Medical Society, the Royal and Copley Medals of the Royal Society, the Medal of Merit of the US Army, and many others. He was a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and held an honorary fellowship of the Royal Australian College of Physicians. He has been awarded honorary degrees by 17 universities and was a member or honorary member of many learned societies and academies in the fields of medicine and biology. Why he was awarded the Nobel Prize Howard Florey, Ernst Chain, and Alexander Fleming were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effects in various infectious diseases. Penicillin had been discovered by Fleming in 1928, but the active substance was not isolated at that time. In 1939 Florey and Chain headed a team of British scientists, financed by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, whose efforts led to the successful small-scale manufacture of the drug from the liquid broth in which it grows. Without penicillin, millions of people would have died or suffered serious illness from bacterial infections.

1952: Honorary fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford 1960: President of the Royal Society; first Australian to be elected 1962: Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford 1965: Made Baron Florey of Adelaide; accepted chancellorship of Australian National University

Australian $50 note honouring Florey

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Patience deciphers immunity Frank Macfarlane Burnet 1899–1985 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1960 – shared with Peter Brian Medawar

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg

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Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

FRANK MACFARLANE BURNET

It was Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet’s practical, hands on approach to science – which included once injecting himself with a deadly virus to prove a point – that made his breakthrough work possible.

t was Christmas 1950, when an unusually warm wet-weather front moved across the Murray Valley in northern Victoria and created ideal conditions for an explosion in mosquito numbers. Within days, the surrounding farmland was strewn with dying rabbits – and scientists, by luck, had discovered the carrier needed to spread the myxoma virus that they had developed and had been trying for years to use on the country’s devastating rabbit plague. Until then, it had been assumed that the virus could only spread very slowly by direct contact among rabbits. However, the humid conditions combined with the mosquitoes now revealed that there was a highly effective natural carrier, after all. Farmers, whose landscapes and livelihoods were being destroyed, were ecstatic. But their jubilation quickly turned to horror. People also began to fall ill and die from a deadly new brain disease. The media quickly blamed the new “rabbit virus” – and the scientists who had unleashed it. Virologists knew that myxoma, which causes myxomatosis in rabbits, had no effect on humans, but they were struggling to be seen or heard in the outcry and hubbub of “Death Valley”-type headlines. Something, or someone, was needed

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to calm a panicking population – someone who was not only eminent in medicine but also respected and trusted by the community. The man the government turned to was noted virologist Dr Frank Macfarlane Burnet, director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) in Melbourne. Burnet, known to friends and colleagues by his childhood nickname “Mac”, decided that the best way to calm everyone down was to simply inject himself with a large dose of the myxoma virus and show people, in the most dramatic way possible, that the deadly new human disease was not, in fact, myxomatosis. After some discussion, it was decided that both Burnet and an associate, Frank Fenner (who would later achieve world renown for his part in eradicating smallpox from the planet), would inject each other. Fenner had just been appointed a professor of microbiology at the John Curtin School of Medicine at the Australian National University in Canberra, and he was working at the Institute until his new laboratories were built. By chance, he and Burnet were working side by side. Fenner was filling in time studying the myxoma virus, and Burnet was investigating the mystery virus that was killing people.

Portrait of Burnet

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FRANK MACFARLANE BURNET Human guinea pigs Burnet prepared a compound containing the myxoma virus – a dose 100 times greater than a rabbit or human would receive from a mosquito. “He injected me and I injected him,” recalled Fenner, who, with scientist Francis Ratcliffe of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), later wrote the definitive textbook Myxomatosis. Just after the pair had finished injecting themselves, CSIRO head Ian Clunies Ross walked in and demanded that, since myxomatosis was a CSIRO project, he should also be injected. This was duly done, and after three weeks, when tests showed the scientists were free of any myxoma antibodies (as they had known would be the case), the myxomatosis scare faded into history. What did not fade, however, was the lasting impression in the public’s mind of the scientists’ perceived bravery. In becoming human guinea pigs, Burnet, Fenner, and Clunies Ross had perpetuated an important, although fading tradition in which scientists take unknown risks as the first volunteers in their own experiments. Meanwhile, the mystery human virus was identified as a new strain of encephalitis that was triggered by the same warm, wet weather that had gotten myxomatosis off to a flying start. Murray Valley encephalitis, on which Burnet became the world authority, is

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extant to this day. The approach to the myxomatosis scare typified Burnet’s practical, sleeves-up attitude. In much the same manner as Pasteur, Burnet was committed to tackling practical

From Frank Macfarlane Burnet’s early hiking diary, 1920. The first image is titled "The Jordan Valley".

Co-recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Sir Peter Brian Medawar (L) and Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet in conversation.

Burnet’s main research tools – a chicken egg (literally) and a microscope – looked old-fashioned. Throughout his career, Burnet favoured an experimental technique developed while working at the National Institute of Medical Research in London in the 1930s. An opening was made in the shell of an egg and a virus sample injected into the membrane that surrounded the chick embryo. In these conditions most viruses multiplied, allowing closer study. Yet rather than learn new methods – such as the use of tissue culture – in virology, in which he had already achieved acclaim, Burnet decided to move on. He had always been interested in immunology, and he now directed his own and the Institute’s work into this area. While the radical change in direction was later justified with the awarding of the Nobel Prize, at the time others felt that Burnet’s move was dictatorial. Gustav Nossal, who would eventually succeed Burnet as director of WEHI, arrived at the Institute in 1957 expecting to work on viruses. He was reportedly taken aback when told of the change in direction. For a man regarded as one of the great scientific thinkers of the 20th century, Burnet’s propensity for gloomy – and often incorrect – predictions about science, especially after his formal retirement in 1965, often puzzled associates. Professor Jim Goding, of Monash University’s Department of Pathology and Immunology, recalls: “On the occasions that I got to know Burnet socially, I challenged him

concerning his predictions. When confronted with the spectacular progress since his predictions, he would say, ‘I stand corrected,’ but then immediately reiterate his belief that most of the really important work had been done and our generation was just tidying up loose ends.” Nossal believed Burnet’s stance simply reflected “the real pain that he felt in having to leave the scene of discovery”. It showed one of Australia’s greatest heroes to be very human. Innumerable records and memoirs tell the story of Frank Macfarlane Burnet. He was born in the Gippsland town of Traralgon on September 3, 1899, the second of seven children. His father, also Frank, was the branch manager of the Colonial Bank and had emigrated from Langholm, Scotland, in 1880. In 1893 he married Hadassah Pollock Mackay, the daughter of a local schoolteacher, George Mackay, who had also emigrated from Scotland. From the time he was old enough to run around the district, which was then still lush with bushland, the young Burnet developed a fascination for biology, assiduously compiling the usual boyhood collections of butterflies, birds’ eggs, rocks, and beetles. His interest in the natural world became even more marked at age 10, when his family moved to Terang in western Victoria, where the wildlife around Lake Terang was a source of unlimited discovery. Those who have written monologues and memoirs about Burnet’s life, including his friend and colleague Frank Fenner, discovered the adolescent Burnet fit a familiar profile of boys who were later drawn to academic careers: they were shy and socially late-maturing, and had a strong devotion to their hobbies. Beetle mania In Burnet’s case, his passion from childhood was beetles, which he began to record and draw. He read all the biological sections of an old Chambers Encyclopaedia published in the 1860s, which introduced him to Charles Darwin. He wrote to Melbourne for a book about beetles, and was sent a translation of Fabre’s Souvenirs Entomologiques. Later he acquired Froggatt’s Australian Insects and covered its pages with his own entries on beetle collecting. His keen interest prompted the local Presbyterian minister to encourage his

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parents to send Burnet to university. He was sent to Geelong College for four years – an experience he later revealed was not a particularly happy one – but in his final year he gained a scholarship to Ormond College, at the University of Melbourne. There he pursued medicine, mainly because it appealed to him more than what seemed to be his only other career options: the law or the Church. Fenner wrote that Burnet’s early years at university were accompanied by wide reading, a broadening of horizons, and a re-evaluation of his ideas on religion. Despite growing up in a Presbyterian household in which Sunday church was an unbending ritual, he soon became agnostic. Darwin’s writings on evolution strongly influenced his early scientific work, while the incisive work of writer HG Wells helped to form his views on society. At the end of a medical course that was shortened to five years because of World War I and the perceived need to produce graduates quickly, Burnet graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery in April 1922, placing second in a class that contained four others who later achieved fame in science and medicine: Sir Roy Cameron (pathology), professor RA Willis (medical research), Dame Jean Macnamara (poliomyelitis research and campaigner for the introduction of myxomatosis), and Dame Kate Campbell (paediatrics). After graduating, Burnet spent two years gaining his Doctor of Medicine, and then a year as resident medical officer at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. In the surgical wards he came to know two eminent surgeons, Sir Alan Newton and Sir Victor Hurley, each of whom later served as a chairman on the board of the Institute while he was director. However, it was while serving as house physician to Melbourne’s leading physician at the time, the neurologist Dr (later Sir) RR Stawell, that Burnet became convinced his future lay in clinical neurology. He applied for the post of medical registrar at Melbourne Hospital, intending it as a stepping stone, yet the medical superintendent had other ideas. Convinced that Burnet’s introverted and awkward personality was more compatible with a career in a laboratory, the superintendent steered him into the jobs of pathology registrar and, a few months later, senior resident

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pathologist. This became the start of Burnet’s brilliant scientific career and long association with WEHI (the pathology laboratories of the hospital operated as part of the Institute). In 1924 the Institute was given a fresh intellectual stimulus with the arrival from University College, London of Dr Charles Kellaway (later Sir Charles), who, as the Institute director, transformed it into a research facility specialising in physiology, biochemistry, and bacteriology. Kellaway saw Burnet as the potential leader of the small bacteriology section, but decided he should first have overseas training. In 1925 Burnet left for England as a ship’s surgeon. He took a paid position at the Lister Institute in London that still gave him time for research. Under the supervision of professor JG Ledingham, he gained a PhD from the University of London in 1928. Burnet’s time in London was not all work and staring through a microscope: he

Scientists catching mosquitoes, carriers of the myxoma virus, just after the disease outbreak

returned to Australia in 1928 with his fiancé Linda Druce, an Australian who had been living in London. They married later that year on July 10, 1928, and spent their honeymoon skiing at Mt Buffalo in northern Victoria. Yet it was another posting to London, this time to the National Institute of Medical Research at Hampstead in London in 1932–33, that changed the course of Burnet’s scientific life. The post placed him in the thick of research that was opening up scientific understanding of animal virology. During his visit Burnet developed his work on the use of the chick embryo to study animal viruses. He also acquired a powerful friend in Sir Henry Dale, a pharmacologist and winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, who offered

him a permanent position at the National Institute. However, Burnet decided to return to Melbourne, where he became assistant director of WEHI, in charge of the virus section. Back in Melbourne, Burnet continued to study the behaviour of a variety of viruses in the developing chick embryo. Seizing opportunities as they arose, he worked on psittacosis (parrot fever), carried out studies on poliovirus, and recognised a rickettsia (a micro-organism that resembles bacteria but can be as small as a virus and reproduces only inside a living cell) to be the cause of Q fever. Q fever, characterised by fever, chills, headache, and weakness, is often mistaken for flu and is a zoonotic disease that spreads from animals, such as sheep, cattle, and ticks, to people.

Frank Macfarlane Burnet with wife and daughters, 1960

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The causative organism of Q fever was later named Coxiella burneti in Burnet’s honour. Influenza interest However, his major interest from 1939 was the influenza virus, prompted by the discovery of methods of growing the virus in chick embryos. With the onset of World War II, his attention was focused on methods of immunising against influenza in case there was ever another pandemic like that of 1918–19, which killed more people than the whole of World War I. In 1942 he was offered a professorship at Harvard University in the US and was strongly tempted, but he later explained that he felt a deep sense of loyalty towards the Institute and Australian science. The patriotism he felt towards his country was reflected in the fact that many of his papers were first published in Australian scientific and medical journals. He even felt that it was an advantage for scientists to be relatively isolated in Australia, since it protected them from being too influenced by fashions in scientific thinking. In 1944 Burnet succeeded Kellaway as director of WEHI – despite both Kellaway and Burnet himself having reservations about the appointment. Kellaway was worried that Burnet lacked the necessary leadership skills and that the post might hinder Burnet’s research work. The Institute’s board overruled Kellaway, and Burnet immediately showed that he was capable of making big decisions. He determined that the Institute should concentrate on animal virology, especially the influenza virus. His team was to eventually unravel the nature of the influenza viral enzyme (neuraminidase), which became the starting point for four decades of Australian research that culminated in 1999 with the release of the world’s first anti-influenza drug, Relenza. During that time, because Burnet kept the Institute at the forefront of influenza research, it attracted numerous overseas scientists. Those who worked at the Institute had no doubt that they were privileged to be working with a man of genius. Burnet also had a reputation as a hands-on director. Until 1955, when he started travelling overseas more often and had to juggle increasing demands on his time, Burnet spent more than half of each day at the laboratory bench. He usually worked

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Burnet in his lab

alone, sometimes joined by one or two graduate assistants and a couple of technicians. Few of Burnet’s research papers list a co-author other than his graduate assistant of the day. Fenner says that Burnet was careful in selecting his graduate assistants – and a rollcall of highly competent women assistants (including his daughter Deborah) repaid him with many years of service. One, Patricia Lind, worked in the lab with Burnet from 1944 until his retirement in 1965. When Burnet and Peter Medawar travelled to Sweden in 1960 to receive their Laureates, professor Bertil Lindblad, the president of the Royal Academy of Sciences, articulated their achievement during the award ceremony: “In your discovery of immunity produced in the embryonic stage and of actively acquired tolerance you have found a new biological law, opening up new vistas in experimental biology. The phenomenon of immunological tolerance which you have discovered will most certainly be of direct practical importance

Peter Colman, Officer of the CSIRO, at the Division of Protein Chemistry, showing his flu protein (neuraminidase) model to Frank Macfarlane Burnet. Photo: CSIRO

Innoculating eggs for influenza production. Eggs are inoculated in order to produce influenza virus. Photo CSIRO

for the treatment of various kinds of injuries and diseases.” During his time in Sweden to receive his Laureate Burnet was clearly conscious of the historical significance of his achievement, and was keen to place it into a wider educational context. “I think that this occasion has a rather special significance for my own country, a middling small country a little bigger than Sweden but only now beginning to create an image of its own in the eyes of the world,” he said. “Someday I hope that we will take our place along with Sweden as one of the centres where knowledge can do along with social progress to the good life we all seek.” He then had a message for all students, not just those who might embark on scientific careers: “To advance science is highly honourable, but other things are equally honourable. Perhaps when you are 20 to 30 years older, research as we know it may be less important than it is today, but there will always be an obligation to pass on to the new generation the tradition of liberal scholarship. I hope that

when you are as old as I am, skill and success in education will be as highly rewarded as success in scientific discovery is today. But whether your career is in research, in education, or in seeing that some of the wheels of our complex civilisation turn as they should, I wish you luck.” Although Burnet won the Nobel Prize for his work on acquired immunological tolerance, he was dismissive of the wider implications of that work. (For example, one of his comments was alluded to in the following headline: “No great value in transplants, says top scientist”.) Burnet considered his greatest contribution to biology to be his clonal selection theory. This theory, which sought to explain how animals could produce such a wide variety of antibodies, opened up vast new areas of research. However, it would take nearly another 20 years for the actual mechanism of clonal diversification to be discovered, by Japanese immunologists Nobumichi Hozumi and Susumu Tonegawa in 1976.

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FRANK MACFARLANE BURNET Burnet had an unforgettable impact on the stream of scientists who came to WEHI, especially between 1944 and 1965. Although his management style could seem like a benign dictatorship, the Institute’s scientists were granted many freedoms. Unlike others, Burnet did not put his name on papers to which he had not contributed. Highly animated discussions over morning and afternoon tea were a feature of Institute life. He read every paper his colleagues had written, scribbling clarifications over any points he felt were unclear and returning the manuscript the following day. Reluctant spokesperson Burnet never courted interviews, but he recognised the importance of talking to the media if the public were to understand the role of science and scientists. He would interrupt his precious time at the laboratory bench to take inquiries from the press and occasionally appear on television. After Burnet notionally retired in 1965, he

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"I hope that when you are as old as I am, skill and success in education will be as highly rewarded as success in scientific discovery is today. But whether your career is in research, in education, or in seeing that some of the wheels of our complex civilisation turn as they should, I wish you luck.” broadened his interests even further, becoming a public commentator on issues as disparate as cigarette smoking and uranium exports. In 1966 he returned to the University of Melbourne, where, over the next 12 years, he wrote 13 books on subjects ranging from immunology and human biology to ageing and cancer. He also produced a fourth

edition of his first book, Biological Aspects of Infectious Disease. Most of Burnet’s writings were not technical monographs but were written for the doctor or biologist who was not a specialist in virology, immunology, or gerontology. Many of his popular books are highly readable. In 1973 Burnet’s life was turned upside down when his wife Linda died of lymphoid leukaemia. She had been his companion on many of his overseas trips, and when separated by distance, they had corresponded devotedly. Many of their letters are held at the University of Melbourne Archives, along with Burnet’s photographs, diaries, notes, press clippings, and early watercolours and sketches. After his wife’s death, Burnet lived for a while at Ormond College at the University of Melbourne, which had been his home as a medical student. In was here that he renewed his friendship with the then Master at Ormond, Dr Davis McCaughey (who was later appointed governor of Victoria). While devastated by his wife’s death, Burnet was to find love again. In 1976 he married Hazel Jenkin, a widow who had endowed the library at the School of Microbiology to commemorate her only daughter, Heather, who had died while a graduate student. In November 1984 Burnet was operated on for cancer and initially seemed to have made a good recovery, but secondary lesions were

discovered in August 1985. As a biologist, Burnet accepted the inevitability of death and was impatient with proposals designed to prolong the human life span. He had earlier recognised the scope for research “on the best means of minimising the depression and misery of pre-death”, so it is perhaps fitting that he was spared those things. He remained mentally acute until he lost consciousness shortly after his last illness took hold. He died on August 31, 1985, aged 86, at his son Ian’s home at Port Fairy in Victoria, near where he had spent his early years. He was given a state funeral by the federal government and was buried at Tower Hill Cemetery, near Port Fairy. His wife Lady Burnet survived him, along with his children from his first marriage, Ian, Elizabeth, and Deborah, and eight grandchildren. Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet remains one of Australia’s most acclaimed scientists, a man who made an extraordinary contribution to human medicine and wellbeing and was a proud Australian. Greatness became a mantle that he appeared to wear quite comfortably, yet at heart he never moved far from the shy, curious child who used to wander through the bush, hunting down butterflies and drawing beetles in a sketch pad.

Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet at the Nobel Prize-giving ceremony in Stockholm, 1960.

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Vital statistics

Why he was awarded the Nobel Prize

Name: Frank Macfarlane Burnet

The Nobel Prize was awarded with Sir Peter Brian Medawar of the United Kingdom for the discovery of acquired immunological tolerance. How does the human body recognise the difference between existing micro-organisms and dangerous invaders? This fundamental question preoccupied Burnet during the 1940s. He studied every piece of literature he could find on the subject – and it was his ability to think laterally across all this information that produced the breakthrough hypothesis.

Born: Traralgon, Gippsland, south-eastern Victoria Birthdate: September 3, 1899 Died: August 31, 1985, in Port Fairy, Victoria School: Geelong College, Geelong University: University of Melbourne; University of London Married: Edith Linda Marston Druce, in 1928; widowed 1973. Married Hazel Gertrude Jenkin in 1976 Children: Three from his first marriage: Ian, Elizabeth, and Deborah Lived: Mainly in Melbourne, but also in London Awards and accolades 1942: Fellow of the Royal Society of London 1946: Honorary doctorate from Cambridge 1947: Royal Medal, Royal Society of London 1948: Fellow of Royal Australasian College of Physicians 1951: Awarded a British knighthood 1953: Fellow of Royal College of Surgeons 1958: Order of Merit 1959: Copley Medal, Royal Society of London 1960: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1960: Honorary doctorate from Harvard University 1961: Australian of the Year 1968: Honorary doctorates from Oxford and Monash universities 1978: Order of Australia 1981: Australian of the Year Burnet was the most highly honoured scientist to work in Australia. Following his death in 1985, two Melbourne research units and an annual oration at the Australian Society of Immunology were named in his honour.

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During Burnet’s study of influenza viruses in the 1930s and 1940s he had developed methods for growing viruses in chicken embryos inside eggs. He noticed in his research that, although normal hens could be infected with influenza and develop antibodies, chickens born from eggs with the virus did not develop antibodies when exposed to influenza. The chickens had an “acquired immunological tolerance” and did not raise an immune defence because their immune systems did not recognise the virus as foreign. This showed that when the immune system developed during the foetal stage, it recorded all proteins and microorganisms in this enclosed environment as “self”, including the virus injected by the scientist. Burnet’s theory was confirmed in experiments by the English researcher Medawar, and it was for their collaboration in developing a new understanding of the immune system that they were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1960. This understanding of the basis of immunity has become vital in the field of organ transplants. Prior to Burnet and Medawar’s work, it was thought that immunity was in some way related to the nature of an individual’s blood.

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Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

FRANK MACFARLANE BURNET

The work of our Nobel Laureates continues to reverberate through time. It is impossible to do justice to the fundamental importance of Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet’s work in a few words. He made a huge contribution to the body of scientific knowledge, part of which was the development of the phenomenon of immunological tolerance. The advancement of the field of immunology as a science during this time, was a direct result of the discoveries of Burnet, and the discipline has since grown exponentially. Vaccine development, tissue transplantation, and the development of monoclonal antibody and associated therapies, have all progressed through Burnet’s initial work. While resource-poor communities were not direct or primary focus of Macfarlane Burnet’s work, the impact of his ground-breaking discoveries has opened the way for many of the global health issues that face these communities to be addressed. He, like the Institute that bears his name, tackled the big issues that affected humanity at the time. Sir Frank would have been very proud of the work we undertake and, like us, very enthusiastic about the impact our work has had and will have in the future. We owe Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet a great deal. His contributions will be forever be remembered for their significance and the positive impact they have had on humanity. We are very proud that the Burnet Institute named after Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, and our present-day focus is remarkably compatible with his main areas of interests in virology, immunology, and public health.

Professor Brendan Crabb AC Director and CEO Burnet Institute The Burnet Institute’s mission is to achieve better health for vulnerable

communities in Australia and internationally by accelerating the translation of research, discovery, and evidence into sustainable health solutions. State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Defining the mind: physical and mental worlds collide John Carew Eccles 1903 –1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1963 – shared with Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Fielding Huxley

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

JOHN CAREW ECCLES

John Carew Eccles had a burning desire to answer life’s biggest questions: how we come to be, how we are what we are – the very nature of existence. His work led to an understanding of the central nervous system, including how it works and how it controls the body.

re you made up of your brain or your mind? Is the essence of who you are controlled by the brain – an organ – or the mind, which has no known physical dimension? Is your mind mysterious, an ethereal controller of your brain, or a complex but wholly explicable product of the brain’s chemical, electrical, and neurological processes? Indeed, is the mind real or imagined? Start exploring questions like these and you plunge into a maelstrom of conflicting philosophies and sciences – the same ferment of human thought that has pitted atheists and spiritualists against each other throughout the ages. Ponder the existence and function of the mind and you enter into the world of Sir John Carew Eccles, whose obsession with the brain and the central nervous system reshaped scientific understanding of neurological processes. His research and insights into these complex and controversial mechanisms that define humanity culminated in his being awarded science’s highest honour, the Nobel Prize, in 1963. The honour was shared with two British neurology specialists, Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley. Their citation read, “For their discoveries concerning the ionic mechanisms

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involved in excitation and inhibition in the peripheral and central portions of the nerve cell membrane”. In plain English, the three scientists, individually and together, significantly expanded medical researchers’ understanding of the central nervous system, including how it works and controls the body. For Eccles, winning the Nobel Prize was the culmination of his search for the mechanisms by which the mind controls the body. He always said that his quest began as an 18-year-old medical student, when he was struck by an awesome feeling of his own uniqueness; he marvelled at his brain’s capacity for thoughts and emotions. Yet perhaps his obsession with the brain started at a much younger age. A memoir written by his family, Hello Eccles, states: “He was born with an uncommonly large head and the doctor told his parents bluntly that this indicated the child would either be an idiot or be brilliant. Anxiously they awaited his development.” One of Eccles’ daughters, Mary Mennis, said her father once confessed that he had done an IQ test and, because his results were off the top of the scale, his IQ could not actually be tested. Before Eccles’ ground-breaking neurological studies, which greatly increased knowledge

Eccles in his lab. Image courtesy of John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University.

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g JOHN CAREW ECCLES of the mammalian nervous system, the brain was regarded by many neuroscientists as a powerful, albeit poorly understood, biological machine – a haphazard collection of circuits that wire bodily functions via the central nervous system. When processed by the brain, the combined action of all this circuitry, feeding information into and out of the brain, was thought to somehow create a sense of personal control and individual identity. Eccles, also a neuroscientist, considered such conventional views as ridiculously simplistic. In fact, he described many of the more popular theories of the day as “impoverished and empty”. While every bit the disciplined scientist with an obsession for rigidly objective experimentation, Eccles nonetheless believed that if the science was going to be credible, it could not simply dismiss what he called “the mystery of human creativity and uniqueness”. He wrote: “Extensive experimental studies have shown that mental acts of attention and intention activate appropriate regions of the cerebral cortex. An intention to move, for example, initiates the firing of a set of neurons of the supplementary motor area about 200 milliseconds before the intended movement takes place. If the mind is the brain, this would mean either that one part of the brain activates another part, which then activates another part, or that a particular region of the brain is activated spontaneously, without any cause, and it is hard to see how either alternative would provide a basis for free will.”

that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.”

"He was born with an uncommonly large head and the doctor told his parents bluntly that this indicated the child would either be an idiot or be brilliant" Eccles was never shy about including both the philosophical and the anatomical in the course of his research, which went further than anyone had previously gone into whether, or how, both physical and mental states might exist or interact in the nervous

With his sister Rose and parents William and Mary, 1911

Free will or mind machine? Eccles believed that the notion of the brain as nothing more than a virtual machine could not stand up to even basic scrutiny as soon as a scientist acknowledged the mysteries that the machine theory could not explain. For example, to sidestep the mystery of that uniquely human capacity to wonder, as if an explanation would reveal itself in the course of time as the brain became better understood, was, to Eccles, shoddy science. “I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity,” he wrote. “This belief must be classed as a superstition, and we have to recognise

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Sir John Eccles. Photo: Wellcome Collection

system. This was largely due to his being, at that time in his life, a practising Catholic with a strong belief in God, which he took to his research without any sense of contradiction as he peeled away at the mechanics of the human brain and its neurological processes – processes that other scientists believed to be the inner and wholly human origin of spiritual awareness. In an undated interview with ABC Radio, Eccles once explained his scientific obsession in this way: “How we come to be and how we are what we are is beyond any understanding. I have been obsessed by this: trying to understand the very nature of my existence. Somehow or other, what is going on in your brain turns into a perception. This is a tremendously important problem beyond any solution, but it is a real problem.” John Eccles, the scientist who defined some of science’s most imponderable questions

during the 20th century, was born on January 27, 1903 at Northcote, a suburb north-east of Melbourne’s central business district. His father, William James Eccles, and his mother, Mary (nee Carew), were both schoolteachers born in Victoria. At the age of 12 Eccles began his secondary schooling at Warrnambool High School. Before entering the University of Melbourne, he spent a year at Melbourne High School studying science and mathematics. He led the school in the final state-wide exam, shared the state geometry prize, and gained a senior scholarship to the University. Although interested in mathematics, he chose to study medicine and started his five-year course in 1920, at the age of 17. He was active in various university societies and in sport, gaining a full blue in athletics after setting an Australian universities’ record in pole vaulting. Like many students whose courses included the biological sciences, he was strongly influenced by Darwin’s Origin of Species. It encouraged Eccles to read widely on both physiology and philosophy, and it was when he could not find a satisfactory explanation for the interaction between the mind and the brain that he decided, while still a student, to become a neuroscientist. After reading Sir Charles Sherrington’s 1906 book The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, Eccles applied himself to achieving a Rhodes Scholarship just to be able to work with the pioneering neurophysiologist at Oxford University. He later wrote, “I, at the age of 17 or 18 as a medical student, suddenly came up against a problem. What am I? What is the meaning of my existence as I experience it? And I proceeded to read quite a lot about what the philosophers had said, and the psychologists, and was profoundly dissatisfied with it. I decided that they didn’t know enough about the brain and the brain was the essence of all my consciousness and everything that I knew myself to be. I decided that I would learn something myself about it.” Eccles completed his medical course in February 1925, gaining first class honours, first place in his cohort, and several clinical prizes. He graduated with the degrees of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, and had already been awarded the Rhodes Scholarship for Victoria. After six months as a resident medical officer at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, he left Australia in August 1925

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JOHN CAREW ECCLES

and arrived in Oxford in October. Eccles then worked closely with Sherrington until 1931 at the Oxford Neurophysiology School, which produced major advances in neural understanding. Sherrington, also a published poet, was 74, and his experiments with Eccles were the last in which he actively participated. However, the pair formed a deep friendship that would last until Sherrington’s death. Later, in 1952, when Eccles was in England to deliver the eight Waynflete Lectures (dealing with neurophysiology and mind–brain problems) at Magdalen College, Oxford, he visited Sherrington at the latter’s Eastbourne nursing home on England’s south coast just days before his great mentor died. In 1932 Eccles became a Staines Medical Research Fellow, and two years later he was made lecturer in physiology at the same college in Oxford. In the 1920s the Oxford Neurophysiology School, under Sherrington, had led the world in the field of mammalian central nervous system physiology. It was also a time of controversy between the exponents of rival chemical and electrical theories on the nature of the process of transmission at the terminal junctions (synapses) of nerve cells (neurons). Although there was strong evidence for chemical transmission at excitatory and inhibitory synapses in the peripheral nervous system, synaptic transmission in the central nervous system was widely considered to be an electrical process.

political uncertainty in Europe. “There was the ominous rise of Hitler against the unprepared Western Alliance, so I decided, perhaps unwisely, to return to what seemed the security of Australia. There was the opportunity to create in Sydney a research institute matching the Hall Institute at Melbourne Hospital with Kellaway and Burnet. I accepted the directorship of the Kanematsu Institute at Sydney Hospital.” (Dr Charles Kellaway, later Sir Charles, was director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, transforming it into a research facility specialising in physiology, biochemistry, and bacteriology. Eccles said that, in retrospect, he felt he should have stayed in England and weathered the storm, but instead, “I embarked on my odyssean journeying, never to return to my beloved England. It was a fateful choice.” He found the academic isolation severe:

Eccles at a black-tie event pictured with Princess Desirée of Sweden

Chemical resistance Eccles resisted many aspects of the chemical transmitter theory. The techniques then available for studying central synapses were simply inadequate for determining the nature of the transmission process, but the debate was important in defining problems and stimulating considerable experimental work. The eventual victory of the chemical theory was another 20 years away. For a time it looked as if Eccles would stay at Oxford for the duration of his academic career, but in 1937 he was drawn back to Australia by a position at the Kanematsu Memorial Institute of Pathology at Sydney Hospital. His mentor, Sherrington, had retired from his post in 1936, and Eccles was disappointed at the direction that research was taking at Oxford. He was also increasingly worried about the

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“The Sydney University Medical School was a very dim place, being little more than a teaching institution. Unbelievably, it was completely locked up by guards at 5 p.m. Even the professors had to scurry out to avoid imprisonment for the night!” At the Kanematsu Institute he led a team studying the actions of chemical substances on the transmission of nerve impulses to muscles. One of the team members was Bernard Katz, a refugee from Nazi Germany, who would become a key member of the research team that eventually proved the chemical theory in nerve transmission. It was Katz who was able to show how chemical transmitters released from nerve endings produce electrical currents, and that the chemical alters the configuration of molecules in the cell membrane. This allows ions to flow into muscle fibres and generate electrical currents. Katz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1970. Katz’s collaboration with Eccles was interrupted by Japan entering the war – Katz joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1942 – and Eccles found himself working on the problems of communication in the noisy environment of aircraft and tanks. The last straw, however, came when the hospital board decided to add two floors to the Kanematsu Institute to accommodate a resident medical staff, effectively curtailing future expansion of the research laboratories. Eccles resigned in late 1943 and moved to Dunedin, New Zealand as professor of

physiology at the Otago Medical School. His new job required him to take on a heavy teaching load, so Eccles, who would be called “Prof” and, eventually, “Jack” by younger colleagues, conducted many of his experiments late at night and in the early morning. Many people, when describing Eccles, mentioned his enormous energy, along with a powerful personality. It was in New Zealand that Eccles met science philosopher Karl Popper, who became a pivotal influence on Eccles and his research. “The year 1944 was important in my scientific life above all my post-Sherrington years, because my intimate association with Karl Popper dates from that time,” Eccles said. “Many people, including myself, had our scientific lives changed by the inspiring new vision of science that Popper gave us.” Popper was a vigorous proponent of the “falsifiability” of hypotheses as the only true test of validity for a scientific theory. In other words, he argued that proving a proposition to be valid was not good enough – just as much effort had to go into deliberately trying to disprove it. Eccles found this a liberating way to approach experiments. It meant he could be absolutely daring in developing any hypothesis, and rejoice even when he proved it wrong – because this in itself was a scientific success. Eccles would later say this greatly lifted his conceptual power, because in many ways the shackles were off. It removed any hesitation about proposing a theory that might later be

With fellow Nobel Laureate Professor Ragnar Granit (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1967)

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JOHN CAREW ECCLES

proved flawed. Eccles and Popper eventually collaborated on the influential 1977 book The Self and Its Brain, a fascinating probe into the body–mind, self and soul puzzle. It remains the most cited of all of Eccles’ philosophical writings. Concerned that his heavy teaching load in Dunedin was limiting his competitive edge, Eccles returned to Australia in 1952 to take up the foundation chair of physiology at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the recently established Australian National University in Canberra. He regarded his “14 golden years” there as the most productive and enjoyable period of his career. Colleagues remember him as honest and occasionally terse. However, Eccles would unreservedly heap praise upon anyone who had made significant discoveries or progress. In Canberra Eccles made significant contributions to the understanding of the ionic basis of central nervous system excitation and inhibition, and of the nature of the chemical transmitters involved in this. It was for this work that he received the Nobel Prize in 1963. His daughter, Rose Mason, was working with him as a researcher in Canberra when he received the Nobel Prize news. She recalled the momentous occasion, which Eccles downplayed in his own writings: “We had a wonderful celebration in the lab and we presented him with a candlestick,” she said.

marriage shortly afterwards to Dr Helena Taborikova, a Czechoslovakian neurophysiologist whom he had met at a scientific congress in Prague in 1963. Eccles’ daughter felt her father’s decision to leave Australia again had more to do with personal than professional circumstances. When interviewed for a Radio National program celebrating her father’s centenary, she said her parents had “drifted miles apart”. “My mother had become very religious, and she went to religious meetings. She got up and went to daily mass, and this used to irritate him because he’d get to bed at two or three and the alarm would go at six and, you know, wake him up. Both were incompatible in many ways, their characters, and he was much more open – he loved meeting people.” Despite the incompatibilities, daughter Mary Mennis said her mother was shocked to hear – via a friend who heard it on the evening news – that Eccles, who was in Chicago, was filing for divorce. Eccles ceased

Eccles and his first wife, Irene, with the Nobel medal (Rose Mason Collection)

Forced retirement In 1966, despite a brilliant career and international acclaim, Eccles crashed head-on into the cultural apathy that dogged academic achievement in Australia at the time. Despite his knowledge, experience, and zest for science and life, he found absolute disinterest within the nation’s bureaucracy and university hierarchies in finding a way around retirement at the compulsory age. Reluctantly, he left Australia again and was welcomed with open arms by the American Medical Association’s Institute for Biomedical Research in Chicago. It was not a happy or successful period for Eccles, and he moved three years later, this time to be distinguished professor of physiology and biophysics at the State University of New York. His departure from his home country had also been coloured, in the eyes of some, by his divorce from his wife, Irene, with whom he had nine children, and his

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to be a practising Catholic. When his second wife, Taborikova, was interviewed on Radio National, she said he could no longer accept many of the dogmas of the Church. When Eccles finally did retire, in 1975 at the age of 72, he moved to the “idyllic mountain surroundings” of Contra in Switzerland. Both he and Helena, who outlived him, were sad that Australia had not accommodated his willingness to keep experimenting and writing well beyond retirement age. He travelled widely throughout Europe and the United States and played a prominent role in the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War organisation, which was involved in the formation of ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. (ICAN, which has its roots in Melbourne, is Australia’s first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.) Eccles also continued to wrestle intellectually with a new generation of researchers. In Frankfurt, in 1993, during a celebration of his 90th birthday, he was still pushing advanced ideas on cerebral function and the nature of consciousness and the self–psyche, mind–body conundrum.

John Carew Eccles and his wife Irene in the late 1920s

Mental interactions Eccles came to believe that humans have a non-material mind or self that acts upon, and is influenced by, our material brains – a mental world in addition to the physical world – and that the two interact. As for what the mind actually is, Eccles conceded that it could not be pure nothingness – otherwise it could not exist, in which case he reasoned it

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to be composed of finer grades of energy-substance. Indeed, he suggested our inner constitution might comprise several non-physical levels. Eccles always had plenty of opponents, however. In his last book, How the Self Controls its Brain (1994), he was buoyed by advances in quantum physics and the latest discoveries about the microstructure of the neocortex, which he felt were on the way to supporting his proposition. Eccles called the fundamental neural units of the cerebral cortex dendrons, and he proposed that each of the 40 million dendrons is linked with a mental unit, or psychon, representing a unitary conscious experience. In willed actions and thought, he proposed that psychons act on dendrons and momentarily increase the probability of the firing of selected neurons. Eccles remained in basic agreement with the neo-Darwinian theory that evolution is driven by random genetic mutations followed by the weeding out of unfavourable variations by natural selection. However, he added to this his belief in a divine providence operating over and above the biological evolution. As for what happens after death, Eccles had little option but to fall back onto his personal perspective: “We did come to be by something we do not understand at all, and therefore in our apparent ceasing to be, with death, it is the same problem. So, I should say we have hope because we know nothing, and we should not dogmatise it. This is part of the message I have for humanity: that there is such tremendous mystery, so little is known, and the wonder is so enormous that we must have hope.” Eccles took the scientific exploration of the mind and brain as far as anyone had been able to push it, but even he was forced to concede that perhaps the meaning of life might always be a mystery. He said: “For me, the one great question that has dominated my life is, what am I?” After suffering ill health from 1994, John Eccles died on May 2, 1997 at Locarno, Switzerland. At Eccles’ request, he was buried in Contra, near his last home.

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JOHN CAREW ECCLES

Vital statistics Name: John Carew Eccles Born: January 27, 1903, in Northcote, Melbourne Died: May 2, 1997, in Locarno, Switzerland School: Warrnambool High School; Melbourne High School University: University of Melbourne; Oxford University Married: Irene Frances Miller, of Motueka, New Zealand in 1928; divorced 1968. Married Helena Taborikova, of Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1968 Children: Five daughters, including Rosamond (Rose) who worked at the Australian National University with him as a researcher from 1955–66, and four sons with Irene Miller Lived: Australia, New Zealand, the United States, England, and Switzerland Awards and accolades 1927–29: Christopher Welch Scholar, Oxford 1932–34: Staines Medical Fellow 1952–66: Professor of physiology, Australian National University 1952: Waynflete Lectures, Magdalen College, Oxford

In particular, his work concerned the electrical changes that the nerve impulses elicit when they reach another nerve cell. He made significant contributions to the understanding of the central nervous system, including excitation and inhibition and the nature of chemical transmitters involved in these. Eccles showed how excitation and inhibition are expressed by changes of membrane potential. When the response is sufficiently strong to cause excitation, the membrane potential decreases until a value is reached at which the cell fires off an impulse. This impulse travels through the nerve fibre of the cell and causes contraction in a muscle. He showed how excitation and inhibition correspond to ionic currents, which push the membrane potential in opposite directions. By understanding the nature of the events in the peripheral and central nervous system, a greater understanding of nervous action has been achieved. Eccles believed that the origin of each of us stems from codes of genetic inheritance, and that the most significant scientific questions we can ask concern the working of our nervous systems – the reception, communication, and storage devices that subserve all our perception, thoughts, memories, actions, creative imaginations, and ideals.

1958: Created Knight Commander 1962: Royal Medal, Royal Society 1963: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1966: Foreign Associate, National Academy of Sciences 1968–75: Distinguished professor of physiology and biophysics, State University of New York at Buffalo 1990: Companion in the Order of Australia 1993: 90th birthday marked by the establishment of the Sir John Eccles Lecture at the University of New South Wales Why he was awarded the Nobel Prize Sir John Eccles’ work with the brain and central nervous system reshaped scientific understanding of neurological processes. His discoveries expanded the knowledge available about the central nervous system, including how it works and how it controls the body. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with physiologists and biophysicists Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley.

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A quantum leap Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov 1916– 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics 1964 – shared with Charles Hard Townes and Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

ALEKSANDR MIKHAILOVICH PROKHOROV

Laser applications, which range from supermarket checkouts to global communications and broadcasting networks, can be traced back to the work carried out by Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov. His work, which provided the first practical demonstration of quantum electronics, is the origin of today’s vast laser industry.

leksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov was born in 1916 at the family farm in Russell Road, Peeramon, in the Atherton Tablelands of Queensland. His Russian émigré parents, Mikhail Ivanovich Prokhorov and Mariya Ivanovna Prokhorov (nee Mikhaelovna) had fled from Siberia to Australia in 1911 because of Mikhail’s involvement in revolutionary activities. As an opponent of the Tsarist regime, he had been sent to Siberia following the abortive 1905 revolution. After the hoarfrost, howling wolves, frozen mountains, salt mines, and human chain gangs of Siberia, the young couple’s new home in Australia’s tropical far north was a world away, both figuratively and literally. At the time, the Cairns district was actively attracting migrants from all over Europe to develop tin and gold mines, cut timber and work on the railways. Among the new arrivals looking for a fresh

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start were a small group of Russian families, many of them highly educated and, like the Prokhorovs, escaping the serious social upheavals taking place in their homeland. Looking for some sense of community, many took up new land selections in the same area of lush rainforest country (characteristic of the Atherton Tablelands), and tis part of the world came to be known colloquially as “Little Russia”. As for Peeramon, little remains of its pioneering past. Today the town’s main built attraction is the Peeramon Hotel, one of the oldest pubs in Queensland. Prokhorov was the third and youngest child. His parents also had two daughters, Jane and Lila. When he was seven years old, Lila – the eldest sister – died unexpectedly. That same year, 1923, the family decided to return to Mother Russia, a move probably influenced by the propaganda filtering out of the country following the October Revolution

Prokhorov family portrait, 1923 of 1917. When the Communists took power, they promised a worker’s paradise, raising the hopes of many that the horrors visited on Europe by World War I would be expunged by a new, utopian world order. Life under Stalin Life in Russia as a teenager was not easy for the young Prokhorov. The civil war had been a disaster for the country’s economy, culminating in the enormous famine of 1920– 21. The following year, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established, and when Vladimir Lenin died soon after, his successor Joseph Stalin began his reign of terror. It was during this period that Stalin introduced farm collectivisation, effectively wiping out the peasantry both as a class and as a way of life. He also oversaw the execution or exile of millions to Siberian concentration camps. Against this bloody and turbulent background, Prokhorov grew into adolescence. In 1934 he was accepted into Leningrad State University and graduated four years later with an honours degree in physics. This led to postgraduate work at the PN Lebedev Physical Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. There he studied the propagation of radio waves over the earth’s surface and, with one of his research directors, the physicist VV Migulin, proposed a

novel technique for using radio interference to explore the ionosphere, one of the layers of the upper atmosphere. In June 1941 the German invasion of Russia interrupted Prokhorov’s studies and he entered military service, despite being eligible for exemption because of his academic research. In the same year, he married Galina Alekseyevna Shelepina, a geographer with whom he later had one son, Krill. However, instead of a life of simple domesticity with his new bride, Prokhorov went on to serve with the Red Army in a period of warfare that would eventually kill onesixth of the population. The battles for Leningrad (Prokhorov’s old stomping ground) and Stalingrad were particularly protracted and obscene. While defending his country, Prokhorov was wounded twice. After his second injury, in 1944, he was demobilised. He was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, 1st Class, and the Medal for Valour for his bravery. After taking off his uniform, Prokhorov wasted no time in resuming his studies as a senior research associate in the Oscillations Laboratory of the PN Lebedev Physical Institute. His main passion by this time was nonlinear oscillations, about which he devised a theory that became the subject of his thesis. This earned him his candidate’s degree (equivalent to a master’s degree) in 1946. For this work, he and two

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G ALEKSANDR MIKHAILOVICH PROKHOROV other physicists were awarded the Leonid I Mandelshtam Prize, named in honour of the Soviet radio physicist of considerable repute. From 1947, he studied the radiation from electrons produced in a synchrotron (a device that accelerates charged particles such as protons and electrons in widening circles to very high energies). He demonstrated that the electrons radiate at wavelengths of the order of centimetres in the microwave region. As a result of these investigations, he wrote his PhD thesis, “Coherent radiation of electrons in the synchrotron accelerator”, in 1951. The year before, Prokhorov was appointed assistant director of the Oscillations Laboratory at the PN Lebedev Physical Institute. In 1954 he was appointed head of the Institute, a post he held until his retirement. The Department of Oscillations soon became a research nursery. In 1959 the laboratory of radio astronomy was organised from one of the groups in the department, and in 1962 another specialist laboratory was dedicated to quantum physics. Today, the laser is taken for granted as a common component in domestic, industrial, and scientific equipment. Yet for the first 10 years of its existence it was regarded as

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a genius invention with little practical use. Its potential only began to emerge in 1964, when three scientists shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for its discovery. After completing his doctorate, Prokhorov began to investigate the question of radio spectroscopy on a wide scale. Somewhat later, he explored quantum electronics. To assist in this field of inquiry, he organised around him a team of young research scientists. Together they applied radar and radio broadcasting techniques, developed primarily in the United States and England during and after World War II, to study the vibrational and rotational spectra of molecules. Prokhorov focused his research on a class of molecules called asymmetric tops, which have three different rotational axes of symmetry and are the most difficult to analyse in terms of their rotational spectra. In addition to purely spectroscopic research, he carried out a theoretical analysis of the application of microwave absorption spectra to improving frequency and time standards. This latter work led to his collaboration with Nikolay Basov. While the pair was searching for a technique to amplify microwave signals in spectroscopic experiments, they hit upon the idea of using a gas-filled cavity with reflectors at either end, in which

Atherton in 1928

Seeing the future: Prokhorov’s experiments created a new field of study, optics the microwave beam would be intensified. They then discovered that this method produced microwaves with an extremely narrow range of frequencies. This laid the theoretical groundwork for the eventual construction of a molecular oscillator (or maser) operating on ammonia. This is a device that emits microwave radiation of a single wavelength and was a precursor to the laser. In 1955 Prokhorov studied the electronic paramagnetic resonance spectra of ruby with AA Manenkov, which made it possible to suggest it as a material for lasers in 1957. The two announced the discovery of their molecular generator in a paper read before the AllUnion Conference on Radio Spectroscopy held by the USSR Academy of Sciences in May 1952. However, they held off publishing their results for more than two years, by which time the American physicist Charles H Townes had built a working maser and published his conclusions in the journal Physical Review. Prokhorov’s research came from a combined understanding of the science of optics and radio engineering. In 1964 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries leading to the development of the laser. He shared this with his compatriots Basov, also at the PN Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, and Townes, whose discoveries were made

independently at Columbia University and Bell Telephone laboratories. “Many believed that we had gone crazy, that it was impossible,” Prokhorov said in a television interview in 2001. “It was a brave step, because before that no one had said it was possible to create a generator of optical range. Then it became a new, independent science: optics.” The inventions were the first practical demonstration of quantum electronics. Taking a stand Prokhorov was regarded as a politically controversial figure by the West. In the 1950s he established the Radio Spectroscopic Laboratory at the Nuclear Physics Research Institute of the Moscow State University, of which he became a full professor in 1957. This institute was a key contributor to the Soviet program to build a counter-system to then United States president Ronald Reagan’s plans for a “Star Wars” defence system – so called because it would destroy ballistic missiles in space. But Prokhorov, who became a lifelong member of the Communist Party in 1950, was anything but a conformist in an era when expressing views that did not align with the Party’s was both rare and dangerous. Even under strict government controls, he was known for his independent streak

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ALEKSANDR MIKHAILOVICH PROKHOROV

and outspokenness. As the editor-in-chief of the multi-volume reference book the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, a position he held from 1969 until 1978, Prokhorov ignored orders to have the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov excluded from the encyclopaedia. The father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Sakharov later turned anti-war activist, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. He was also one of the regime’s most courageous critics, a defender of human rights and democracy. This act of defiance by Prokhorov might have sent him to exile in Siberia, like his father before him, had he not been so highly respected. But, ironically, in 1983 he was one of four Soviet scientists to criticise Sakharov, who argued that the US might have to match the Soviet Union in nuclear weapons before effective arms reduction negotiations could begin. In the previous year Prokhorov had been one of 97 Nobel Prize winners who called for a freeze on his country’s development and deployment of nuclear weapons. Yet in 1984 he lent his name to what was seen as a Soviet propaganda campaign. Prokhorov was one of four Soviet Nobel Laureates to sign a letter to President Reagan on behalf of an imprisoned Native American political activist, Leonard Peltier. The letter,

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however, was perceived to be part of a Soviet ploy to deflect attention from Sakharov’s hunger strike, staged on behalf of his wife, who had been refused permission to travel to the West for treatment of a heart condition. In the political sphere, Prokhorov’s fame grew even more when he refused a government invitation to become a deputy in the Soviet parliament, famously declaring, “I am not a politician. I am a scientist.” Prokhorov continued to use his position to engage world leaders throughout his life. In 1999 he was one of several scientists to sign a letter to the presidents of the US and Russia urging them to work together to help Russia make the transition to being a democratic country. The same year, he was the chair of the Russian Committee for the Observance of the United Nations International Year of the Elder Person. Although Prokhorov could have easily rested on his laurels after he won the Nobel Prize, he went on to create various types of lasers. In later years his work focused on fibre and integrated optics and the creation of optical communication systems. He also supervised research in microelectronics, plasma physics, controlled thermonuclear fusion, and

Meeting of the inventors, 1959.L to R: Zeiger, Basov, Gordon, Prokhorov, and Townes

laser medicine. Between 1973 and 1981 he was chief of the Department of General Physics and Astronomy of the Institute of General Physics in Moscow. In 1981 he became director of the Natural Sciences Centre of the PN Lebedev Physical Institute, and in 1983 he founded the General Physics Institute in Moscow, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and served as its director until 1988. He also served as editor-in-chief of Laser Physics, a bi-monthly international journal. End of an era Prokhorov was 85 when he died of pneumonia on January 8, 2002 in his home in Moscow. Scientists and politicians worldwide mourned his death, saying it marked the end of an era for Russian science. Then-Russian president Vladimir Putin said in an issued statement, “His name is linked to outstanding discoveries that in many ways defined 20th-century civilisation.” Yevgeny Dianov, head of the Fibre Optics Scientific Centre, told Russian television, “His independence allowed him to speak freely to the Soviet authorities.” Meanwhile, the Russian winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics, Dr Zhores Alferov, said that his death was “a bitter loss for world scientists”. Outside of Russia, Art Guenther of the University of

New Mexico’s Centre for High Technology Materials in Albuquerque, New Mexico, spoke glowing of Prokhorov as “a lifelong committed scientist, a consummate gentleman, a Russian patriot, and a global opticist. His contributions to quantum optics have formed the basis for much of today’s photonics evolution and applications.” Guenther added that he was always impressed with the “respect and adoration of the Russian scientific community for his leadership, contributions, and friendship. He will be sorely missed”. After his death, television footage showed Prokhorov’s desk stacked high with files and paperwork. His glasses lay on top of one of the piles, as if he had only just taken them off. The scientist did not own a computer, which he half-joked would “interfere with his thinking”. Instead he preferred to handwrite all his notes laboriously on hundreds of scraps of paper that could still be seen littering his office. Prokhorov is buried in Moscow’s Novodyevichy Cemetery, the final resting place of many prominent Soviet and Russian scientists, writers, and composers. And, lest we forget, on the other side of the world, in Atherton, Queensland, there is a memorial plaque celebrating the achievements of Peeramon’s most famous son.

Prokhorov with Charles Townes and Nikolay Basov

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ALEKSANDR MIKHAILOVICH PROKHOROV

Vital statistics

Why he was awarded the Nobel Prize

Name: Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov

The 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Prokhorov, with Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov, also of Russia, and Charles Hard Townes of the US, for work in the field of quantum electronics.

Born: Peeramon, Queensland Birthdate: July 11, 1916 Died: January 8, 2002, in Moscow University: Leningrad State University; Institute of Physics, Academy of Sciences (both in the USSR) Married: Galina Alekseyevna Shelepina, in 1941 Children: A son, Krill Lived: Mainly in Russia Awards and accolades 1948: The Mandelstam Prize 1959: Lenin Prize 1964: Nobel Prize in Physics 1967: Honorary professorship from Delhi University 1969 and 1986: Named a Gold Star Hero of Socialist Labour – the USSR’s highest civilian award 1988: The Lomosonov Gold Medal for outstanding achievements in physics Prokhorov was also a member of many professional associations. He was elected a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1960, and became a full academician in 1966 and a member of its Presidium in 1970. He was an honorary member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Optical Society of America. He also received the Order of Lenin; the Order of the Patriotic War, First Class; and a Medal of Valour for his bravery.

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The project that earned the three scientists their Prize was a device that generated an intense beam of pure microwave radiation called a maser. This is an acronym for “microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”. The same principles of quantum electronics were later applied to the generation of an intense bean of pure light – hence the word laser, which is an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”. Between 1950 and 1955, Prokhorov and Basov devised a way of exciting electrons in ammonia molecules into higher energy states. The electrons were then relaxed back to their original lower state; the transition was accompanied by a burst of pure microwave radiation (a photon). The idea was then refined to generate shorter wavelengths of light. Applications of the research can be found in products such as compact discs and modern surgery. In awarding the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics, the Nobel Committee recognised the contributions of all three physicists. One half was awarded to Prokhorov and Basov and the other to Townes “for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction and amplifiers based on the maser– laser principle”.

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Keeping your nerve Bernard Katz 1911–2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1970 – shared with Ulf von Euler and Julius Axelrod

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William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg

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Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

BERNARD KATZ

From fleeing persecution in Germany to contributing to the world’s understanding of the human nervous system, Bernard Katz’s life was anything but ordinary.

edraggled, penniless, and feeling distinctly like Dickens’ David Copperfield arriving on the doorstep of unknown relations, the young refugee nervously ascended the long, creaking flight of stairs to the top floor of University College, London. It was a defining moment for the 23-yearold Bernard Katz. Behind him lay the chasm of Nazi Germany that in February 1935 was already beginning to engulf Jews and scientists like him. All his hopes were pinned on an outspoken British physiologist and Nobel Laureate, Archibald Vivian (AV) Hill, whom, a year earlier, had launched a scathing attack on the treatment of scientists under the Nazis, provoking the wrath of the Third Reich’s scientific Gauleiter (district political leader), the Nobel Laureate Johannes Stark. Katz was reasonably confident of a sympathetic hearing with Hill. However, he had no inkling that the daunting staircase was also taking him towards a series of brilliant advances in human knowledge, an Australian citizenship and a lifetime love-match with an Australian girl. It was also to lead to a British knighthood and to science’s highest honour,

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the Nobel Prize. Bernard Katz discovered how nerves communicate with the muscles and helped to lay the foundations for modern neuroscience and neuromedicine. He was born in Leipzig in 1911, the only child of a Russian father, Max Katz, and a Polish mother, Eugenie Rabinowitz. However, although he was born in Germany, Katz never acquired German nationality. For his first six years he was a subject of the Tsar of Russia, as his fur merchant father had migrated to Leipzig in 1904 to escape the internal unrest that preceded the Russian Revolution. As a result, the family was regarded as enemy aliens during World War I. Then the Revolution came, and any expatriate Russians who did not wish to become Soviet citizens ended up with no citizenship at all. Katz later said, in The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography, “I did not foresee I was going to remain stateless and without a passport for the first 30 years of my life until I finally acquired this much-coveted possession in Sydney, Australia.”

Bernard Katz at the University of Melbourne, 1971

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BERNARD KATZ At age nine, Katz had an early taste of what it meant to be an alien Jew when he was refused entry to the leading secondary school in Leipzig, even though he easily topped its entrance examination. He was instead schooled at the König Albert Gymnasium, which had a strong reputation for the humanities and classics. Yet even in the school corridors, Katz was hardly protected from the anti-Semitism being encouraged by the fledgling Nazi party. In 1922, at the tender age of 11, Katz heard about a fellow student who had “called the boys together and informed them of a marvellous plan that his father had discussed with him at home”. The plan was that the Jewish population of Leipzig should be invited to assemble in the underground fair hall and, after the doors were closed, be killed off by filling the hall with poison gas. Despite all of this, Katz prospered at school. He interspersed his studies with chess – for which he developed a lifelong passion – reading, walking, and swimming. The normal German high-school curriculum took nine years. Katz forged ahead in his studies so strongly that he was encouraged to skip a year, and thus spent only eight years (1921–29) at the gymnasium. His school reports were excellent, save for subjects such as gymnastics and singing, in which he freely admits his performance was deplorable. He often tried to avoid those classes. Katz was a quiet, bookish, and solitary child. He said, “I was never what one would call a loner, but I kept away from gatherings. I did have good friends, but usually only one at a time.” Among these was a young Jewish scholar, Heinz Wydra, with whom Katz shared a desk and who introduced him to a way of thinking that later held significance for his approach to science. It was Wydra who taught Katz the game of chess. In Katz’s later years his addiction to chess was replaced by a similar obsession with physiological experiments. “The excitement produced by the occasional successful experiment was similar to the enjoyment of a good performance at chess,” he said. “In both cases, the sudden flash of insight after a long struggle in the dark and the intuitive vision of a solution to a seemingly intractable problem are

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exhilarating experiences which one encounters in both kinds of activity.” During his last three school years, Katz had to choose between continuing his Latin and Greek and a more mathematical and scientific curriculum. Against his character, he opted for the classics because they left him more time to pursue his love of chess. He then “tended to drift off to one of the cafes in Leipzig which had been invaded by chess players”, spending long hours over the chequered board nursing a single cup of coffee. Katz later regretted this youthful indulgence, not so much because he missed out on the natural sciences, which he quickly caught up with when he undertook pre-uni-

Weizmann promised to try to get some funds to help the young scientist. It turned out to be no more than £50 a year for two years, but the elated Katz hastened home to complete his degree and plan his escape versity courses, but because he did not pursue his maths. Katz embarked on his medical studies at the University of Leipzig in April 1929. A lecture by physician and physiologist Viktor Freiherr von Weizsäcker on the social impact of medicine left a huge impression on Katz, as he realised that there could be great intellectual satisfaction in being a doctor. Confronting prejudice Throughout school, Katz had encountered occasional – and, to him, inexplicable – examples of prejudice on account of his racial background as a Russian Jew. As an Ostjuden, or Jew from Eastern Europe, he was surprised to find that even Jews of Germany and Western Europe, as well as non-Jews, looked down on him. The World War I Marshal von Hindenburg, Weimar Germany’s second president and Adolf Hitler’s appointee as chancellor in 1933, was already clearly favouring the Nazi Party and Hitler. “I finally decided there was

little future for the decent people and none at all for me in the Germany of those days,” Katz said. “It was at that time, in the summer of 1932, that I began to make plans to emigrate as soon as I had completed my medical course.” Meanwhile, the challenges of university study were fuelling in Katz the prodigious focus and appetite for understanding that characterised his life’s work. Katz had the benefit of an outstanding physics teacher in Dr Peter Debye, who a few years later was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The young student also spent time in the Institute for Medical History in Leipzig, gaining a broader understanding of the social context of his studies. Here he shared an enthusiasm for ideas with like-minded students and eminent philosophers, historians, and writers on medicine. Katz was by now an active Zionist, running public appeals to raise funds to buy land for the new settlers in Palestine. He was also working part-time for two ear-noseand-throat specialists, learning the basics of the medical trade and supporting himself financially. As his studies progressed, he homed in on what was to become his life’s work: the study of how nerves function. “I was attracted to the subject of neurophysiology at quite an early stage, from about 1930 onwards. In those days, the establishment of the laws of electric excitation of nerves and their precise mathematical formulation were regarded as a great thing. In retrospect, it seems a somewhat naive approach.” He said that the exact fitting of so-called “strength duration” curves to electric stimuli of various shapes and intensities was considered a wonderful achievement, even though it was only a formal exercise that shed little light on the physical mechanism of excitation; “Nevertheless, I felt it was fascinating that one could made accurate and repeatable measurements of electric excitability on living tissues and express the results by a simple mathematical equation.” According to Katz, all one needed to do the experiments were some calibrated boxes of simple electrical gear, resistances, condensers, and an isolated nerve-muscle preparation of a frog. Escape As he approached his final exams, Katz found the political atmosphere around him

thickening. “I felt increasingly revolted by the behaviour of the majority of my fellow students who no longer bothered to conceal their Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitic vulgarities,” he said. “I made use of every opportunity I could find to withdraw into the solitary atmosphere of my laboratory.” Many of Katz’s most respected tutors were also starting to display support for Hitler. His isolation was further evidenced when, in order to win an academic prize, he had to submit an essay under a pseudonym. Katz chose that of Johannes Muller, the father of German physiology. He won the prize, but was not officially allowed to receive it – although his professor later slipped him the prizemoney under the table. While still a student, he also had two research papers published. One of them caught the eye of one of AV Hill’s colleagues, physiologist Ulf von Euler (with whom Katz was later to share the Nobel Prize). “When the Nazis took over early in 1933, I still had some 20 months to go before completing my medical course,” Katz recalled. “It was not at all clear whether I would be able to do so. For me, the only practical alternative was to join the exodus to Palestine and try to make myself useful in a kibbutz.” At the urging of his tutor, however, Katz decided to stick it out. In 1934, he read in the English journal Nature of Hill’s stinging critique of the policies of Nazi Germany towards scientists. Katz decided that, if it was possible, he would emigrate and go to work with Hill. His friends put him in touch with the famous Zionist leader Dr Chaim Weizmann. Meanwhile, British relatives promised to try to get him a visa – no easy task for a stateless person. To meet Weizmann, Katz had to slip across the border into Czechoslovakia to Karlsbad. Weizmann promised to try to get some funds to help the young scientist. It turned out to be no more than £50 a year for two years, but the elated Katz hastened home to complete his degree and plan his escape. “At the beginning of February 1935, I packed my bags and, equipped with travel tickets, a Nansen certificate (for stateless persons) with a temporary British visa, and the princely sum of £4, I took the train to Holland,” Katz said. “l transferred to the Channel ferry at Flushing and arrived at Harwich the next day.” The following day

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BERNARD KATZ

he reported to Hill in London to begin what he later called “the most inspiring period of my life”. Under Hill, whom Katz would later acknowledge as “the person from whom I have learned more than anyone else, about science and about human conduct”, he studied the fundamental properties of synapses, the junctions across which nerve cells signal to each other and to other types of cells. Researchers had known since Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani (1737–98) that nerves were sensitive to electric discharges, and later they found that nerves actually generated minute amounts of electricity themselves. But much remained to be discovered. Katz was accepted as a PhD student by Hill at University College, London (UCL), working in his laboratory until August 1939. He liked to joke that Hill only took him on “as an experiment”. Although Katz had arrived at UCL speaking little English, his writing style was simple, precise, and unpretentious, something he attributed to excellent teachers at the König Albert Gymnasium. Although

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the scientific papers that Katz wrote decades ago would need to be added to today, not one of his beautifully constructed sentences would need to be corrected. He completed his doctoral studies in 1938, and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Science (London University). He also won a Beit Fellowship, then regarded as the premier award in the biophysical sciences. In 1939, as a Carnegie Research Fellow, Katz was invited to study with John Carew Eccles, who was to win the Nobel Prize in 1963 at his laboratory at Sydney Hospital. Katz arrived in Australia a month before World War II broke out. In Sydney Katz teamed up with Hungarian– American neurophysiologist Stephen Kuffler, who had recently arrived from Vienna. For the next two years, Eccles, Katz, and Kuffler worked together on transmission at the neuromuscular junction – the point at which the nerves communicate with the muscles – producing landmark papers and forming lifetime friendships. This work laid the ground for the modern understanding of how one cell

The Katz Laboratory, 1939

communicates with another. At the time, a fierce dispute was raging among researchers about how the nerves communicated with the muscles – whether the electrical nerve impulse leapt across the nerve-muscle junction or synaptic transmission was mediated by the release of a chemical messenger (acetylcholine), as had been proposed by English pharmacologist Henry Dale in the 1930s. Although Dale’s ideas were gaining acceptance, Eccles continued to argue strenuously in favour of purely electrical transmission. Katz admitted that he and Kuffler would have “the occasional stand-up fight” with Eccles over the question. Katz later liked to recall an incident in which he was helping Eccles to mow his lawn, only to shear through the power lead to the electric mower, narrowly escaping a lethal shock. To avoid further accidents, Eccles hastily swapped the electric mower for a petrol-driven one. Katz would later say that this was the precise moment at which he converted Eccles from “electrical” to “chemical” transmission between nerves and muscles. Katz was naturalised as an Australian citizen in 1941. With war clouds spreading, he felt a strong obligation to serve his adopted country and joined the Royal Australian Air Force in 1942. He spent

the remainder of the war in New Guinea and the Pacific as a radar officer. In Australia Katz met a young, non-Jewish Sydney woman, Marguerite (Rita) Penly, who would become his life companion. They married shortly after World War II ended in 1945, and had two sons, David and Jonathan. For Katz, his jaunts with Rita to meet up with friends in Europe, Israel, and America were among his happiest times. The newly married couple returned to England in 1946, and there Katz rejoined AV Hill’s team at UCL, helped set up the UCL biophysics department, and embarked on some of his most important work. The new electrophysiological laboratory was soon in operation, using war-surplus electronic apparatus that the team had scrounged, rebuilt, and recalibrated. In 1952, when Hill decided to retire, Katz succeeded him as professor and head of department, leading it to become what colleagues later regarded as “one of the shining pinnacles of British biomedical science, attracting talented postdoctoral workers from around the world”. In the same period he also began a key collaboration with the Marine Biological Labs at Plymouth on England’s south coast, studying the nerve currents in squid. Much of Katz’s work in

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these days focused on the biochemistry and action of acetylcholine, the transmitter molecule (or neurotransmitter) with which nerves activate muscles. Ground-breaking discovery In 1950 Katz and his colleague Paul Fatt made an accidental but ground-breaking discovery: even when it was supposed to be at rest, the end region of the muscle was fizzing with spontaneous electrical activity caused by the discharge of packets of molecules of acetylcholine from the nearby nerve ending. They revealed that the acetylcholine opens minute aqueous (watery) pores in the muscle cells that allow the electrical current to flow through, causing the muscle to contract. Their experiments demonstrated that these pores were the basis of chemical synaptic transmission – the means by which the nerves signal. The pores later came to be known as ion channels; they are the basis for all nerve activity as well as many other cell functions. The team then turned its attention to the second step in the transmission process, the mechanism by which acetylcholine activates its receptors. In 1957 José del Castillo and Katz proposed a two-step model by which the receptor of the nerve signal was activated. This model still forms a starting point for discussion of receptor mechanisms. During the 1960s, Katz and Mexican neuroscientist Ricardo Miledi returned to the issue of transmitter release, undertaking a series of studies. Their work not only provided some of the first definitive evidence for the idea that calcium entry was essential to transmitter release but also allowed the input-output of a single synapse to be studied. Further ground-breaking work followed in the early 1970s, and their studies were so original that their first two Nature papers cited only four references to other scientific papers. In 1967 Katz was awarded the Royal Society’s prestigious Copley Medal and, in 1970, recognition of his achievements was crowned with the award of the Nobel Prize, which he shared with Ulf von Euler of Sweden and biochemist and pharmacologist Julius Axelrod of the United States. The Prize was for “their discoveries concerning the humoral transmitters in the nerve terminals and the mechanism

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for their storage, release, and inactivation”. Katz’s work had immediate influence on the study of organophosphates and organochlorines, the basis of new post-war study of nerve agents and pesticides, as he determined that the complex enzyme cycle was easily disrupted. While Katz’s research into nerve processes was of the most fundamental kind, it also came to have immediate significance amid the rising public concern about the effect of toxic chemicals. It was clear that the delicate electrochemical processes involved in nerve signalling could be easily disrupted. This provided other researchers with a powerful means for exploring the effects of the chemical on the human nervous system – including why they caused lethal paralysis – as well as opening new possibilities for the treatment of brain and nerve disorders. Although Katz trained only five PhD students (including Liam Burke, an emeritus professor of physiology at Sydney University), his influence on his science was prodigious. A colleague recalls: “His department became a Mecca for postdoctoral students from all over the world. His influence on the training of a large number of the world’s greatest scientists was huge.” And while “BK”, as he was known to colleagues, could seem forbidding

"His department became a Mecca for postdoctoral students from all over the world. His influence on the training of a large number of the world’s greatest scientists was huge" (there are some who recall traumatic experiences in presenting the first draft of a paper to him), there are stories of his jokes and light-hearted asides that cut through the pomposity of boring committee meetings. In the latter part of his research career Katz became interested in the biochemistry of the pineal gland, in particular its production of melatonin in response to light. Although generally viewed as an Australian or British scientist, Katz’s German origins and

Zionist beliefs were recalled and celebrated in 1993 with the creation of the Bernard Katz Minerva Center for Cell Biophysics. This was a German–Israeli joint venture embracing the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa,

“I did not foresee I was going to remain stateless and without a passport for the first 30 years of my life until I finally acquired this much-coveted possession in Sydney, Australia.” and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. After retiring as head of biophysics at UCL in 1978, Katz, who had never entirely lost his German accent, remained active in research administration, working with the research council of the Royal Society as one of its two secretaries. A UCL colleague, pharmacologist David Colquhoun, remembers that even in retirement, Katz “continued to referee papers with an astonishing speed, often within a day or two, and he took a direct and lively interest in new developments for many more years. In the 1980s I remember him coming, almost

running, down the stairs, asking to see David Ogden – at that time a post-doc in my lab – because he’d seen an abstract that David had submitted for a Physiological Society meeting and wanted to discuss it”. Katz was devastated in retirement when his wife Rita developed a prolonged illness. Even though he was in his late 80s and frail, Katz made the long journey to visit her in hospital twice a day. Katz, who shared his wife’s love of literature, was widowed in 1999. In April 2003, the stateless alien who had the nerve to change the world died at the age of 92. Of his life, The Times newspaper reported: “The work of Sir Bernard Katz constitutes an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of the nervous system. In his research he combined an uncanny instinct for separating the important from the trivial. Characteristically, he would approach a fundamental problem ... and, by tackling the question in a new manner, [he] opened up fields that had never been dreamt of”.

The three winners of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Ulf von Euler, Julius Axelrod, and Sir Bernard Katz, meeting with Nils K. Stahle, executive director of the Nobel Foundation

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Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

BERNARD KATZ

Vital statistics

Why he was awarded the Nobel Prize

Name: Bernard Katz

Katz was renowned for his work on nerve biochemistry and the pineal gland. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Ulf von Euler of Sweden and Julius Axelrod of the United States.

Born: Leipzig, Germany Birthdate: March 26, 1911 Died: April 23, 2003, in London School: König Albert Gymnasium, Leipzig University: University of Leipzig; University College, London Married: Marguerite Penly, in 1845 in Australia; widowed 1999 Children: Two sons, David and Jonathan Lived: Although naturalised as an Australian citizen in 1941, he returned to live in London in 1946, where, after his retirement in 1974, he remained active in research council and science administration Awards and accolades 1933: Siegfried Garten Prize for physiological research 1939: Beit Memorial Research Fellowship 1952: Fellow of the Royal Society 1961: Fellow of University College, London 1965: Feldberg Foundation Award

Katz uncovered fundamental properties of synapses, the junctions across which nerve cells signal each other and to other types of cells. He was especially interested in the electrical events that occur when impulses in motor nerves induce muscle activity by acting at motor end-plates. These special structures in the muscle, which have condenser-like properties, are charged by nerve impulses and their discharge, in turn, activates the muscle. Through the discovery of the existence of “miniature end-plate potentials”, Katz demonstrated that the messenger substance between the motor nerve and the muscle endplates, acetylcholine, was released from the nerve terminals in small packages. New substances for the treatment of high blood pressure and Parkinson’s disease are among the results of an increasing understanding of the nature of mental disease and psychical disturbances.

1967: Baly Medal; Copley Medal 1968: Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians 1969: Awarded a British knighthood; foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1970: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Katz’s publications included Electric Excitation of Nerve (1939), the classic text Nerve Muscle and Synapse (1966), and the widely read and admired The Release of Neural Transmitter Substances (1969).

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Wit, war, and words of conscience By Helen Verity Hewitt

Patrick White 1912–1990 Nobel Prize in Literature 1973

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William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg

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Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

PATRICK WHITE

Self-doubt, staunch loyalty, and violent rages are just some of the qualities that characterised Australia’s only Nobel Laureate in Literature.

ne of Patrick White’s duties as a Royal Air Force intelligence officer during World War I was to rifle through the pockets of the dead enemy for maps, letters, diaries, and other scraps of information – German pilots, ltalian soldiers, “the yellow flesh melting like butter into the sand and saltbush, the corpses washed up by the sea were the worst’’, he wrote in his autobiography. Another of White’s duties was to censor the letters the airmen wrote. He became obsessed with the role. He was a young writer plunged into the most extreme human circumstances, with death at his elbow and privy to the most private longings and despairs of his fellows in their communication to their loved ones. Literature and art were a solace to him. During the inevitable periods of tedium and waiting, he read the Bible from cover to cover and all of Charles Dickens’ novels. Of Dickens, he said, “As blood flowed, and coagulated in suppurating wounds, as aircraft were brought down in flames and corpses tipped into the lime pits of Europe, I saw Dickens as the pulse, the intact jugular vein of a life which must

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continue, regardless of the destructive forces which Dickens himself recognised.” Goya, one of White’s favourite artists, had recorded his series The Disasters of War all the scenes that White was now witnessing. Goya’s passion, through which the cruellest human behaviour is depicted together with the most sublime, was also to be White’s passion. At the same time, the ultra-sensitive White was noting “the background of trivialities, tantrums, adulteries, service feuds, and wrangling for posting and perquisites, against which a great war is fought”. His acute ear for the colloquial made him a master of dialogue. As a novelist, White tried to capture the whole huge web of human life in all its complexity, contradictions, and confusion. The effects of war Echoes of war sound through most of White’s work. His first post-War novel, The Aunt’s Story, is a turbulent portrait of Europe on the eve of war. The megalomaniac protagonist of his novel Voss had his source in Hitler, and had come into White’s imagination while he

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Patrick at King's College

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PATRICK WHITE was stationed in the Egyptian desert. During a year’s posting in Palestine, White absorbed “something of the Hebrew archetype”, which fed into his portrait of Himmelfarb, the refugee rabbi who is crucified in Riders in the Chariot. At the end of The Twyborn Affair, White’s flamboyant alter ego is killed in London by a bomb during the Blitz. His two pre-War novels, while accomplished, are of their time; his post-War novels exist on another level, for all time. What he called “Hitler’s War” changed everything. “In a green pork-pie hat and a black polo sweater”, the young White had blossomed and revelled in 1930s London, entranced by the theatre, the art, and the deep cultural history of the great city. London meant intellectual, artistic, emotional, and sexual liberation. He had escaped from an extremely privileged but conservative world in Australia. The large White family had made a pastoral fortune during the 19th century. A saying in the rich Hunter Valley region used to go, “The Whites and the Wrights and the not-quites”. (The Wrights were the family of the poet Judith Wright.) White, born in 1912, was expected to go back to the land after completing his upper-class education at English boarding school Cheltenham College and at Cambridge, where he read German and French. He did spend a year jackarooing in the Monaro in between school and Cambridge, but he felt like a stranger in Australia. In his autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, White repeatedly described himself as a “cuckoo” in his family, a “changeling”; his mother accused him of being a “freak”. White later said he and his mother could not live in the same hemisphere, although he wrote her dutifully every week. Explosive family tensions are a major theme in all of White’s novels. White never saw either of his parents working. His father had retired from the land at the age of 42 and agreed to fund White’s ambition to be a writer in London. It was probably a relief to everyone; “An artist in the family was almost like a sodomite; if you had one, you kept him in the dark.” London also meant escape from his mother’s persistent attempts to match him up with some suitable girl. White had known from an early age that he was homosexual. In 1936 he established himself in London,

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found marvellous mentors (and lovers), immersed himself in modernist art, wrote, and forged friendships with the artists Roy de Maistre and Francis Bacon, among others. White’s first novel, Happy Valley, was published in 1939 and his second, The Living and the Dead, was in the offing when Hitler invaded Poland. White felt he had to enlist: “A sense of duty always sounds priggish when put into words.” In Flaws in the Glass he repeatedly plays down his war service, but about one-third of the autobiography is devoted to those five years – years in which he wrote nothing. White accepted a commission in Air Force intelligence and, while waiting for a posting, experienced the beginning of the Blitz. “The incredible bombs had begun falling,” he later wrote. His reality was being blown up. White’s first posting was to the frontier

White’s childhood home in Elizabeth Bay, Sydney. Photo: Floodstreet.

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between Eritrea and Sudan. Next he went to Egypt, where he fell in love with the Mediterranean and Levantine melting pot of Alexandria. He was involved in the campaign that culminated in the relief of Tobruk.

Explosive family tensions and misunderstandings are a major theme in all of White’s novels The Corps headquarters to which White was attached was cut off by German snipers. White, a very poor driver, had to steer a Dodge truck through the night, zigzagging through minefields, to reach the ruins of Tobruk at dawn. In 1941, in Alexandria, White met Manoly Lascaris, a Greek Alexandrian who was to become “the central mandala” in his life. Their loving partnership was to last until White’s death in 1990, despite White’s

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self-confessed jealousy and violent rages. Lascaris’ unshakeable Greek Orthodox faith was a point of stability that attracted White, himself always a restless spiritual seeker. White spent a year on duty in Athens following its liberation and became a lifelong Grecophile. The country’s mix of mythology, history, and physical beauty and the fatalistic, complex psychology of its people spoke to his own intense temperament. By 1948 White and Lascaris were living at Castle Hill, then seen as being outside Sydney. White’s mother was now living in London. At a time when so many Australian artists and writers were becoming expatriates, White’s decision to live and work in Australia was of vital importance to the development of Australian culture. Lascaris had wanted to leave Greece, and post-War London seemed like a graveyard to White. The Australian landscape drew him back, along with the flourishing art world that he discovered in Sydney and the plentiful food, in contrast with rationed London. “Anyone who has experienced hunger will remember a destroyer of the spirit even greater than lust,” he recalled. Members of Lascaris’ family had starved to death during the German occupation of Greece. Several years of despair following World War II gave way to a revived faith in a creative divinity. White’s epic narrative The Tree of Man, in which a lifetime of struggle ends with an affirmation of faith, was published in 1955. Deeply romantic by nature, White was a romantic modernist, like many artists and writers whose work retained the mystic or transcendental strain of northern European romanticism while fully absorbing the devastation of the two World Wars. Romantic modernism recognises the upheavals and horrors of the 20th century, but clings to spiritual hope. Voss was published in 1957 to great acclaim; Riders in the Chariot, which coincided with, and contributed to, the high tide of visionary romantic modernism in Australia followed. This huge metaphysical novel envisages an Australia in which Aboriginal, Christian, and Jewish mysticism meet and recognise one another. Published in 1961, Riders in the Chariot shows remarkable insight into the experience of Aboriginal children who were taken

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Patrick White with Sidney Nolan from their mothers. In the boyhood of his Aboriginal painter character Alf Dubbo, White evokes the double standard that turned a blind eye to white men fathering unacknowledged children with Aboriginal women. He outlines the assumptions that those children would be better off in white society; the children’s vulnerability to abuse in their foster homes; and the passive powerlessness of the children, who have no one to trust or turn to. Dubbo’s adulthood is an account of homelessness, alienation, loss of cultural identity, mental anguish, repeated betrayals by white society, alcohol abuse, and early death through disease. White, in this novel, also expresses his contempt for the corrupting, contaminating effect of commercialism on Aboriginal creativity. White and Lascaris moved to Centennial Park in Sydney’s exclusive eastern suburbs in 1964. In the big white house at Martin Road, White completed The Solid Mandala and wrote The Vivisector, his portrait of a visual artist based on a number of artists he knew, including Francis Bacon, Roy de Maistre, and Sidney Nolan. Published in 1970, the novel was thought to be in the running for a Nobel Prize, but it was apparently judged to be too bleak. White succeeded in winning the 1973 Nobel Prize for his next novel, The Eye of the

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Storm, about old age and revelation. A Fringe of Leaves, based on the historical events of a 19th-century shipwreck off the Queensland coast, followed. White’s last novels were The Twyborn Affair and Memoirs of Many in One. During the decades at Martin Road, White became one of Sydney’s legendary figures with his looming, charismatic presence, his unmistakable voice unlike any other, his piercing gaze, his uncompromising forthrightness, his rages, and the obvious intensity of his being. Only a strictly disciplined work regimen allowed White to satisfy his need for solitude and silence, and his equally strong need for frequent trips back to Europe and the creative stimulation and refreshing amusement to be found in the company of his fellow artists, in any medium. Falling out Many of his friends missed his tart wit, his love of gossip, and his generosity. Everyone wanted to know White, but psychological vivisection by that scalpel eye was a danger. Victims included such old friends as comedian Barry Humphries, writer Geoffrey Dutton, and Sidney Nolan. Nolan and White shared a dynamic friendship for more than 20 years. They were both passionate about Rimbaud, French modern painting and

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Greece. Both reinterpreted the history and mythology of the European explorers of Australia, sharing a feeling for their vulnerability, courage, and arrogance. Nolan’s paintings provide the landscape for Voss, the armature of A Fringe of Leaves, and significantly influenced The Vivisector and The Eye of the Storm. It was highly appropriate that Nolan accepted White’s Nobel Prize on his behalf in Sweden in 1973. But White’s beloved friend Cynthia, Nolan’s wife,

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committed suicide in 1976 and the friendship between White and Nolan ran aground. White attacked the painter in Flaws in the Glass; Nolan responded with a savage, homophobic painting of White and Lascaris. The ability to enter imaginatively into the psyches of his characters is White’s forte. He himself felt fragmented, made up of many in one, able “to range through every variation of the human mind, to play so many roles in so many contradictory envelopes

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PATRICK WHITE

of flesh”. Stage-struck from youth and his days as a “stagedoor Johnny” in London, White wrote plays as well as novels for the characters that inhabited his head. The bestknown include The Ham Funeral, The Season at Sarsaparilla, A Cheery Soul, and Big Toys. Lascaris was always apprehensive about the writer’s forays into the world of the theatre. White’s temperament became particularly volatile in that exciting, hothouse environment. He developed close working relationships and friendships with the theatre director Jim Sharman and popular actors including Kerry Walker and Kate Fitzpatrick. Everything was grist to White’s mill. His own childhood, in all its asthmatic, solitary angst and aspiration, reappears in many guises in his novels. The family drama is played over and over, with variations. The same four basic “sets” (two childhood homes, and the houses at Castle Hill and at Centennial Park) are rearranged to accommodate a multitude of scenarios. Overseas haunts, such as London and Greece, are also

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used. White asserted that the characters in his books arose from his unconscious, from all aspects of himself, and from neighbours – friend and foe – and whomever crossed his path. For example, many of the supporting cast in The Vivisector were recognisable characters of the Sydney art world. Characters belonging to Lascaris’ extended, complicated family add to the throng. White’s huge imaginative life never ceased; every night he dreamt vividly, and those dreams flowed into his writing. In addition to the plays and novels, White also wrote a number of short stories, most of which are collected in The Burnt Ones and The Cockatoos. He said he hated writing, but that he had no choice – that the novels forced their way out of him. In 1974 he opened the Henry Lawson Festival of Arts, held in Lawson’s birthplace of Grenfell, New South Wales, and took the opportunity to reiterate his romantic understanding of the creative spirit. Lawson, he said of the famous writer and poet, was “a tortured, manic-depressive soul like many other artists. I know

Patrick White and Tom Uren at a Hiroshima Day demonstration, Sydney, 1984

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White's unfinished novel The Hanging Garden was published postumously in 2012 by Random House Australia.

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this is an unfashionably romantic view of the creative artist, but I think the fashionable option has been developed largely by intellectuals with little of the artist in them”. White once described himself as “a skeleton at the Australian feast”. He raged against what he saw as Australian complacency, insularity, hypocrisy, and materialism. “A pragmatic nation, we tend to confuse reality with surfaces. Perhaps this dedication to surface is why we are constantly fooled by the crooks who mostly govern us. “ Passionate crusader White devoted more and more time to political and environmental issues, although they

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took him away from his work. He was deeply involved in the battle to save Fraser Island in southern Queensland, the largest sand island in the world. He supported the Green Bans of Jack Mundey, the leader of the New South Wales Builders’ Labourers Federation, who led industrial actions to help protect certain prominent Sydney buildings from over-development. He gave the keynote address at the inaugural meeting of People for Nuclear Disarmament and continued to be a frequent marcher and speaker at its rallies. He also gave much practical support to the Aboriginal Treaty Committee and to the Aboriginal Dance Theatre. In White’s vision, there can be no true culture or “home” in Australia for non-Indigenous Australians without reconciliation with the Aboriginal “spirit of the land” and the original inhabitants. He profoundly desired an Australian culture free of overwhelming British influence, in which there would be room for the voices of all comers – an expanding fusion and profusion of every-growing complexity and richness. White did everything he could to foster this development. He was a generous patron to young artists, and he donated some 250 works to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Having won a number of literary prizes, he decided in 1967 to accept no more (in order to give other writers a go), and he turned down the Miles Franklin Award and the $10,000 Britannica Award in the same year. Suspicious of honours, he also turned down a knighthood and, later, an Order of Australia. He did accept the Nobel Prize in 1973, but then used all of the prizemoney to establish an annual literary award for older Australian writers who had not received their due recognition. White died in 1990 after a bronchial collapse, following a lifetime of chronic asthma. In an epigraph in Patrick White Speaks, a 1989 collection of articles and public addresses by White, the poet and critic Dorothy Green expressed the feelings of many when she wrote, “What interests me most about this book is its consistency with the novels – the moral stance is firm from the beginning. As novelist and citizen, Patrick White is the voice of our country’s conscience. He begs us to search our hearts.”

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Vital statistics

Why he was awarded the Nobel Prize

Name: Patrick White

Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973 for his novel The Eye of the Storm. In the presentation speech, the Swedish Academy said that he won “for the epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature”. The Eye of the Storm places an old, dying woman at the centre of a narrative that revolves around and encloses the whole of her environment. Past and present blur until we have come to share an entire life panorama, in which everyone is on a decisive dramatic footing with the elderly lady. The Nobel Prize caused White’s literary fame to spread throughout the world.

Born: London, England Birthdate: May 28, 1912 Died: September 30, 1990, in Sydney School: Tudor House, Moss Vale, New South Wales; Cheltenham College, England University: King’s College, Cambridge Partner: In 1941 White met Manoly Lascaris, with whom he lived until his death Children: None Lived: Mainly in Sydney Awards and accolades 1941: Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society for Happy Valley 1957: WH Smith Award for Voss 1961: Miles Franklin Award for Riders in the Chariot 1965: Gold Medal of the Australian Literature Society for Riders in the Chariot 1973: Nobel Prize in Literature 1974: Australian of the Year Novels 1939: Happy Valley 1941: The Living and the Dead 1948: The Aunt’s Story 1955: The Tree of Man 1957: Voss 1961: Riders in the Chariot 1966: The Solid Mandala 1970: The Vivisector 1973: The Eye of the Storm 1976: A Fringe of Leaves 1980: The Twyborn Affair 1986: Memoirs of Many in One

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The chemistry of life By Julian Cribb

John Warcup Cornforth 1917–2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1975 – shared with Vladimir Prelog

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William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg

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JOHN WARCUP CORNFORTH

A debilitating ear disease that left him deprived of hearing did not stop John Cornforth in his quest to uncover the wonders of science.

nown to his friends as “Kappa”, John Warcup Cornforth was born on September 7, 1917, in Sydney. His father was a Britishborn schoolteacher of English and classics and an Oxford graduate; his mother was a hospital nurse and descended from a German minister who had settled in New South Wales in 1832. Cornforth was the second of four children. He began to suffer the first signs of deafness, cause by the progressive disease otosclerosis, at age 10. By the time he was 20 the bone growth near his middle ear meant Cornforth was unable to hear and had permanent tinnitus, or a ringing in his ears. Nevertheless, he developed a profound insight into aspects of both nature and human nature that would eventually lead him to the pinnacle of scientific attainment: the Nobel Prize. Cornforth’s childhood was spent in Sydney and in the rural surrounds of Armidale, in the New England region of New South Wales, where his later fascination for understanding the natural world gradually awoke. “Looking back at the time some 70 years ago when the love of science took hold of me, I think of no big event but of many small things that influenced me,” he once recalled. He said that as

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a child, he read books and learned lessons but did not have much curiosity about the natural world. This began to change when he looked at the stars – he later became known for his ability to tell time by the stars – and he said he entered science through astronomy. At Sydney Boys High School, a young chemistry teacher, Leonard Basser, captured and inspired Cornforth’s eager mind, encouraging him both to think and to experiment. His deafness was encroaching, and chemistry appeared to be a profession that he could pursue in spite of it. A laundry laboratory At 14, Cornforth had constructed a small chemistry laboratory at home in his mother’s laundry and was conducting his own experiments with a sense of growing absorption and fascination that never deserted him. “At the time, one could buy small amounts of many common chemicals, and I made a little laboratory at home, with improvised equipment to study chemical reactions,” he said. “I soon discovered that the organic chemicals were the most interesting. With the help of

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Cornforth in the laboratory

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a textbook on practical organic chemistry I made many preparations using cheap chemicals to prepare those that were too expensive to buy. This was more satisfying than astronomy: you could change things by your own effort. At that time, I was rapidly losing my hearing, so I suppose the work attracted me also for its impact on the other senses: the beauty of crystals and distilled liquids, the colours of dyes and smells – both good and bad.” Cornforth saw himself as a craftsman of

the fundamental components of nature. “As a carpenter or carver learns to work with the grain of wood or bone, I learned that each substance has its own nature and can be easy or difficult to handle according to the procedure chosen,” he said. “I began to see experiments as I see them now: not only as procedures to answer questions or to make compounds but as opportunities to observe what happens and to learn from mistakes.” John Cornforth was well ahead of his years at school and entered Sydney University at

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JOHN WARCUP CORNFORTH the age of 16. By this time he was unable to hear any lectures, and so he became an accomplished lip reader. He was also blessed with an extraordinary visual memory and learned a great deal from handbooks and journals. Many of these were in German, which he did not know, but he found a German dictionary and looked up each word until he understood them all. Cornforth said that reading the original scientific literature helped him to become a scientist because it showed the evidence behind the things that he was being taught – and some of this evidence was wrong. “The most liberating thing was the realisation that the literature wasn’t entirely correct,” he said. “It gave me quite a shock at first, and then a thrill, because ‘I can set this right.’ Always, and ever since, I’ve relied upon the primary literature exclusively. I don’t believe a word I ever read in any textbook. I began to see science as a continuous process of discovery and correction and myself as a part of this process.” During his life at university there came a second moment of revelation, this time on a bush walk in the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney with friends. “One morning we were resting beside a river,” he said. “I turned over so that my face was close to the grass and I began to count all the different kinds of plants that I could see. There were more than 20, all different, each beautiful in its own way. For me this was a kind of conversion, because I had never looked at things in that way before. This was really the beginning of my curiosity about living things.” Cornforth said he brought back from this walk some fruits, including wild grapes and some berries with a bitter taste. He took them into the laboratory and extracted pure compounds from them. “This was not a very good way to study the chemistry of life, but I began to be interested in the life sciences and to read biological textbooks,” he said. “At that time they mostly described and classified things that nobody understood. But later, when I started to work with life scientists, I could understand their viewpoints and could use my chemistry to solve problems that interested us all. After that experience, I started to look at what constituents of plants I could extract.” Cornforth continued to be enthralled by

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the breadth and complexity of chemistry. “What you can do is to form in your mind a pattern of what is possible and what is not possible in chemistry,” he said. “This helps you to make new compounds and to understand new reactions and structures. When the literature or one of your own experiments presents you with a new fact, you compare it with the pattern in your mind. Often, the new fact fits into the pattern easily and reinforces it, but sometimes the fact does not fit.” Cornforth said that when this happens,

“I began to see science as a continuous process of discovery and correction and myself as a part of this process.” you check, and sometimes find that a mistake had been made. But if there was no mistake, you must change your pattern to fit the new fact – and you learn more about science on these occasions than at any other time. Burning questions Science, for Cornforth, began with curiosity. “You ask questions, you read what other people have written, and then you begin to find ways of answering your own questions,” he said. “You never stop learning.” For Cornforth, knowing the fundamentals of how something was made or worked never detracted from, but rather magnified, its wonder. “Keats once said that Newton’s explanation of the rainbow killed the beauty of it for him. But for me, what I know about nature simply enhances the beauty of it. I am sorry for the people who look at a flower and don’t understand anything at all about what is going on.” It is not unusual for Cornforth to quote poets or poetry. He said, “I use poetry as a substitute for music. I have no particular vocabulary of music in my head, but I have thousands of lines of poetry that I can recall as I like. The curious thing is that some pieces I have known for 65 years or more. And when I recall them, I find that I have sometimes improved them!” The young Cornforth was also well known for his ability to produce limericks on demand. In 1937 he graduated with

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With wife and collaborator Rita Harradence

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first-class honours and the Sydney University Medal. Along the way, he had also acquired his nickname, “Kappa”, which came from a habit of scratching the Greek letter into his laboratory glassware to stop fellow students from “borrowing” it, as he said. After a year of postgraduate research, he was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship to work at Oxford with Robert Robinson (who was later to nominate his colleague for the Nobel Prize). Only two of these prized scholarships were given in Australia each year. The other went to fellow student Rita Harradence, also of Sydney and also an organic chemist. In Sydney, both Cornforth and Harradence had been working in a laboratory designed by Robinson, who had become Sydney University’s first professor of pure and applied organic chemistry after he arrived there from

England in 1912. Cornforth and Harradence met for the first time after she had a small accident with a valuable piece of laboratory equipment – a Claisen flask, which was difficult to come by in those days. As a keen improviser of equipment, Cornforth had adapted an old Bunsen-burner tube and taught himself to blow glass. By this stage he had earned a reputation as a glass blower and equipped himself with a proper blowpipe for the job. One of Rita’s friends suggested she get him to perform the repair on the flask, which Cornforth duly did. This was the beginning of a lifetime partnership in which Harradence became his co-researcher in the chemistry lab, his ears, and often his interpreter in communicating with others. Both also belonged to the Sydney University Bushwalkers Club, and walking remained one of Cornforth’s abiding passions. In a reminiscence for the club’s archives, Cornforth recalled: “The longest day’s march I ever did was when (another keen member) Dick Welch and I arrived early one Sunday morning at Jenolan and found that we couldn’t get transport that day. We wanted to be in Sydney by Monday, and we knew that a train to Sydney left Mt Victoria around midnight, and we decided to catch it. The walk was around 70 kilometres, if I remember right. We made it, and fell asleep in our seats on the way back while our leg muscles stiffened. It was agony to get going again ... I remember saying to Dick around the middle of the walk, ‘Tomorrow, we’ll be laughing like hell at ourselves’ – and this was true. And I’ve never lost the taste for walking acquired in those days, and still walk around eight kilometres a day.” In 1941 Cornforth and Harradence married. They had three children and several grandchildren. It was through Cornforth’s grandchildren that he discovered that he had an unusual talent, given his profound deafness. “Sometimes my grandchildren have asked me to sing, and although I’ve explained to them that I can’t sing, they made me try,” he said. “Apparently, I can produce a melody quite accurately from something that I heard when I could hear. How that happens, I don’t know.” Everything for Cornforth always came back to Rita. The husband-and-wife team ended up collaborating on 41 scientific papers. “Throughout my

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JOHN WARCUP CORNFORTH scientific career, my wife has been my most constant collaborator,” Cornforth said. “Her experimental skill made major contributions to the work. She has eased for me beyond measure the difficulties of communication that accompany deafness; her encouragement and fortitude have been my strongest supports.” War broke out as Cornforth and Rita journeyed to Oxford, his father’s alma mater, and after completing their work on steroid synthesis for doctorates, they became part of the chemical effort on penicillin, the major chemical project in Robinson’s laboratory during the War. “We made contributions and I helped to write The Chemistry of Penicillin, the record of a great international effort,” Cornforth said. Among his most satisfying personal contributions to the chemistry of penicillin, Cornforth recalled, was the penicillamine story. At the time the research team was getting a pure penicillin preparation to be able to break up the molecule in various ways, and penicillamine was an important fragment. Penicillamine is a chelating agent; that is, it attaches to other chemicals in the

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body and aids in their removal. It is now used to remove excess copper associated with the genetic disorder Wilson’s disease, and to treat severe rheumatoid arthritis. “Analysis indicated the penicillin preparation only had five carbon atoms, and Robinson immediately wrote a comprehensive table of the structures that it could be,” Cornforth said. “But he was misled by one piece of analytical evidence, which was what used to be called the C-methyl determination. Using the Kuhn–Roth oxidation method, you boil the substance you are analysing with chromic and sulphuric [sic] acid, and then you distil over any acetic acid that has been formed from that oxidation. The amount of acetic acid was supposed to represent the number of methyl groups attached to a carbon atom. Because penicillamine gave hardly any acetic acid in that assay, they didn’t like any formulae that had a methyl group. But that made it very difficult to think of a formula at all. Robinson saw what he thought was the least improbable formula and he asked Rita and me to synthesise it,” Cornforth said. “I had to visit Manchester at about this time,

Armidale, early, 1900s

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and on the way up, it occurred to me that penicillamine might have too many methyl groups, not too few.” Subsequent experiments proved he was right. After the War ended, Cornforth returned to his earlier work on the synthesis of the organic molecules known as sterols. His close collaboration with Robinson continued after he and Rita joined the scientific staff of the Medical Research Council and worked at its National Institute, first at Hampstead in north London and then at Mill Hill on the city’s outskirts. By 1951 Cornforth and Robinson were able to complete, simultaneously with Robert Burns Woodward at Harvard, the first total synthesis of the non-aromatic steroids. Steroids are a class of naturally occurring organic substances and their derivatives that are of great importance in biology, medicine, and chemistry. Cornforth and Robinson were always more than mere collaborators in the laboratory; they shared a close friendship that lasted until Robinson’s death in 1975. “The nature of our friendship was a continuous sequence of differences of opinion,” Cornforth said in 1985. “He was an argumentative person and I have known the same thing to be said of myself.” At the National Institute for Medical Research, Cornforth came into contact with biological scientists and formed collaborative projects with several of them. In particular, he shared an interest in cholesterol with George Popjak. They began to collaborate in studies of its synthesis in living organisms. This was the beginning of what Cornforth recalled as the richest and most fulfilling period of his career. “I spent 16 of the best years of my life in an extraordinary place, the National Institute for Medical Research, and I know to what extent scientific advances are the product of an ambience created by many people, not just the few who tend to have the best ideas. “At this time Konrad Bloch was beginning his work on the biosynthesis of the sterols, and Popjak and I began to conduct experiments in which the disciplines of chemistry and biochemistry could be applied.” In 1962 Cornforth and Popjak left the Medical Research Council and became co-directors of the Milstead Laboratory of Chemical Enzymology set up by Shell

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Research. Lord Rothschild helped establish the laboratory and Cornforth worked under him until Rothschild left Shell in 1970. At Milstead, a project was developed that looked at the study of the stereochemistry of enzymic reactions. Stereochemistry is the study of how the properties of a chemical compound are affected by the spatial arrangement of atoms in molecules and complexes. Not only can a compound have more than one geometric form, but chemical reactions can also have specificity in their stereochemistry, thereby forming a product with a particular three-dimensional arrangement of the atoms. This is especially true of reactions in living organisms. Cornforth mainly studied enzyme-catalysed reactions. Stereochemical-specific reactions have great practical importance, as many drugs, for example, are active only in one particular geometric form. Cornforth’s stereochemistry work continued after 1968, when Popjak left Milstead to go to the University of California in Los Angeles. In 1975, the same year that Rita chose to retire, Cornforth left Shell to take up a position as Royal Society research professor at the University of Sussex. His work at Milstead led directly to the 1975 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for clarifying the stereochemical control of enzymic relations. Some substrates for enzymes contain carbon atoms that become chiral – leftor right-handed in structure – when one of the attached hydrogen atoms is replaced by deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen that has twice the mass of ordinary hydrogen). This labels the compound, and examination of the label in the product can throw important light on the reaction mechanism. One problem was how to measure the tiny optical activity generated by replacing one hydrogen isotope with deuterium in otherwise symmetrical molecules. (Later it became possible to make methyl groups chiral by using all three hydrogen isotopes and to measure the chirality without using optical rotation.) Optical assistance “It was necessary to measure the optical activity, and looking at all the methods that were available, I could see that it was going to be nearly impossible,” Cornforth said. “I wrote to a friend in Australia who was an

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expert in optics and I asked him whether there was anything in the pipeline for measuring very small optical activity. He told me to go to the National Physical Laboratory, as they were evolving a prototype. It was a marvellous instrument, but it was a lash-up of all kinds of components. We did our biochemistry and chemistry and got two specimens

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of monodeuterio-succinic acid in which the molecules are mirror images of each other. We had a few milligrams of each of these, and we also had a third specimen which we had much more of, which was made from a product in which we were sure of the stereochemistry. We took these three specimens to the National Physical Laboratory

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at Teddington (on London’s edge) and they did the optical rotations. They came out beautifully. The two dispersion curves of the two compounds were mirror images of each other – one going up like this, the other going down like that: a perfect dispersion. I think that’s the day I remember with the most pleasure in my experimental life.” There came another memorable day when, shortly after Cornforth had moved from Shell to the University of Sussex in 1975, Rita telephoned to tell him she had just heard it announced on the BBC news that he had been awarded a Nobel Prize for his work. “I was quite surprised,” he said. “I had estimated my chances at about one in three. As for the ceremony, I couldn’t hear a word of what was said. I amused myself by looking around at the audience. It was in this sports stadium, an enormous place, because the

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town hall was being refurbished, but I could see in the darkness of the auditorium these flashes of bright light. They kept on like this, and I couldn’t make out what they were. And, finally, I realised all the women were wearing jewels, and that was what was causing the flashes of light. That was the thing I remember most of all from the ceremony.” As well as a gold medal and prizemoney, Nobel Prize recipients receive a personal diploma depicting their achievement. Cornforth’s diploma had a drawing of two molecules, which were supposed to be the mirror-image forms of acetic acid. Associate Professor Damon Ridley, who spent study leave in 1978–79 with Cornforth, said, “But the cartoonist drew two identical structures, so the certificate has a scientific flaw. This appeals to ‘Kappa’s’ sense of humour.” In 1977 Cornforth’s Nobel Prize was followed by a British knighthood, which came after wide professional recognition of his skills as a scientist. Memorable for others was Cornforth’s brief yet powerful speech of acknowledgement on behalf of himself, Vladimir Prelog, and their colleagues: “That our work has been considered worthy of such distinction is a great satisfaction to us both, but I think that we derive equal satisfaction from the sense of being in the great company of those who approach the truth. In a world where it is so easy to neglect, deny, corrupt, and suppress the truth, the scientist may find his discipline severe. For him, truth is so seldom the sudden light that shows new order or beauty; more often, truth is the uncharted rock that sinks his ship in the dark. He respects all the more those who can accept that condition; and in returning thanks tonight, we are saluting all those who made our load lighter by sharing it.”

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JOHN WARCUP CORNFORTH

Vital statistics Name: John Warcup Cornforth Born: Sydney, Australia Died: Brighton, England, in 2013 Birthdate: September 7, 1917 Died: December 8, 2013 School: Sydney Boys High School University: Sydney University; Oxford University Married: Rita Harriet Harradence, in 1941 Children: Three Awards and accolades 1953: Elected to the Royal Society 1953: Chemical Society’s Corday Morgan Medal 1965: Flintoff Medal 1967: Stouffer Prize 1968: Royal Society’s Davy Medal 1972: Prix Roussel 1975: Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1975: Australian of the Year 1977: Awarded a British knighthood 1982: Royal Society’s Copley Medal

if the nearby groups retain their positions or if they are rearranged in some way. The enzyme leads the process in a uniform way; without this guidance, chaos would break out in the biological system. Cornforth “marked” the hydrogen atoms by making use of hydrogen’s three isotypes: ordinary hydrogen (mass 1), heavy hydrogen (mass 2), and radioactive hydrogen or tritium (mass 3). He then made use of their differing reaction speeds (the lightest reacts the quickest). Only trace quantities of tritium can be used; no more than a-millionth or so of the molecules involved in the reaction are marked. The planning of this research is an outstanding intellectual achievement. Among the biologically significant reactions the stereochemistry of which have been clarified is the synthesis of steroids from mevalonic acid via squalene and condensations of acetate with glyoxylic acid to citric acid. Since Cornforth showed the way, meaningful related research has emerged in other quarters.

Why he was awarded a Nobel Prize In 1975 John Cornforth and Swiss chemist Vladimir Prelog were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Cornforth was awarded for his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalysed reactions. This subject is quite complex and related to geometry in three dimensions. It is concerned with the delicate mechanism of important reactions in biological systems, where a group of atoms takes the place of a certain hydrogen atom among two or three that may appear to be equivalent. The problem is to decide which of the hydrogen atoms is replaced and

In 2017 Google celebrated Cornforth's 100th birthday with a Google Doodle

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Survival of the cells By Brad Collis

Peter Charles Doherty 1940– Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1996 – shared with Rolf Martin Zinkernagel

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PETER CHARLES DOHERTY

Research into certain diseases was heading down the wrong track until Peter Doherty’s work on immune responses was released.

eter Doherty has always regarded himself as somewhat of a misfit, invariably out-of-sync with his circumstances. He has always loved the icons of Australian outdoor life, the sun and the surf, yet as a boy he was invariably forced indoors by an Irishinherited complexion that rapidly turned him lobster-red in the sun. On leaving university, he was a veterinarian when he wanted to be a researcher; 40 years later he was a Nobel Prize-winning scientist with no time to be the novelist he had aspired to become. His academic interests at school had been literature and history, but he also excelled in physics and chemistry, and he felt these were more likely to find him a good job. He was tempted by marine biology, but a visit to an open day at the University of Queensland’s veterinary school settled the matter. From an early age, this tendency to walk adjacent to, rather than on, the routine path occupied by his peers shaped him into an avid, liberal reader, and observer; added to this was a dash of the Irish rebel. These are all handy ingredients for someone drawn to the allure of bold ideas and scientific discovery.

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Doherty is quite willing to use the clout that a Nobel Prize bestows to push the cause of science and education in the political arena and in the community generally. Doherty’s story still has some distance to run. However, in the meantime, he is an intriguing living history, a person whose experiences are still touchable by aspiring young scientists looking for a role model. He did not follow the ordered career paths of predecessors like John Eccles and Frank Macfarlane Burnet, but he has triumphed as an individual who refused to be subdued by the jealousies of university politics. Peter Doherty was born on October 15, 1940 in Brisbane, the eldest son of Eric Doherty, a telephone mechanic and administrator, and Linda Byford, a piano teacher. The family lived in a tough outer suburb of Brisbane, where Doherty went to the Indooroopilly State School. Near his home, a cement works caked everyone and everything in grey dust, providing a reason to stay inside to read and soak up the sounds of his mother’s passion for classical piano.

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Early influences Doherty recalls: “There was always music in the house, including Chopin, Debussy, and Beethoven, and books, so my early influences were classical composers, reading, and the wireless. When I look back, the ABC had a very strong influence on me. I still remember being absolutely moved listening to a program one day on Icelandic sagas. I think that’s the key to education – being able to reach and intrigue a child.” At school, Doherty says he was good at science, bored by maths, and passionate about history and ideas. These ideas came from books, people, and exploring art galleries. His interest in artistic expression saw him buy a second-hand Leica camera and even build his own darkroom and enlarger. “I was interested in learning and creativity because I think I realised even then that education was a way up, and a way out,” he says. Even so, school life was tough. It was authoritarian,

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and Doherty, then and still, has never been one to acquiesce to authority or dogma – and this made his entry into university absolutely liberating. He says, “It was a transformation for me, a real freedom to learn and explore like never before.” He was influenced by authors as diverse as Aldous Huxley, JeanPaul Sartre, and Ernest Hemingway, and it was reading Hemingway that resolved him to be “the man of action rather than the philosopher”, which is why he decided to study veterinary science. “I was also going through a religious phase and captivated by the whole ‘feeding the world’ ideal, and veterinary science seemed one way to play a part. Of course, I was just 17 years old and would probably have made a very different decision had I been more mature.” Doherty graduated with his BVSc in 1962 from the University of Queensland and, because he had been supported by a bonded government scholarship, he was

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PETER CHARLES DOHERTY required to spend several years working as a rural veterinary officer. He was keen to do laboratory-based research – and he made the mistake of saying so. His employer, the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Stock, promptly sent him to the country as a rural veterinary officer. “I spent some months driving large distances to perform post-mortems on cattle and pigs that had died of unknown causes and to survey cattle for various venereal diseases,” he recalls. “This resulted in the diagnosis of trichomoniasis in an area where it was thought that complete eradication had been achieved. Realising that I was a danger to their regulatory effort, the Department quickly brought me back to the state veterinary laboratory: the Animal Research Institute [ARI] at Yeerongpilly.” At the ARI he undertook an epidemiological study of the bacterial infection of livestock, bovine leptospirosis, and a thesis on this was later the basis for his master’s degree. Also at the ARI was a young microbiologist, Penelope Stephens, who had been contracted to develop a viral diagnostic service. They graduated at about the same time and she was his first real girlfriend. They married in 1965. Still determined to be a research experimentalist, Doherty responded one day to an advertisement in Nature magazine for a training post in experimental pathology at the Moredun Research Institute in Edinburgh. He got the job, which also allowed him to enrol as a part-time PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. While there, he helped to run a diagnostic neuropathology program for the Scottish Veterinary Investigation Service and undertook a research project on the tickborne encephalomyelitis virus. The thesis earned him his Edinburgh PhD in 1970 – just three years before his historic work back in Australia that would lead to the Nobel Prize. While in Scotland, Penny worked at the Institute of Animal Genetics until she and Doherty decided to start a family; within a few years, they were the parents of two boys. Doherty and his family thoroughly enjoyed life in Scotland. Doherty recalls: “For the first time, I could spend the whole day outside without the penalty of sunburn. Our long vacations were used for camping holidays in Europe, including our first trip to

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Scandinavia and Stockholm with a young child in the back of a Volkswagen van.” A lucky side-track The family considered staying in the United Kingdom permanently, but Doherty was eager to learn more about the developing field of immunology, and the John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR) in Canberra was the place to do it. “I was actually supposed to come back to work with the CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation] at Geelong [Australian Animal Health Laboratory], but I decided to go to Canberra first to learn more about immunology, and then join the CSIRO.

“We never set out to make our discovery – we weren't aiming in that direction at all. But when we found something unexpected, we followed it” Well, of course, we made our great discovery and got stuck; otherwise, I probably would have spent the rest of my career happily in Geelong.” Instead, Doherty was awarded the Nobel Prize when, in 1996, he and a former colleague, Rolf M Zinkernagel, were recognised in the category of Physiology or Medicine. The Prize was awarded for ground-breaking research, carried out in 1973–74, that fundamentally changed medical science’s understanding of immune response. “It was a classic science story,” Doherty says. “Both Rolf and I were interested in trying to see exactly how an infected micro-organism actually causes damage and disease, which meant finding out a way to quantitate the cellular invasion. By chance, an American researcher, Richard Carp, was visiting as part of his research into scrapie [a sheep disease], and we got chatting. He explained how he collected cerebral spinal fluid [from mice] where it accumulated at the back of the brain. This provided us with a source of cells in which a viral invasion could be quantitated.” Doherty and Zinkernagel discovered that white blood cells (lymphocytes) must

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At the Nobel Prize ceremony with Rolf Martin Zinkernagel

recognise both an invading virus and certain “self” molecules – the so-called major histocompatibility (MHC) antigens – in order to kill the virus-infected cells. This concept of simultaneous recognition of both “self” and “foreign” molecules now forms the basis for a new understanding of the cellular immune system. At the time they began their research, it had already been discerned how antibodies, the circulating defence molecules, recognise and kill targets such as bacteria. It was far less well understood, however, how the white blood cells recognise and kill virus-infected cells without destroying the normal uninfected cells. Another mystery was the reason behind nature’s creation of immunological uniqueness – the small but important differences that exist between molecules called transplantation antigens, which white blood cells recognise as “self” or “foreign”. These differences were a major obstacle to organ transplants. In their research, the two scientists were able to use mice to study how the immune system, and particularly T-lymphocytes (a subset of white blood cells), could protect animals against infection from a virus able to cause meningitis. Doherty calls T-lymphocytes the “hit men” of the immune system. The infected

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mice developed these killer T-lymphocytes, which in a test tube could kill virus-infected cells. But there was also an unexpected discovery: the T-lymphocytes, even though they were reactive against that particular virus, were not able to kill virus-infected cells from another strain of mice. What decided whether or not a cell was eliminated by these killer lymphocytes was not only if they were infected with the virus but also whether they carried the “correct” variant of histocompatibility antigens, those of the infected mouse itself. Zinkernagel and Doherty’s findings, which were published in Nature in 1974, demonstrated conclusively the need for the cellular immune system to recognise simultaneously both “foreign” and “self” molecules. It became possible for the first time to understand that the true function of transplantation antigens was not to provide an obstacle to transplantation; instead, it is to bind and present molecules from viruses and other micro-organisms to white blood cells in such a way that the white blood cells “understand” whether they should become aggressive or stay calm. As a consequence, it became obvious how each individual, thanks to her or his unique set of

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PETER CHARLES DOHERTY transplantation antigens, also carries his or her unique immune system. It also became possible to understand why evolution had created these large immunological differences among individuals within a species. Immunological diversity is advantageous for the individual and the species. Thus, there will always be some individuals who survive even the most severe epidemics. In return, individuals carrying a certain variant of transplantation antigens have an increased susceptibility to autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, and this is possibly the price they pay for their forefathers having survived a severe epidemic. Doherty and Zinkernagel’s explanation of the self- and not-self-selectivity of the immune system advanced research in many clinical areas. It led to advances in therapeutic efforts to strengthen the immune response against invading micro-organisms and certain forms of cancer, and to efforts to diminish the effects of autoimmune reactions in inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatic conditions, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes. It has also proved to be a great advance in the field of organ transplants. In an interview with science writer Roger Beckmann for the

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Australian Academy of Science, Doherty provided his own explanation of his research: “It shows us that the immune system can recognise a third state – an altered self – as well as self and non-self. When a virus has infected a cell and the cell is displaying viral antigens in addition to its own, it has become altered self. That’s what’s recognised and dealt with, rather than the viral antigens per se. The point is that the body treats altered self in much the same way as non-self. A virally modified cell is destroyed in the same way that a transplanted cell from another individual would be. “People were wondering why the body should have a system for combating transplanted tissue when this state clearly never arises in nature. We suggested that the recognition of alloantigens – that is, MHC antigens differing from your own – was there not to frustrate transplant surgeons but to help the body ‘see’ altered self.” The essential importance of the work is that it changed the entire direction of research into diseases such as cancer, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and even AIDS – research that had been going down the wrong path. It opened up crucial new fields of study that now occupy thousands

Doherty gives the seventh HKU Centenary Distinguished Lecture: Virus killers and killer T Cells

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of medical scientists around the world who are consequently getting much closer to understanding and combating some of humanity’s most devastating diseases. The research gave medicine a crucial step forward, although it is not just the scientific advance that has made Doherty and Zinkernagel’s collaboration folkloric in the annals of Australian science. The real reason they are said to have teamed up in the beginning was that Zinkernagel liked to sing arias from The Marriage of Figaro and Doherty, an aficionado of classical music, was said to be the only other person happy to share such an operatic workspace. Then, despite the significance of their research being quickly recognised around the world, the two scientists, Doherty in particular, found themselves unwanted in Australia.

At the Prize ceremony with wife Penny

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No vacancies Doherty’s position at the University was only temporary, and when he applied for a permanent job, he was told quite bluntly that none were available. Both men subsequently went to the United States – Zinkernagel because he had intended to move there anyway, Doherty because he needed a job. For him, it was a move forced by institutional bloody-mindedness and jealously. In a 2002 interview with journalist Luke Slattery for The Australian Magazine, Doherty recalled: “We made this big discovery. It was very exciting. And, of course, with a lot of very bright people, who were a bit prima donna-ish, really, there was a lot of resentment, too. The difference between that institution and an American institution is

that if you’d made a really big discovery like that, they would have done everything possible to keep you. These guys were really glad to see us walk out the door.” Doherty was 34 with a young family, and so he accepted an offer to work in Philadelphia as associate professor at the medical research and training Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. He quickly became involved with the highly regarded Immunology Graduate Group that worked closely with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. After the disappointment of his rejection at home, the time in Philadelphia was fulfilling and rewarding. “The Wistar/Penn axis was a highly interactive, and very open, intellectual environment,” he remembers. “I collaborated extensively ... and was part of a large, campus-wide multiple sclerosis research effort. Penny went back to school and developed a new career in the area of drug information. I wrote grants, was a member of the immunology circuit, worked with outstanding graduate students, and became an established scientist and academic.” Ostracised Buoyed by the direction his career had now taken, Doherty’s confidence was up again, so much so that, he says, “I made the major mistake of accepting an offer to return to the JCSMR as head of the Department of Experimental Pathology. However, my decision was made on emotional grounds rather than on the basis of what was actually being offered.” Essentially, there was not enough money to go around, and what funding there was, according to Doherty, was not distributed according to the quality of people’s work, as it would have been in an American university, but to “local heroes” and favourites. Surprisingly, he was invited to join a group that was asked to review funding arrangements, and it recommended scrapping the existing tenure and funding system. The recommendation (which was eventually adopted some time later) was rejected vehemently by the university’s hierarchy, and Doherty and his associates were quickly ostracised. For the second time, he decided he was wasting his time in Australia and left. It was an emotionally tough period, with Doherty, one of the world’s most brilliant researchers in his field, unable to work in the country he loved with a passion. “I was very angry for a long time, vowing never to return to Australia or go anywhere near a

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PETER CHARLES DOHERTY

university. I was only interested from then on in working at a specialist research institution.” The opportunity to rebuild his research career came with the resources offered to him by the St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. He was appointed professor of biomedical research and chair of the Immunology Department, where he devoted himself to studying cancer-causing viruses, in particular the Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) thought to be responsible for a number of diseases, including nasopharyngeal carcinoma, a tumour of the nasal passages and throat. EBV has also been cited as a possible link to Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer affecting cells of lymph nodes. Doherty remained at St Jude (where Penny worked as a hospital volunteer) until their final return to Australia more than a decade later in 2001. By this time Doherty was an acclaimed Nobel Laureate and had been named Australian of the Year in 1997. “I had gradually reconciled myself because I did

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come into contact with Australians who were working hard to try and make a difference, to make the country work. Also, Australia is small enough to be able to do things differently if it chooses, and it occasionally does this very well.” There were also family ties. His youngest son was by now a Melbourne barrister, although the eldest had settled in Seattle as a neurologist. In reflecting on his career, Doherty feels his characteristics as a scientist stemmed from a non-conformist upbringing, a sense of being something of an outsider, and looking for different perceptions in everything from novels, to art, to experimental results. In his Australian Academy of Science interview with Beckmann, he said he loved immunology because he loved puzzling out complex, intricate systems. He also made the case for scientists to be free to be able to pursue conceptually driven research rather than be locked solely into end-use-driven research. This is an

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issue that has been dividing scientists and science policy makers in Australia in recent years. Keeping curious “Conceptually driven research is what is likely to yield some of the biggest benefits,” Doherty says. “But with this stuff, you can’t be sure where it will end up. Real curiosity-led work cannot be confined by a short time horizon, and it doesn’t guarantee an outcome. Plenty of research leads up blind alleys. But you have to know that those blind alleys are there in order to find the right pathway. Of course, that doesn’t mean you don’t need applied research – it’s essential – but you need to get the balance right between the two. Many governments, with their short time horizons, tend to favour the applied side too much.” When asked about the qualities needed to be a successful researcher, Doherty lists persistence and the need to be totally absorbed in what you do. “You also need to have an open mind

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and be prepared to drop one line of inquiry and follow another if it looks interesting.” He adds, “We never set out to make our discovery – we weren’t aiming in that direction at all. But when we found something unexpected, we followed it.” In summarising his own approach, he says he likes complexity and is always delighted by the unexpected. “Ideas interest me. Intellectually, I march to the beat of my own drum and have little interest in competing in races. There are too few people working in the area of viral pathogenesis and immunity, too little funding, too many problems, and too little time.” Doherty founded the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, a joint venture between the University of Melbourne and the Royal Melbourne Hospital, in 2014. Guided by Doherty and the University of Melbourne’s Professor Sharon Lewin, a staff of some 700 work on discovering, preventing, treating, and eliminating infectious diseases.

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PETER CHARLES DOHERTY

Name: Peter Charles Doherty Born: Brisbane, Queensland Birthdate: October 15, 1940 School: Indooroopilly State School, Brisbane University: University of Queensland; University of Edinburgh Married: Penelope Stephens, in 1965 Children: Two sons, James and Michael Lives: Melbourne Awards and accolades 1983: Paul Ehrlich Prize for Immunology; fellow, Australian Academy of Science 1986: Gairdner Prize

recognise both an invading virus and certain “self” molecules in order to kill the virus instead of cells. The concept of simultaneous recognition of both “self” and “foreign” molecules now forms the basis for a new understanding of the cellular immune system. Doherty and Zinkernagel’s explanation of the self-/non-self-selectivity of the immune system advanced research in many clinical areas. It led to advances in therapeutic efforts to strengthen the immune response against invading microorganisms and certain forms of cancer, and to efforts to diminish the effects of autoimmune reactions in inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatic conditions, multiple sclerosis and diabetes. It has also proved to be a great advance in the field of organ transplants.

1987: Fellow, Royal Society 1993: Alumnus of the Year, University of Queensland Alumni Association 1995: Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award 1996: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1997: Australian of the Year 2001: Melbourne University’s Laureate Professor 2015: Honorary Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences 2017: Fellow of the Royal Society of Victoria Why he was awarded the Nobel Prize Peter Doherty was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on immune responses. He and his colleague Rolf Zinkernagel, with whom he shared the Prize, were trying to see how infected microorganisms cause damage and disease. The two scientists discovered that white blood cells must

In his book, Pandemics: What Everyone Needs to Know, Doherty addresses the history of pandemics and explores diseases that persist today.

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Swallowing the science By Lia Timson

J Robin Warren 1937– Nobel Prize for Physiology in Medicine 2005 – shared with Barry J Marshall Barry J Marshall 1951– Nobel Prize for Physiology in Medicine 2005 – shared with J Robin Warren

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J ROBIN WARREN AND BARRY J MARSHALL

When accepted thinking suggests that a medical condition results from human behaviour, it takes courage, perseverance, and insight to prove otherwise.

he discovery by doctors Barry Marshall and Robin Warren of the bacterium that causes stomach ulcers has led to new treatments and technologies. Things may have improved for scientists since Galileo Galilei was put under house arrest for daring to challenge the wisdom of the day by asserting that the sun, not the earth, was at the centre of the universe. However, some pioneers still must expend time and effort to disprove the prevalent thinking in their field before their findings can be accepted. This was the case for two of Australia’s contemporary Nobel Laureates, Doctors Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who went against widely accepted scientific belief when they proved that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria, not stress. Their teamwork began in 1981, but it was only 24 years later that their subsequent breakthrough was recognised by the Karolinska Institute, which awarded them the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2005. The discovery of the Helicobacter pylori

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(Hp) bacterium and its role as a catalyst for the cure of the chronic, disabling, previously incurable peptic ulcer disease was described by the Institute as “remarkable and unexpected”. It decreased the incidence of stomach cancers and later made ulcer surgery and years of stress treatment for gastritis redundant. Although half of the global population – a higher proportion in developing countries – carries the bacteria unknowingly, ulcer patients can now be treated with a short course of antibiotics. This alone is a result of the pair’s original work. Their discovery, and the ongoing research that ensued, also gave birth to a whole new industry, as Dr Barry Marshall describes it – an entirely new discipline that employs hundreds of scientists worldwide, including pathologists, researchers, those advancing the drugs and treatments for gastric diseases, and those working on technologies and vaccines enabled by it. “We’re helicobacterologists,” Marshall says. “There must be over 1,000 scientists who

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now make a living out of helicobacterology. We have a global conference each year and more than 400 people come to study the genome. In Australia alone we have four or five groups – some 20 people specialise in Hp outside my team.” By the end of the 21st century’s first decade, scientists had expanded the pair’s original discovery beyond peptic ulcers to include gastritis and duodenal and stomach cancers, among other sequelae. Marshall himself had furthered his studies to include using Hp as a vaccine vehicle to prevent diseases as diverse as influenza, hepatitis, and malaria, and to understand patterns of human migration through the DNA of Islander peoples. Gaining formal acceptance So why did it take so long for Hp to gain formal acceptance? This question is often asked of Robin Warren, now retired except for the multitude of Nobel-related speaking engagements he commands every year. “One

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of the difficulties when I started was that the standard medical teaching for a century was that the stomach was sterile; bacteria didn’t grow there,” says Warren. “It was just like the earth being flat. It was a fact. The medical establishment is conservative and doesn’t like sudden changes.” While the duo is credited with the discovery of the helixshaped bacterium in 1982, it was Warren’s first observations as a young pathologist at the Royal Perth Hospital in Western Australia that gave rise to their partnership. “I found them in one case in 1979 a couple of years before I met Barry,” he says. “I’m a pathologist. I look at pieces of tissue, trying to work out what’s wrong with them for the surgeons who send them down [to the lab]. One of the pieces of tissue was a piece of gastric mucosa from the stomach, and I thought I could see a lot of bacteria on the surface, so I stained it with a special stain that shows the bacteria very nicely. I hadn’t seen bacteria before in the stomach, and no one knew of

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J ROBIN WARREN AND BARRY J MARSHALL any reports of them. So, I kept looking and I kept finding more and more, and eventually I was finding them in a third of the biopsies.” In 1983, in a letter to The Lancet medical journal, Warren summarised his initial findings; in a separate letter Marshall detailed the work that they were beginning together. The following year the journal published a co-authored article that gave detailed proof of their discovery – and this is the paper Warren believes won them the Nobel Prize two decades later. “Barry first suggested sometime after we published our article [that we may win]. I told him not to be so bloody silly,” Warren laughs. “When I heard, I got a bit of a shock, actually,” he said after news of the Prize. Although the first step in scientific recognition had taken place with the published articles, the young medicos experienced great difficulty convincing their peers of the significance of their findings. Warren later told a gathering of doctors in Stockholm, Sweden, “I was unable to convince the commissioning [doctors] of the importance of the organisms. While histology suggested the opposite to me, it was hard to prove. I worked in a laboratory without patient contact. I couldn’t obtain the biopsies I wanted, and the idea of taking biopsies to culture was not considered to be in the patient’s interest.” Things changed when Marshall, then a young registrar in gastroenterology at the same hospital, took an interest. “Someone suggested he come down and see that crazy pathologist who was trying to suggest bacteria cause gastroenteritis. He burst into my office one day without knocking and demanded to see my work. He was quite a wild young man,” remembers Warren, who is 14 years Marshall’s senior. “He was the first person to actually show an interest, so I was quite happy to show it to him.” Marshall’s curiosity was unusual among doctors at the time, but natural for him, as it stemmed from his blissful ignorance of specialist doctrine. “Clearly, this was an interesting thing to study ... but I may have had other advantages compared with colleagues Robin had approached previously,” he wrote in an autobiographical article for the Karolinska Institute. “I wasn’t coming from a background in gastroenterology, so my knowledge and ideas were founded in

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general medical basic science rather than the dogma one was required to learn in specialist medicine.” Marshall was indeed required by the hospital to perform a different clinical research project each year as part of his medical training. This pleased him greatly, as since childhood he had maintained an open mind towards scientific experiments – from homemade explosives and a hydrogen generator for balloons, to making a diagnostic of poisoning while attempting to perform cardio-pulmonary resuscitation at the age of 12 on his 18-month-old sister, who had ingested kerosene but was, he admits, still breathing. (The feat earned him his first newspaper mention the next day.) At Royal Perth Hospital he was interested in various projects, including being “engrossed in a study of heat stroke in fun runners”. This could have led him to a sports or environmental medicine specialisation, but instead his boss suggested the gastroenterology project. He was told about Warren’s suspicions about a bacterial cause of stomach inflammation and his list of hospital patients with bacteria present in their stomach biopsies. Lab-bound Warren needed a doctor who could move through the hospital following up those patients. “I was especially interested because one of the patients on Robin’s list was a woman I had seen in my ward, who had severe stomach pain but no diagnosis. In desperation, we had referred her to a psychiatrist and commenced antidepressant medication for want of a better treatment,” Marshall wrote. He agreed to send Warren a number of biopsies to see if the findings could be replicated. “They were. So, he became more enthusiastic and we became collaborators. Barry was the only person who believed me at all for about five years,” Warren says, although he credits his late wife, Winifred, a general practitioner and psychiatrist, with supporting and encouraging his research until her death in 1997. Together, Marshall and Warren studied a further 100 patients as well as Marshall himself, who drank a glass of Helicobacter pylori and consequently suffered from a two-week bout of gastritis. While being a volunteer guinea pig is a method used intermittently by scientists today, despite being frowned upon, at the time there were compelling reasons

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for the experiment, not the least of which was the need for proof. “In retrospect, my experiment could’ve gone wrong,” says Marshall, professor of microbiology and immunology at the School of Biomedical, Biomolecular and Chemical Sciences at the University of Western Australia since 1999. But the excitement of the discovery and the possibility – however remote – of a Nobel Prize were good incentives. “The Nobel Prize helps innovation because it helps create a parallel scenario. Someone young on a low salary, slaving away on weekends trying something new, everyone says he’s a fool; but he says, ‘Just wait till I get the Nobel Prize.’ I can’t say I was really like that, but it helps. It’s like the Olympics for science,” says Marshall. The pair received a number of prestigious prizes on the way to the Nobel, each with its own benefits and small monetary reward. From their first joint recognition – the Warren Alpert Prize from the Harvard Medical School in 1994 – to the Medal of the University of Hiroshima for Warren and the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Life Sciences for Marshall, their lives have been peppered with accolades. In 2007 they were each appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia. But it was the Nobel Prize that finally engraved their names in the world’s hall of fame and gave them license to spend a little. They each received a slice of the 2005 Nobel total prize pool of 10 million Swedish krona, or approximately €1 million at the time. “It’s good I can share with the family, take them to Sweden. It’s much better value to know that I can temporarily afford to board the dog for $30 a day while we’re away,” Marshall laughs. Speaking more seriously, Marshall is pleased that the Prize did not come earlier in his career, as he feels better prepared now for the notoriety that followed such an honour. He is often asked if he has any regrets, especially with regard to not having patented an antibiotic treatment for ulcer treatment – pharmaceutical companies today earn a steady income from such drugs. Despite not having a crystal ball, he quips, “It turned out alright in the end. If I had had a good patent lawyer, I could’ve done it. But I could’ve made a lot of money,” he says, only half-jokingly. “Life would’ve been pretty strange [with money]. I’ve had a very interesting life; I wouldn’t change that.”

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Seminal influences Barry Marshall was the oldest of four siblings and was born into a mining community in the Western Australian town of Kalgoorlie, on September 30, 1951. His early childhood memories are peppered with enterprising boys’ adventures that were made possible by the world around him. He played on the beach near the family’s first Babbage Island home, across from the whaling station at Carnarvon, where his father, Bob, worked in the mining trades. Later, alongside his brothers, Barry concocted homemade engines and electromagnets from scrap metal and experimented with explosives made with pharmacy chemicals. His interests always involved scientific pursuits, whether medicine, physics, chemistry, or mathematics. His mother, Marjory, was a nurse, and it was with her that, as a young medical student, Marshall had his first medical arguments. His earliest source of medical information was her copy of Modern Medical Counsellor: A Practical Guide to Health (1955). He later purchased his own copy at a second-hand bookshop; it still sits proudly on his office shelf. “We used to have a lot of arguments about what was really true in medicine. She would know things because they were folklore and I would say, ‘That’s old-fashioned. There’s no basis for it in fact.’ ‘Yes, but people have been doing it for hundreds of years, Barry; therefore, there must be some use in it.’ That can be true,” he recounted in an interview with the Australian Academy of Science. It was Marjory’s higher-education aspirations that took the family away from the mining environs to the state’s capital, Perth. Marshall believes she did not want her children following the locals down the mine shaft, as wellpaid as the trade was. She wished for them to study and enter a profession instead. His rational choice to study medicine had less to do with medicine itself and more with not pursuing mathematics, which he loved – but he found the daily calculus boring. Robin Warren also pursued medicine after being influenced in part by his family. His mother, Helen, was also a nurse and her father, Sydney Verco, one of a long line of prominent Verco doctors – the family name still adorns many a surgery door and hospital ward in South Australia. Warren was born on June 11, 1937, in North Adelaide, South

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J ROBIN WARREN AND BARRY J MARSHALL Australia, a member of a fifth generation of free Scottish settlers who commanded vast tracks of outback land for cattle and wheat production. His father, John Roger Warren, later became a leading Australian winemaker, co-producing Hardy’s Cabinet Claret, a top-selling drop credited with changing Australia’s wine-drinking habits. After his grandfather’s death and the difficult financial situation that followed, his mother was unable to pursue her aim of becoming a doctor like her father and her brother, Luke. She trained as a nurse instead. “I cannot remember my mother ever pressuring me to study medicine, but somehow this always seemed to be my aim,” he wrote in an autobiographical article. He defied earlier doctors’ recommendations to avoid medicine – he had suffered from grand mal epilepsy at 16 and was considered not fit enough to pursue medical school – to follow his calling. His main inspiration was Luke Verco, who became a captain in the Army Medical Corps during World War II and later a country general practitioner. The coincidences between Marshall and Warren do not stop at both of their mothers having been nurses or their early passion for

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“Someone young on a low salary, slaving away on weekends trying something new, everyone says he’s a fool; but he says, "just wait till I get the Nobel Prize." I [Marshall] can’t say I was really like that, but it helps.” mathematics and for varied medical disciplines (Warren enjoyed botany and zoology, while Marshall liked biology and biochemistry). Both married women in related fields (Warren’s wife, Wini, was a psychiatrist, and Marshall’s wife, Adrienne, a psychologist) and fathered girls who, after earlier career choices in law and design, respectively, changed course to follow in their fathers’ footsteps, pursuing medicine. A leap in five years Marshall does not believe things should be named after people until they are dead – “in case they become less reputable”– but

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he has made an exception for the institution that now bears his name. The Marshall Centre for Infectious Diseases Research and Training housed in the University of Western Australia’s Faculty of Life Sciences was funded to the tune of $4 million by the federal government at its inception. Ever the entrepreneur, Marshall quickly recognised the publicity value of the Nobel accolade and of his own newfound fame. “It’s a way to create extra value and some free publicity for the university. I was happy to do it because the people who now spend time in the lab, the postgraduate students, they also get the Nobel Prize prestige on their CVs. No matter how disreputed I get, they can’t take the Nobel Prize off me,” he jokes. It is but one of the many consequences arising from Professor Marshall and now-Emeritus Professor Robin Warren’s receipt of the Nobel Prize. The Marshall Centre is the focal point for postgraduate studies into infectious diseases, a laboratory for innovative thinking in biotechnology, and a poster child for scientific advancement in Western Australia and the country as a whole. Marshall is also thankful for the doors that the prize of prizes has opened – “we now go straight to the top of government or academia” – particularly as he spent years working to attract funding for other Hp projects. The Laureates also count on the full-time help of dedicated staff members at the Office of the Nobel Laureates who manage their Prize-related engagements, including guest-speaking appearances, overseas travel, and those endless requests for autographed photographs – which Warren finds obsequious

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– from every corner of the world. “I still get a lot of requests for autographed pictures”, Warren says, “from places like India and Poland. Some are so deferential, it’s like they are bowing. It’s quite strange … [their requests] sound like they’ve got me up further than God. I’m sure I’m not anything like that.” Perhaps the greatest progress since the awards night on December 10, 2005, has been the private and government funding that Ondek has attracted. The company, set up by Marshall before the pair had been awarded the Prize, subsequently attracted capital investment for the development and possible commercialisation of an ulcer vaccine. Marshall was once frustrated at the lack of Australian investors who understood the high-risk, high-return nature of science subsidy. He says the mining sector seemed to be able to test the ground anywhere and immediately attract funding, whereas biotechnology research was met with suspicion by private and public investors. Thanks to the Prize, however, that is no longer the case. Ondek chairman Peter Hammond says there was a leap in confidence among investors after the announcement, and in the subsequent two years the company attracted $2.6 million in private funding and a matching $2.38 million from the now-defunct Federal Commercial Ready grant. “The Prize has been a great help in attracting investment. Investors now realise there are top scientists like Barry in Australia and that we need to support them to keep them here,” says Hammond. “We’re even turning around the brain drain,” Hammond says of Alma Fulurija, an Australian scientist who returned from Switzerland to join the company. Interestingly, it was the mining industry, which had lost Marshall to medicine, that put up the first fistful of cash for Ondek, along with Swedish investors. Hammond says it is a perfect fit. “These investors understand the risk profiles. Mining is not that different to science; they too have to go through a long research phase before commercialisation. Also, they know they have to build alternative industries in WA. We won’t be able to mine iron ore forever. They see biotechnology as an industry where Australia has a competitive edge, not dissimilar to the edge they have in mining.” Although Hammond says the company was always going to be able to raise some funds, the Nobel Prize fast-tracked the process considerably. It has also helped attract the right people to the team. “We’re not having trouble at all

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attracting the right people because we’re not doing it on the cheap with remuneration,” says Marshall. The money is used to fund Ondek and its team of 15 renowned scientists from Australia, Korea, China, Sweden, the United States, and Switzerland. New rounds of funding begin every January to guarantee the group’s future. In 2010 the company raised $10 million to continue human trials of a vaccine made using helicobacter as its vector. The first experiment, involving 36 patients in Perth, concluded in June 2011 and proved a safety profile for the bacteria that survives stomach acids to live in its host long enough to inoculate them against illnesses. Ondek moved to seek approval to conduct another trial, this time with a flu-virus antigen attached to the bacteria. The company’s initial aim was to find an oral form of vaccine (i.e. in food, drink, or capsule) for the common flu and later, possibly, for hepatitis. The company says the approach could help fight other diseases and even be used in hormone therapy. It is currently on hold. Experience brings confidence It has been almost 40 years since Marshall and Warren embarked on their helicobacter journey. Marshall is still the world authority on the subject. He continues to work on expanding his knowledge of the bacterium and to practise as a gastroenterologist for rare, difficult-to-manage helicobacter infection cases at the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth. In a fast-paced world where young people constantly change jobs and career directions, citing boredom or slow upward progress as reasons, I asked Marshall what it is like to dedicate your life to the pursuit of one subject. “It does give you confidence,” he laughs. “Some things need time and resources to develop. It would be wasteful to do something on a small scale and stop halfway through it.” If Marshall and his team succeed in mass-producing vaccines using Hp as a vector and helping to treat debilitating diseases in developing countries, his one-track career will have paid off. “The fact that we haven’t changed direction at all is a plus,” he concludes, while still seeing the world through an Hp-laden Petri dish. His latest co-authored paper is titled “The peopling of the Pacific from a bacterial perspective”. It is a collaborative study of the different strains of helicobacter present in the DNA of Islander

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peoples and their ability to suggest patterns in early Indigenous migration. His life’s work has also made him less stressed and too busy to sweat the small stuff. “I lost my licence, so I don’t speed anymore. I just arrive late now,” he says. Marshall continues to maintain a broad range of interests outside the lab. He fiddles with computer programming (something he used in the early days to harness stomach-ulcer data from doctors around the world), and is an iPad devotee and a fan of social networking. He is on Twitter, maintains a casual blog, is on Facebook with Robin Warren, and is permanently curious about the world and the digital technologies around us. He is a fan of Apple, and even expressed regret at not having contacted its former chief executive, Steve Jobs, before Jobs died. “I wish I had sent Steve a card. Next time I think of something kind to do, I won’t delay. Let’s cure pancreatic cancer. #thankyousteve,” he tweeted on October 6 2011. He even doubts the privacy-zealous when it comes to the Internet, saying he does not care about others finding out about him online. “If everybody just says what they are

The pair "high five" at the Prize ceremony

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doing, the amalgamation of information can let us see what’s happening. I’m less and less concerned about security. In fact, I’m running a mini-campaign against it.” The future Dr Marshall will remain at the helm of both the Marshall Centre and Ondek’s plans while also lecturing at the University of Western Australia and travelling around the world to further the vaccine cause. He wants to realise his dream of an unobtrusive, painless vaccine that can be self-administered. “People don’t like to have injections. If we had an edible product available in the supermarket, no one would prefer an injection,” says Marshall. “But the really exciting part of this project is to be able to vaccinate, easily and cheaply, millions of people – say, against malaria – with live bacteria.” A collaborative agreement with the giant Japanese laboratory that produces and sells the fermented lactobacillus drink Yakult was signed in 2008 but has not yet progressed to Marshall’s aim of a liquid Hp drink available at the checkout.

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However, he has not abandoned the thought of an ingestible vaccine. “It’s not a fancy concept. We know we can make it work on mice with helicobacter diluted in water. So, ideally it will be a freeze-dried version put in a capsule and available on the pharmacy shelf.”

“We’re helicobacterologists” – Marshall

Robin Warren, although only a happy external observer of this plan, is fully aware of the repercussions his initial discovery can still have on the state of the world’s health. “I think it [the ingestible vaccine] is a very clever idea. I hope it comes off. H. pylori is the perfect bacteria to do it with because it sits in the stomach. If you infect the stomach with a harmless variety of these bacteria, they will keep on producing antibodies,” says Warren. The now-octogenarian was happy to have been pulled out of retirement by the numerous Nobel Laureate speaking engagements that saw him globetrotting from Thailand to Rome and Greece, but he is now trying to keep the overseas trips to a manageable few per year and is not tempted – not even a little bit – to don his lab coat again. “I’ve avoided doing as much as Barry has. His work is ongoing. He needs the constant publicity to get the finance to help run the Centre. I have plenty of other things to do, and the work they are doing now is way beyond the stuff I used to do,” he says. He likes to dedicate time to photography – a hobby he has pursued since his teenage years – and to his growing brood: at the time of writing Warren had seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, whom he loves to photograph. While he has no regrets, the widowed Warren would have liked to have replaced his beloved 18-year-old canine companion, who died in 2007. But, like work in the lab, a puppy, too, is out of the question. “I would like to get another one, but all this travelling has kept me out of getting a dog. I couldn’t leave a puppy behind,” he says. “Actually, that’s the one thing about the Nobel Prize I don’t like.”

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J ROBIN WARREN AND BARRY J MARSHALL

Vital statistics

Awards and accolades

Name: John Robin Warren

1994: Warren Alpert Prize (shared with Warren)

Born: North Adelaide, South Australia

1995: Australian Medical Association Award (shared with Warren)

Birthdate: June 11, 1937 School: St Peter’s College, Adelaide

1995: Albert Lasker Award

University: University of Adelaide

1996: Gairdner Award

Married: Dr Winifred Theresa Williams, in 1962; widowed 1997

1997: Paul Ehrlich Prize (shared with Warren) 1998: Dr AH Heineken Prize for Medicine

Children: John, David, Patrick, Andrew, and Rebecca Lived: Mainly in Adelaide and Perth

1998: Centenary Florey Medal, Australian Institute of Political Science (shared with Warren)

Awards and accolades

1999: Benjamin Franklin Medal for Life Sciences

1994: Warren Alpert Prize (shared with Marshall) 1995: Australian Medical Association (WA Branch) Medical Award (shared with Marshall) 1995: Distinguished Fellows Award, Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia 1996: Inaugural Award, the First Western Pacific Heliobacter Congress

1998: Buchanan Medal, Royal Society 2002: Keio Medical Science Prize 2003: Australian Centenary Medal 2005: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (shared with Warren) 2007: Companion of the Order of Australia 2015: Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences

1996: The Medal of the University of Hiroshima 1997: Paul Ehrlich Prize (shared with Marshall)

Why they were awarded the Nobel Prize

1997: MDhc, University of Western Australia

Barry Marshall and Robin Warren were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005 for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease. Previously, it was believed that stomach ulcers were caused by stress. Doctors Warren and Marshall proved that bacteria can live in the stomach despite its acidic environment. Although millions of people around the world carry the bacterium in their stomach naturally, those suffering from ulcers and other gastric diseases are now routinely treated with antibiotics. Marshall later patented diagnostic two tests, the CLOtest (mucosa biopsy) and the PYTest (breath), to detect Helicobacter pylori. These are still in use today.

1998: Centenary Florey Medal, Australian Institute of Political Science (shared with Marshall) 2005: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (shared with Marshall) Vital statistics Name: Barry James Marshall Born: Kalgoorlie, Western Australia Birthdate: September 30, 1951 School: Newman College, Perth University: University of Western Australia Married: Adrienne Feldman, in 1972 Children: Luke, Bronwyn, Caroline, and Jessica Lived: Mainly in Perth and Virginia, United States

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Table of Contents

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The long and the short of it By Deborah Singerman

Elizabeth Helen Blackburn 1948– Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2009

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Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg

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ELIZABETH HELEN BLACKBURN

The discovery of what protects chromosome length, and the downside of its replication of cancerous cells, ensures that wishing someone a long life is no idle salutation to Professor Elizabeth Blackburn and her 2009 Nobel Prize-winning collaborators.

ven as a child growing up in Tasmania, Elizabeth Blackburn’s reading, interests, and genes indicated her likely career direction. Budding scientists, as many of the Australian Nobel Laureate biographies show, are curious about life, revel in nature, and, it has to be said, often follow in their ancestors’ footsteps. Blackburn was no exception. Her parents were both physicians, many members of her extended family were doctors, and she cherished the biography of Marie Curie written by Curie’s daughter. Aware of “this expectation that I’d probably be a physician, it never occurred to me that as a woman, I wouldn’t have gone into science”, she says. In 2009 Professor Blackburn was not only the first Australian woman to become a Nobel Laureate but also the first woman working at the University of California, San Francisco (and the fourth UCSF scientist overall) to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She was also only the ninth woman to win this Nobel Prize. “Very excited” by all this news, she modestly placed herself in context rather than take all the glory, saying

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she hoped that “nine will quickly become a larger number”. The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute also awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Blackburn’s collaborators Dr Carol Greider of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Dr Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School. Their discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase revealed that a unique DNA sequence repeated several times in the telomeres protected the chromosomes from degradation. In effect, the long, thread-like DNA molecules that carry our genes became protective caps at the ends of chromosomes. This DNA sequence varies among species. Blackburn had long been fascinated with “small living creatures”, which she loved to hold, and even sing to, leading her towards biochemistry “as a doorway into the mystery of how life worked” – and, more specifically, to a single-cell organism called Tetrahymena that lives in water. This “oddball creature”, she told the assembled dignitaries in her Nobel banquet speech, has seven sexes. “Who

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ELIZABETH HELEN BLACKBURN knows what is going on under the dark surface of the pond?” she surmised mischievously. Blackburn also acknowledged the prize-winners’ journeys, both professional and geographic. She has lived in the United States for well over 30 years and has dual Australian– American citizenship. She lived in England as a student for several years, too. Szostak and Greider have mixed Canadian, US and UK credentials; they also have science in their blood, Greider being the daughter of two scientists with doctorates from the University of California, Berkeley, and Szostak the son of an engineer father. Theirs was also a long partnership – no fly-by-nighters here. Blackburn had known Szostak and Greider for decades and conducted experiments with them after her 1975 study of telomeres as a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale University of the founder of telomeres research, Joseph Gall. The ground-breaking work on telomeres and telomerase is recounted in academic, Nobel, medical, and popular media. The term “telomere” was coined in the 1930s by researchers Barbara McClintock (Nobel Prize 1983) and Hermann Muller (Nobel Prize 1946), who noticed that the ends of chromosomes appeared to have a protective role – without them, the chromosomes became sticky, fusing together and breaking down. The Greek telos (“end”) was joined by meros (“part”). Telomere experiments in single-cell Tetrahymena contained relatively short linear DNA sequences (minichromosomes), which meant that large amounts of this type of genetic material could be isolated. On analysing the ends of the minichromosomes, the telomeres, Blackburn found a shortened sequence, CCCCAA, which was repeated 20–70 times. The DNA sequence was replicated in an unusual way, but was later added to the ends of the chromosomes. Experimenting across species How did this happen? Blackburn described her findings about Tetrahymena at a scientific conference in 1980, and Szostak, who was trying to find out how minichromosomes functioned in yeast, suggested that he and Blackburn try an experiment crossing both species. The research asked whether the telomere sequences from Tetrahymena protect minichromosomes from being broken down in yeast. Their results have had profound implications.

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Blackburn determined that this sequence could be added to chromosomes, and with Szostak began the experiment, which they thought would probably fail. Although the Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baking and brewer’s yeast) with which they worked was unrelated to telomeres, they found they could use the Tetrahymena sequence to stabilise a long strand of DNA. Szostak’s group identified yeast cells with mutations that gradually shortened the telomeres, and eventually stopped dividing. Blackburn’s team made mutations in the RNA of the telomerase and noted

The research asked whether the telomere sequences from Tetrahymena protect minichromosomes from being broken down in yeast similar effects in the Tetrahymena; again, this led to premature cellular ageing, known as senescence. Functional telomeres, on the other hand, prevent damage to chromosomes and delay cell ageing. Greider’s group later showed that telomerase delays the ageing of human cells. The telomere DNA sequence attracts the proteins, which form a protective cap around the fragile ends of the DNA strands, and telomeres prevent the loss of essential genetic information from the chromosome. Blackburn describes them as being like the plastic ends of a shoelace. Over time, the telomere’s stability diminishes to a shortened state in which it cannot protect an organism from disease; as a result, cells age and shut down. Their chromosomes may fuse or rearrange mutations that can lead to cancer. The ends (telomeres) get shorter each time a cell divides. They must possess a special enzyme that add these repeat units to the end of chromosomes so as to compensate for the incomplete job done by the copying enzyme. Working in Dr Blackburn’s lab as a graduate student, Dr Greider tracked down this enzyme, now known as telomerase, in a central experiment that finished on Christmas Day, 1984. Going into the lab that morning, Greider saw from the six-unit repeat that she had captured telomerase. “That was a really exciting day,” she said. “We tracked the enzyme over time and saw it going up and down at the right time, and

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Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres (2007)

the pattern was right, so we knew the enzyme was influencing telomere production,” Blackburn added. Yet another 15 years passed before the team would receive the highest level of international recognition – the Nobel Prize. Greider and Blackburn later found that, as well as containing protein to do the building work, telomerase has a special piece of RNA that it uses as a template to elongate the chromosome with the six-unit repeats (the CCCCAA sequence). Telomerase extends telomere DNA and enables DNA polymerasers to copy the length of the chromosome right to the end. Telomerase is usually active only at the beginning of life; thereafter, the telomeres get shorter each time a cell divides. If they become too short, a cell is thrown into senescence (premature ageing), that it cannot divide again. Short telomeres are known to have a role in certain diseases of ageing, such as aplastic anaemia, where bone marrow does not

produce sufficient new cells to replenish blood cells. Telomeres are also important in cancer, a disease in which control of cell proliferation is lost. Telomerase elongates telomeres in cancerous cells of advanced tumours, making it a target within these cells. Cancer cells need to reactivate the telomerase gene; otherwise, their telomeres will get steadily shorter, forcing them into senescence. In some 80–90 per cent of human cancer cells, the telomerase gene has been switched back on, Blackburn said, this activity preventing them from losing their telomeres. The length of telomeres may not yet be as well-known as the monitoring of cholesterol or blood pressure, but it is entering the vernacular. SBS documentary-maker Sonia Pemberton made Secrets of the Human Body: Immortal (aired December 5, 2010), which showed the viewing public how telomeres and telomerase held the balance between, as SBS described it, the “power to extend life and the ability to destroy it”. Pemberton had her telomere measured and it was the length of someone five years her senior. She vowed to do more exercise, which research, discussed later, has shown can counteract the impact of stress, for instance, on telomere length. An article on ageing gracefully by Sydney Morning Herald health contributor Paula Goodyer also mentioned “intriguing research into the impact of exercise on things called telomeres” (without mentioning the Nobel Prize-winning Blackburn). Nice girls do science Blackburn was discouraged by people who claimed “nice girls don’t do science”; but, knowing her destiny, she persevered and gained bachelors and master’s degrees in science at the University of Melbourne. Like her mother, Marcia, she was a resident of Janet Clarke Hall, Australia’s first university college to admit women. “Those in college at the time describe her as balanced, fun, and adventurous,” the university says in an official statement. “She played the piano, enjoyed camping, was keenly interested in people, and was not necessarily one to study late into the night – she was too organised for that.” A mentor at Melbourne, Frank Hurd, urged her to go to Cambridge University, where she worked as a postgraduate with English biochemist Fred Sanger (who won his second Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980). In Sanger’s lab Blackburn

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ELIZABETH HELEN BLACKBURN met her future husband, John Sedat, who was then a postdoctoral student. Sedat took a job at Yale University in 1975, and there Blackburn found the lab work – and the species – which were to change her life. “I did a postdoc at Yale with Joe Gall, who had discovered a class of very tiny linear chromosomes in a type of single-celled protozoa. These creatures [the Tetrahymena] – they are pond scum, literally – had lovely, accessible chromosomes. And I thought, ‘Oh, wonderful. I’ll sequence these.’ And right away, I found these strange molecular features about their ends: telomeres.” She and Sedat moved again in 1977, when he got a job at University of California (UC), San Francisco (he is professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF). Blackburn was soon hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at UC Berkeley. For the first time, she had her own lab. Scientists in the Netherlands had observed that the telomeric DNA fragment would get longer and longer. Blackburn suspected there must be an enzyme at work. “When I got tenure at UC Berkeley in 1983, I got brave and started thinking about entering a whole new

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

era of research, and so began the hunt for that enzyme activity.” She had noted that other scientists with a molecular focus were also intrigued by the ends of chromosomes, which went against the more common understanding of how DNA strands could be copied without losing parts of their ends. It was at UC Berkeley, on Christmas Day in 1984, that Greider made the fateful discovery of telomerase. “The huge luck of being in academic research is that you can let yourself learn from the results you get,” Blackburn says. “If you’re on a freewheeling ride like I am, there are no dead ends, because there’s always something new to investigate. I don’t have dead ends. Isn’t it wonderful? I adhere to basic science, but then you have to branch out into arcane avenues, to experiment where you may not be sure of the outcome, but you have to give it a go. Now I’m old enough to say, dammit, I really did have the smarts to take advantage when I saw certain things.” Blackburn has been the Morris Herzstein professor of biology and physiology at UC’s San Francisco campus since 1990, as well as a non-resident fellow of the Salk Institute. As well as being attracted to the university by

Blackburn speaks at TED2017 in Vancouver. Photo: Bret Harmanted

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the promise of the latest equipment and a top team, it fit with with her need to rest after going into premature labour with her son, Ben. She ran the Berkeley lab long-distance, juggling her roles as parent and lab scientist. The “constant tussle” and commuting to Berkeley tired her out – hence her move to UCSF in 1990, which allowed her to spend more time with her family. Blackburn has had periods of selfdoubt and fear, she says, and “was very much daunted and overcome by the challenges of finding jobs. You have to kind of be tough”, she said of weathering those disappointments. In reflecting, with UCSF chancellor Sue Desmond Hellmann, on her career in front of students from the University and local high schools, Blackburn said that while work–life balance was a worthy long-term goal, it is not something that can be accomplished and maintained all the time. “I understand family and career balance … and I think it can be [the case that] over the years … the balance can be achieved, but not every single day, necessarily”, she said. The study of telomeres is notable as a field of research in which female scientists are particularly prominent. Greider ascribes this to a “founder effect” (namely relating to Gall of Yale University, who trained Blackburn and other women who, in turn, recruited others to the field). “There is a slight tendency for women to work with other women,” she says. Blackburn also feels that “women bring in more women

and they feel comfortable”. Her own achievements help people visualise themselves in science, she says, but she recognises that something akin to the “aggressive” anti-smoking campaigns might be necessary for real progress for women in science. In her own life, she and Sedat have prioritised different things at different times. When Ben was growing up, for example, the couple “just focused on science and family” and waited until he had left the family home before resuming visits to the movies, restaurants, and the like, she said. She is a great believer in taking breaks and unwinding – to “work hard, play hard”. “Having intense relaxation is very important, such as travelling or something where you turn your mind off,” she says. In May 2007, when Time magazine named Blackburn one of the year’s “100 most influential people in the world”, it listed her age as 44, much younger than she was. “Don’t think I’m going to ask for a correction on that one,” Blackburn said with a smile. “If they want to turn back the clock, that’s lovely.” Health implications Stress can have effects similar to ageing in reducing telomerase. Blackburn and colleagues have found telomere erosion in people who suffer from chronic stress. They are working on longer-term studies to see if lifestyle interventions – diet, exercise, and stress reduction – will promote telomere repair, perhaps staving off damage and illness from coronary artery disease or diabetes, for example. “The idea is that, wow, inside your cells your molecular

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ELIZABETH HELEN BLACKBURN

machinery is wearing down, and this is not good,” Blackburn says. “If you can get a kind of science that is easier for people to grasp, a concrete measurement aspect, maybe this is the way to change policy.” Spurred on by evidence that physiology can help to make people healthier, she has teamed up with psychologists and doctors to investigate how such interventions might make people feel better as well as have longer-term genetic implications. “We have this huge problem, which is all this morbidity and disease in the middle part of life”, she warns. Telomere length may decline overall, but it varies among individuals. Long or relatively long telomeres are the goal. Blackburn, who reportedly only complains about an “achy back”, applies what she considers good science to her own life. She eats a low-fat diet and takes time to relax, exercise, and walk with Sedat. She is also collaborating with Elissa Epel, an associate professor in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry. They are studying two groups of mothers – one with normal healthy children, the other with children with chronic illness – and have found that the longer the mothers cared for the chronically ill children, the less telomerase the mothers would have and the shorter their telomeres would be. “Most basic biologists like her stay very focused,” Epel said, adding that it was unusual for biologists such as Blackburn to branch into “translational research”. “It’s risky to branch into fields you know little about.” A study of men with prostate cancer, run by “lifestyle guru” Dr Dean Ornish at the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, monitored the effectiveness of interventions in protecting against the growth of prostate cancer. “What we eat, and how we respond to stress, and whether we smoke, and [our] level of intimacy makes a difference, even on a genetic level,” Ornish says. Blackburn frequently cautions that so-called “magic pills” have a habit of “biting back” with unexpected and unwanted side effects. “We’ll want a drug therapy. But in a way it’s sort of stupid not to use millions of years of your body’s physiology. If you can persuade your body physiology to do this for you, do it. It’s free.” A Good Weekend article on “women of influence” listed “the Australian-born American biological researcher Blackburn” as an innovator (alongside the Australian Academy of Science’s Suzanne Cory, one of this book’s “Women in

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Science”). If her visit to Australia after winning the Nobel Prize is anything to go by, Blackburn is in constant demand from organisations and academic institutions. Her visit to Questacon in Canberra was organised by the office of the Chief Scientist, who at the time was professor Penny Sackett, and the Prime Minister’s Office. Ensuring that no one will forget Blackburn’s achievement, Questacon director Graham Durant said that it named “our new boardroom in her honour as the Blackburn Room”. She also gave lectures at Melbourne University and a public lecture on telomerase and telomere biology at the University of Sydney on March 12, 2009, at the invitation of leading professional bodies – the Australasian Association of Clinical Biochemists, the Human Genetics Society of Australasia, and the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia. More recently, Blackburn’s busy timetable resulted in an email regarding this biography: “I regret to have to tell you that I am overwhelmed and not doing

With AIC Gold Medal, 2012

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any further interviews – by email or otherwise – right now”. However, portrayals of her by others consistently show a straightforward approach, rapport with students, and passion for science. Says Sackett: “If the focused intensity in the eyes of the younger children and the rapt attention and razor-sharp questions posed by the older students were any indication, Professor Blackburn’s interaction with them will be a formative experience for them as they continue to think about science. It certainly would have been for me at their age. “Professor Blackburn has an easy manner and is able to describe her science and its significance at any level. But, perhaps more importantly, she is able to convey why she is so passionate about doing science and thinking about science. She spoke about her own journey of curiosity from a small age, and described science as a creative activity, one that benefits from daydreaming as well as from discipline. We all can learn to see science in the world around us, understand how science alters our lives, and thus appreciate the world (and science) just a little bit more in the process. Those who study science in depth, however, or take it up as a profession, have an even greater opportunity: the chance to embark on a life-long journey of discovery with nature. The destination is not always clear, but the trip is fun, challenging, and often makes you forget entirely that you can actually be paid to make discoveries and make a difference at the same time.” Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives when Blackburn received the Nobel Prize, called Blackburn a “champion of innovation” and “an inspiration to all women pursuing careers in the fields of technology, engineering, and mathematics”. Then-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said, “You are fantastic, and you are one of those immigrants that is making great contributions to the State of California.” The University of Melbourne’s position in the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings leapt from 75 to 62 after Blackburn’s award, the biggest increase of any university in the top 100. The ThenGovernor-General Quentin Bryce, when presenting Blackburn with her Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) during the post-Nobel Prize visit, was particularly moved: “I just had tears going down my cheeks as I was putting it around her neck because I was telling her

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about my memories about the girl from the little town I came from who was the first in the town to do science. It was in the 1940s and her name was Sanna Shannon, and we all spoke of it as if she was going to the moon.” “She’s scary in the right way,” says Kerry Hegarty, managing director and chief executive of Sienna Cancer Diagnostics, a small Melbourne-based biotech company that has the global intellectual property rights to telomerase. Intellectually uncompromising, Blackburn is very supportive of those whose work is strong. “She’s a fantastic mentor and her enthusiasm for this field of science is contagious,” says Hegarty. She is also prepared to fight for her scientific beliefs, such as the advancement of embryonic stem cell research. In 2001 then-US President George W Bush appointed Blackburn to the Bioethics Advisory Council. Three years later, to the consternation of many fellow scientists, she was kicked off the Council because she disagreed with a ban on therapeutic cloning. Reports at the time praised her for not avoiding the controversy, on the one hand, but also, on the other, for keeping away from the limelight. She was said to be more comfortable in the lab. Another forthright commentator, immunologist and 1996 Nobel Laureate Peter Doherty, agrees: “She’s direct. She doesn’t beat about the bush,” and she is “all-around an admirable person ... and identifiably Australian. She was always a star. She’s won all the prizes and hit all the marks since she was quite young.” Her husband, Sedat, affirms that life with her is wellrounded. “There is no question that one of the nice features of Liz is that she’s shown young women scientists that you can make it and also have a family – that it’s not one or the other, and that it’s fun,” he said. “You go home at night and feel like there are some interesting new ideas, even after you’ve been doing it for 30 years.” As with all discoveries, what ultimately matters is long-term impact. The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute concluded that the work of Blackburn, Greider, and Szostak “added a new dimension to our understanding of the cell, shed light on disease mechanisms, and stimulated the development of potential new therapies”. Keeping telomeres intact and protecting the ends of the chromosomes that brim with our DNA-carrying genes is still a beautiful dance for this eminent scientist.

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ELIZABETH HELEN BLACKBURN

Vital statistics

2010: Gruber Foundation Genetics Prize

Name: Elizabeth Helen Blackburn

2010: President of American Association for Cancer Research

Born: November 26, 1948, in Hobart, Tasmania Parents: Harold Blackburn and Marcia Jack School: Broadland House Girls Grammar School, Launceston University: University of Melbourne BSc (1970), MSc (1972); University of Cambridge PhD molecular biology (1975); postdoctoral work in molecular and cellular biology, Yale University (1975–77) Married: Jack Sedat, in 1975 Children: A son, Benjamin Lived: Tasmania, Melbourne, Cambridge and, since the mid-1970s, California Awards and accolades 1990: Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology and Physiology, and Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California San Francisco 1991: Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1992: Fellow of Royal Society 1993: First woman chair of Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of California San Francisco; Foreign Associate, National Academy of Science; National Academy of Science Award in Molecular Biology; fellow of American Academy of Microbiology

Why she was awarded the Nobel Prize Elizabeth Blackburn was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak. She studied the telomere, a structure at the ends of chromosomes that protects the chromosome, and co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere. The Blackburn Lab researches the synthesis and function of telomeres and the mechanism of telomerase action and its role in cells. Its discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase revealed that a unique DNA sequence repeated several times in the telomeres protected the chromosomes from degradation. In effect, the long, thread-like DNA molecules that carry our genes became protective caps at the ends of chromosomes. Short telomeres are known to have a role in certain diseases of ageing and are also important in cancer. Telomerase elongates telomeres in cancerous cells of advanced tumours, making it a target within these cells. She is now looking at the effects of stress in reducing telomerase and is working on longer-term studies to see if lifestyle interventions – diet, exercise, and stress reduction – will promote telomere repair.

1998: President of American Society of Cell Biology 1998: The Gairdner Foundation International Award 1999: California Scientist of the Year 2000: American Cancer Society Medal of Honour; Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science; Member of Institute of Medicine 2002–04: President’s Council on Bioethics 2006: Albert Lasker Medical Research Award in Basic Medical Research Award; Time magazine list of 100 most influential people 2008: Tasmanian Roll of Honour 2009: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2010: Companion of the Order of Australia (Australia Day Honours) for eminent service to science as a leader in biomedical research

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Blackburn and Elissa Epel's book,– The Telomere Effect

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Discovering the death of the universe By Tim Mendham

Brian Paul Schmidt 1967– Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 – shared with Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter

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William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg

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Dark forces and exploding stars measure distance and time in space to reveal a universe moving at a profoundly unexpected pace.

he Universe is expanding, and it is doing so at an accelerating rate. Gravity can no longer slow it down, let alone bring it together. Eventually, all but the nearest stars will disappear from our view, and the Universe will cool and turn to ice. And we know this encouraging scenario thanks to the work of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2011. In what has been described as a “milestone for cosmology”, the work of astronomers on opposite sides of the world, including Australian Brian Schmidt, succeeded in overturning what had been the accepted (or at least the hoped-for) picture of the Universe as a gradual deceleration after the initial impetus of the Big Bang, followed by a pulling-together of the cosmos once more into a small body of matter – just like a rubber band, stretched by initial forces and then pulling back into its original shape. Except that the Nobel Laureates showed that the rubber band could no longer contain the tension, and that the band has been going on on expanding, faster and faster, until …

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The Nobel Prize was shared between Australian Brian Schmidt, his American colleague Adam Riess, and American scientist Saul Perlmutter from the University of California, Berkeley. Two teams of astronomers have been competing with each other to find the evidence for the accelerating Universe. One, led by Perlmuttter of the Supernova Cosmology Project, began work in 1988. The other, headed by Schmidt and assisted by Riess, set up their operations at the Australian National University (ANU) in 1994. The competition paid off. By 1998, the two research teams were ready to present their findings, with some trepidation. “When Adam and I were talking about the first results that he was coming out with,” Schmidt says, “and we could see the results and the data, I have to admit that I just figured that a mistake had been made. But that mistake never really went away. And so, after about six weeks, I think the surprise of what was in the data had worn off, but then I think we had to face the realities that we were

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going to have to tell the world about it. I wasn’t so convinced that they would be terribly kind in response to our findings, as it just seemed crazy.” Searching for stars The goal of Schmidt, his team and his competitors, was to map the Universe by finding the most distant supernovae – star explosions in space. By establishing the distance to the supernovae and the speed at which they are moving away from us, the scientists hoped to reveal our cosmic fate. They expected to find signs that the expansion of the Universe was slowing down, which would lead to equilibrium between fire and ice. Instead, they found the opposite: the expansion was accelerating. Only a century ago, the Universe was considered to be a calm and peaceful place, no larger than our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The cosmological clock was ticking reliably and steadily, and the Universe was eternal. That picture was about to change. At the beginning of the 20th century the American astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt found a way of measuring distances to faraway

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stars. At the time, women astronomers were denied access to the large telescopes and were frequently employed for the cumbersome task of analysing photographic plates. Leavitt studied thousands of pulsating stars, called cepheids, and found that the brighter ones had longer pulses. Using this information, she could calculate the intrinsic brightness of cepheids. If the distance of just one of the cepheid stars is known, the distances to others can be established – the dimmer its light, the farther away the star. In the 1920s astronomers were able to show that almost all galaxies are moving away from us. They were studying the “redshift” that occurs when a source of light is receding from us. The light’s wavelength gets stretched, and the longer the wave, the redder its colour. The conclusion was that the galaxies are rushing away from us and each other, and the farther away they are, the faster they move – this is known as Hubble’s law. The Universe is growing. What was observed in space had already been suggested by theoretical calculations. In 1915 Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, which has been the foundation of our understanding of

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the Universe ever since. The theory describes a Universe that must either shrink or expand. This conclusion was reached about a decade before the discovery of the ever-fleeing galaxies. Not even Einstein could reconcile the fact that the Universe was not static, so he proposed a “cosmological constant”, a modification of his original theory of general relativity to achieve a stationary Universe. Later, after the redshift observations, Einstein would consider the insertion of the cosmological constant a serious mistake. However, with the observations made in the late 1990s by the teams awarded the Nobel Prize, there has been renewed interest in Einstein’s “constant”. The task of proving Einstein right or wrong is a major challenge, especially in an area that has recently undergone a massive change of view. “We’re trying to test the model [of the accelerating Universe] as hard as we can,” Schmidt says. “We’re trying to push the model to see if we can break it, to see whether or not Einstein’s cosmological constant – that’s the explanation of the acceleration – whether or not we can show that that’s wrong. At this point, we haven’t been able to do that, but if we were able to show that it was wrong, then I think we would get some insight into what was going on. But if it really does look like Einstein’s cosmological constant [is correct], then I think we really need to have some brilliant mind, an Einstein-like figure, come along and, from a theoretical point of view, shine some light on what’s going on.” In their observations, the two teams expected to measure the cosmic deceleration, or how the expansion of the Universe is slowing. Their method was, in principle, the same as the one that had been used by astronomers more than six decades earlier: to locate distant stars and to measure how they move. But at the distances that astronomers need to see, billions of light years away, the previous yardsticks, the cepheids, are no longer visible. The cosmic yardstick needed to be extended. New measure of brightness Supernovae – star explosions – became the new standard measure of brightness. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers, opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Crucial were light-sensitive digital imaging sensors – charged-coupled devices, or CCDs. (The invention of these devices resulted in a Nobel Prize for Willard Boyle and George Smith in 2009.) The newest tool in the astronomer’s toolbox is a special kind of star explosion, the type 1a supernova. During a few weeks, a single such supernova can emit as much light as an entire galaxy. This type of supernova is the explosion of an extremely compact, old star that is as heavy as the sun but as small as the earth – a white dwarf. The explosion is the final step in the white dwarf’s life cycle. White

“We’re trying to test the model [of the accelerating Universe] as hard as we can,” Schmidt says. “We’re trying to push the model to see if we can break it” dwarfs form when a star has no more energy at its core because all hydrogen and helium have been burned in nuclear reactions. Only carbon and oxygen remain. Our sun will eventually follow the same path. A far more exciting end awaits a white dwarf that is part of a binary star system, which is fairly common. In this case the white dwarf’s strong gravity robs the companion star of its gas. When the white dwarf has grown to 1.4 solar masses, it no longer manages to hold together. When this happens, the interior of the dwarf becomes sufficiently hot for runaway fusion reactions to start, and the star gets ripped apart in seconds. The nuclear fusion products emit strong radiation that increases rapidly during the first weeks after the explosion, only to decrease over the following months, so there is a rush to find supernovae – their violent explosions are brief. Across the visible Universe, about 10 type-1a supernovae occur every minute. But in a typical single galaxy, only one or two supernova explosions occur every 1,000 years. So, the two competing teams knew they had to comb the heavens for distant supernovae. The trick was to compare two images of the same small piece of the sky, corresponding to a thumbnail at arm’s length. The first image has to be taken just after the new moon and the second three weeks later, before the

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moonlight swamps out starlight. Then the two images can be compared in the hope of discovering a small dot of light – a pixel among others in the CCD image – that could be a sign of a supernova in a galaxy far away. Only supernovae farther than a third of the way across the visible Universe were used, in order to eliminate local distortions. Chasing supernovae challenged not only the limits of science and technology but also those of logistics. First, the right kind of supernova had to be found. Second, its redshift and brightness had to be measured. The light curve had to be analysed over time in order to allow comparison with other supernovae of the same type at known distances. This required a network of scientists who could decide quickly whether a particular star was a worthy candidate for observation. They needed to be able to switch between telescopes and have observation time at a telescope granted without delay, a procedure that usually takes months. They needed to act quickly because a supernova fades quickly. At times, the two competing research teams discreetly crossed each other’s paths. The potential pitfalls had been numerous, and the scientists actually were reassured by the fact that they had reached the same amazing results: all in all, they found some 50 distant supernovae whose light seemed weaker than expected. This was contrary to what they had envisioned. If cosmic expansion had been losing speed, the supernovae should have appeared brighter. However, the supernovae were fading as they were carried away faster and faster, embedded in their galaxies. The surprising conclusion was that the expansion of the Universe is not slowing down – quite to the contrary, it is accelerating. Going against expectations So, what is it that is speeding up the Universe? It is something called dark energy, a challenge for physics and a riddle that no one has managed to solve. Several ideas have been proposed. The simplest is to reintroduce Einstein’s cosmological constant. Einstein inserted the cosmological constant as an anti-gravitational force to counter the gravitational force of matter and thus create a static Universe. Today, the cosmological constant instead appears to make the expansion of the Universe accelerate. The

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cosmological constant is, of course, continuous, and as such it does not change over time. So, dark energy becomes dominant when matter, and thus its gravity, is diluted due to the expansion of the Universe over billions of years. According to scientists, that would account for why the cosmological constant entered the scene so late in the history of the Universe, only five to six billion years ago. At about that time, the gravitational force of matter had weakened enough in relation to the cosmological constant. Until then, the expansion of the Universe had been decelerating. The simplest estimation for the amount of dark energy does not correspond at all to the amount that has been measured in space. This constitutes a still unexplained gap between theory and observation. It may be that the dark energy is not constant after all. But, as Schmidt says, “I think that the idea that there was some other big thing in the Universe, other than things that have normal gravity, meant that a lot of the problems that existed in cosmology back in 1998 were suddenly solved. So, there were a lot of people, and especially theorists, who wanted the Universe to be geometrically flat, which means it had to have a lot of stuff in it that we just didn’t know was there. And this stuff solved that problem. It gave the extra matter in a Universe that needed to be flat.” Whatever dark energy is, it seems to be here to stay. It fits very well in the cosmological puzzle that physicists and astronomers have been working on for a long time. According to current consensus, around three-quarters of the Universe consists of dark energy. The regular matter – the stuff that galaxies, stars, humans, and flowers are made of – is only five per cent of the Universe. The remaining 20 per cent is called dark matter, and to date, it remains hidden from us. Like dark energy, dark matter is invisible. We know both only by their effects – one is pushing, the other pulling. “But the model of dark energy, dark matter, normal atoms, really explains in exquisite detail the observations we make of the Universe,” Schmidt says. “So, on one side we have a very precise model of the Universe now, that we can test, and every time we test it, we keep on getting the same answers. But the fundamental understanding of ‘What is this

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dark matter?’ and ‘What is this dark energy?’ remains. And so, I think that’s the more fundamental question.” Therefore, the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that is up to 95 per cent unknown to science. As Schmidt says, “It seems that cosmologists are comfortable with a large degree of uncertainty.” Towards the Prize While there is uncertainty in all aspects of life, Schmidt has had a history of determined and considered action. He was born in 1967 in Montana, in the United States, before moving with his family to Alaska and setting in train a distinguished career, both abroad and in Australia, that would lead him to the Nobel Prize. As a youngster, he showed an interest in meteorology, and for a short time after graduating from high school he worked at the US National Weather Service in Anchorage. That was not quite what he was after – it was less scientific and not as exciting as he had hoped it would be. Instead, he moved into the field of astronomy, something that had previously only been a minor

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

interest. He earned his BS (Physics) and BS (Astronomy) from the University of Arizona, where he was named Most Outstanding Student in Physics in 1989. He initially taught astronomy at Arizona and then moved on to complete his Master’s and PhD at Harvard. At that university he was awarded the Danforth Award for excellence in teaching, and his time there included a stint as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It was at Harvard that Schmidt met his wife, Jennifer M Gordon, an Australian who was a PhD student in economics. In 1994 they moved to Australia. He now holds dual citizenship for the US and Australia. Picking up his teaching career at ANU in Canberra, he launched himself into the study of supernovae that led to the Physics award. In the same year he arrived in Australia he formed the High-Z Supernova Search Team, a group of 20 astronomers on five continents who used distant exploding stars to trace the expansion of the Universe back in time. The team’s research was named the 1998 Science magazine “Breakthrough of the

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Year”. But Schmidt has additional interests of a far earthier nature than the cosmos. He owns Maipenrai, a small winery in the Canberra region that is dedicated to making “fine Pinot Noir without compromise”. The wine is sourced from the property’s closeplanted 1.1-hectare vineyard atop the Yass River Valley. Situated at an altitude of 760 metres, the vineyard’s rocky soil and cold climate “make our six clones of Pinot Noir struggle, but provide an intensity to our wines that can only be achieved in such harsh conditions”. He also prides himself on his cooking. In fact, it was while preparing the evening’s meal that he received the call to let him know he had won the Nobel Prize. He happily admits that he never got to eat the meal, such was the immediate rush of congratulations and media interest. So, what was it like to win the Prize? Just after the announcement, he told Nobel Media: “I feel like when my first child was born. I’m kind of weak in the knees and a little, you know … hard to describe … almost speechless at this point. It’s pretty unexpected and so very big news, and I guess I’m still just trying to get my head around

it.” He says he had no idea that the award was coming his way, even though he was in Stockholm in August, only weeks before the announcement: “I have several friends who are members of the Swedish Academy and had no inkling whatsoever.” Back at the observatory, Schmidt says that “astronomy is really going through a heyday right now. That is, it’s very well supported compared to what it was 30 or 40 years ago. But I think one thing to remind ourselves is that great ideas don’t need billions of dollars; they need moderate support, and you need to have a lot of people with moderate support to get the good ideas. There are also needs for great big experiments, and those are expensive, but they tend not to be so imaginative. They’re sort of the brute-force way of solving problems. And so, I’m a very strong believer that you want to try both things, but you want to make sure you keep a bunch of smaller groups with innovative ideas, at the same time as maybe a couple of brute-force big experiments.” So: will the award encourage others to enter the astronomical fray? “I certainly hope so,” Schmidt says. “I hope that it will remind people of how exciting astronomy is, and how trying to understand the Universe is something that really helps us understand our place in the Universe. And it’s certainly my hope that children in Australia, but also around the world, will go through and say, ‘Ah – I’d kind of like to figure out how to do that myself.’” Taking charge Professor Schmidt was appointed the 12th Vice-Chancellor of ANU in January 2016. As with his scientific career, he has a grand vision of what can be achieved: “The Australian National University must be the Oxbridge/Ivy League institution of the Southern Hemisphere, but with an inclusive and distinctively Australian character. Change is inescapable, especially in the world of universities. But as things continue to change, we don’t want to become a national university in name only. We are determined to play as big and useful a role as we possibly can in Australia’s evolving story.” Fitting, for a person who helped evolve Australia’s Nobel Laureate story.

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BRIAN PAUL SCHMIDT Vital statistics Name: Brian Paul Schmidt Born: Missoula, Montana, United States Birthdate: February 24, 1967 School: Bartlett High School, Anchorage, Alaska University: University of Arizona; Harvard University Married: Jennifer M Gordon, in 1992 Children: Two: Kieran (born 1994) and Adrian (born 1997) Lives: Canberra Awards and accolades 1989: Most Outstanding Student in Physics, the University of Arizona 1991: Danforth Award for Excellence in Teaching, Harvard University 1992–93: NASA Graduate Student Researchers Program Fellowship 1998: Research named Science magazine “Breakthrough of the Year” 1999: Finalist in UNSW Eureka Prize for Scientific Research 2000: Bok Prize for outstanding Astronomical Thesis, Harvard University 2000: The Australian Government Malcolm McIntosh Prize 2001: Oliphant Lecture, Australian Academy of Sciences 2001: Australian Academy of Science Pawsey Medal 2004: Australian Academy of Science 50th Anniversary Lecture 2006: Shaw Prize (Astronomy – joint with Riess and Perlmutter) 2007: Gruber Prize for Cosmology (joint with High-Z and SCP Teams) 2007: Niehls Bohr Lecture, Copenhagen 2008: Elected fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences

2008: Elected fellow of the US National Academy of Sciences 2010: Peter Baume Award, Australian National University 2011: Nobel Prize in Physics 2013: Companion of the Order of Australia 2016: Vice-Chancellor, Australian National University Why he was awarded the Nobel Prize The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astronomers: Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess of the High-Z Supernova Search Team (Australian National University), and Saul Perlmutter of the Supernova Cosmology Project (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of California). In 1988 cosmology was shaken to its foundations as two research teams presented their findings. Headed by Perlmutter, one of the teams had set to work in 1988; Schmidt headed another team, launched at the end of 1994, where Riess was to play a crucial role. The research teams raced to map the Universe by locating the most distant supernovae. More sophisticated telescopes on the ground and in space, as well as more powerful computers and new digital imaging sensors, opened the possibility in the 1990s to add more pieces to the cosmological puzzle. The teams used a particular kind of supernova called a type 1a supernova. It is an explosion of an old, compact star that is as heavy as the sun but as small as Earth. A single such supernova can emit as much light as a whole galaxy. The two research teams found over 50 distant supernovae whose light was weaker than expected: this was a sign that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating. The potential pitfalls had been numerous, and the scientists found reassurance in the fact that both groups had reached the same astonishing conclusion. For almost a century the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang, which occurred around 14 billion years ago. The discovery that this expansion is accelerating was astounding. If the expansion continues to speed up, the Universe will end in ice. The expansion is thought to be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma – one of the greatest in physics today. What is known is that dark energy constitutes around three-quarters of the Universe.

The celestial-inspired wine label from Schmidt’s winery

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Therefore, the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that, to a large extent, is unknown to science.

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Banning the bomb ICAN – International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons 2006– Nobel Peace Prize 2017

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William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg

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A group of peace activists, scientists, doctors, and environmentalists from Melbourne formed ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, in 2007, and in 10 years broke through the barriers of half a century of failure. Their efforts to create and negotiate a UN treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons saw them awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.

uclear weapons are the most lethal, destructive force to ever be borne from the pursuit of science. Forged in the fires of the most horrific conflict the world has ever seen, World War II, their power is indiscriminate and absolute. The world has banned chemical weapons, landmines, and other vestiges of past wars that cause harm for generations, but is yet to establish a comprehensive framework for the phase-out of nuclear weapons. Australia’s sole Nobel Peace Prize was won by ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, an effort originating in Melbourne, and a unique confluence of activists – scientists, peace activists, environmentalists, and doctors – banding together. Associate Professor Tilman Ruff OAM, David Sweeney, Dimity Hawkins AM, Dr Bill Williams, and Sue Wareham took up an idea that had been proposed by their Malaysian colleague Dr Ronald McCoy. Melbourne has a proud history of thinking in new ways about old issues – workers in the state led the way internationally on

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labourer’s rights, with the eight-hour day first achieved through political activism and protest in 1856, years before most of the world caught up. Bringing together scientific, moral, and intellectual approaches alongside medical, political, and legal evidence, ICAN has been able to construct a progressive way forward around the seemingly intractable obstacle of nuclear disarmament. A focus on “humour, hope, and humanity” drives the organisation’s work, which aims to convey the devastation the weapons can wreak, point out the absurdity in the prevailing orthodoxy, and inspire a belief that the world could be different. ICAN’s founding members recognised in the mid-2000s that the policies, ideas, and political functions relating to nuclear disarmament were bogged down, and pushed for a new way to move forward. This required a combination of innovative ideas about security and humanitarian ideas about policy. Most importantly, ICAN centred its advocacy on survivors of nuclear weapons, giving voice to the Indigenous peoples who

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Mushroom-shaped cloud and water column from the underwater Baker nuclear explosion of July 25, 1946

still carry the scars of atomic destruction. In Australia alone, over 12 nuclear weapons have been detonated, a sadly forgotten part of the nation’s history. Looking at the Pacific more broadly, there have been 315 nuclear weapons tests in the region. ICAN, understanding that success must be intergenerational, worked to incorporate young people in its campaign. For most people born after the 1990s, nuclear weapons were not a front-of-mind issue or one that had touched their lives personally. By innovating, collaborating, and building a coalition of non-nuclear-armed states, ICAN now has 39 out of the 50 signatory

states needed to make its UN nuclear weapons prohibition treaty legally binding. A decades-long fight Ever since the creation and use of nuclear weapons, efforts to limit their proliferation have fallen flat. The United States’ Baruch Plan, put forward to the then newly formed United Nations in 1945, shortly after the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saw the nation offer to destroy its nuclear arsenal on the provision that the UN first establish an international system to ensure that atomic energy would be used solely for peaceful purposes. The Soviet Union instead pushed for its Gromyko Plan, in which stockpiles of nuclear weapons would first be destroyed before an international supervisory scheme was agreed upon. Both vetoed each other’s proposals. Historians debate the sincerity of both nations’ plans, considering the leverage that nuclear weapons had given to the US as a rising superpower and the Soviet Union’s massive investments into creating its own nuclear arsenals. The potential power was too much for both to resist, and the single greatest opportunity to limit the spread of nuclear weapons fell to the wayside, dooming humanity to live under the shadow the weapons cast.

Photo:: Tim Wright

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By 1949 the Soviet Union had successfully tested its first nuclear weapon, locking the US and the Soviet Union into an arms race that would see a massive increase in nuclear weapons stockpiling and several other nations building their own bombs. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), in which any nuclear weapon attack would be responded to with an equally devasting nuclear weapon attack, become the prevailing orthodoxy to justify the arms race. A paper published by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in 2016 estimated that more than 128,000 nuclear warheads have been built since 1945, all but two per cent of them by the United States (55 per cent) and the Soviet Union/Russia (43 per cent). Each bomb has the power to wipe out entire cities, killing millions of people in an instant, and the payload, power, and potential damage caused by nuclear weapons have increased vastly since the first two bombs were dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Recognising this threat, scientists from the US and the Soviet Union took a leap of faith and came together to present a united front against the madness of MAD. The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) was born.

IPPNW was initially led by co-founders Drs Bernard Lown, Jim Muller, Eric Chivian, and Herb Abrams of the US, and Drs Yevgeni Chazov, Mikhail Kuzin, and Leonid Ilyin of the Soviet Union, who reasoned that their common interest in survival was more powerful than the ideological divides between them. Drawing on their knowledge of the medical effects of burn, blast, and radiation injuries from Japanese research following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the doctors sounded a medical warning to humanity: that nuclear war would be the final epidemic, one for which there would be no cure and could be no meaningful medical response. IPPNW grew to an international coalition, a non-partisan federation of medical groups across 64 countries representing tens of thousands of doctors, medical students, and concerned citizens, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for its work in educating the world on the horrors of nuclear war. Its Australian affiliate, the Medical Association for the Prevention of War (MAPW), was founded in 1981, and won an Australian Peace Award in 1986 for its efforts, presented by then Prime Minister Bob Hawke. The number of nuclear weapons in the world peaked in the late 1980s, in the dying embers of the Soviet Union, and has fallen substantially since then. Paradoxically, the

Photo: Kristian Laemmle-Ruff

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“It was not all rosy and smooth sailing, but we had a surprising degree of consensus, suppression of ego for the greater good, and a welcome degree of the clarity of purpose, and urgency of need” – Dave Sweeney world is no less safe from the threat of nuclear weapons today than it was then, as the number in existence is still enough to wipe out all life on the planet, and more nations have acquired their own bombs since, increasing the risk of a single miscalculation spiralling into nuclear war. A frustrating stalemate Following the 1980s, the 90s were a period of hope for nuclear disarmament. The UN Non-Proliferation Treaty, first ratified in 1970, offered a way forward: the nuclear-armed states agreed to dismantle their arsenals on the provision that non-nuclear-armed states agreed to not pursue nuclear weapons. Some 25 years later, it was agreed that the Treaty would be extended indefinitely. Critics of the Treaty note that it has not prevented North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons, nor Iraq, Iran, and other nations from attempting to build them, while several

nuclear-armed states have never signed onto the Treaty. Nations that are signatories to the Treaty meet every five years to review the process and discuss how best to move forward towards disarmament. In May 2005 hundreds of diplomats met for a review that did not produce any meaningful agreements on how to move forward. From failure came a shared frustration, which sparked the fire for a new approach among the activists, health specialists, and anti-war groups that had long known each other, having worked in the nuclear disarmament space for years. This included MAPW’s former and current presidents Dr Bill Williams and Dr Susan Wareham, alongside Dr Tilman Ruff, Dimity Hawkins, Malaysian IPPNW affiliate Dr Ronald McCoy, and Dave Sweeney of the Australian Conservation Foundation. Between them, they had knowledge of grassroots activism campaigns, experience with UN-level advocacy for nuclear disarmament, networks of contacts around the world, and a shared city: Melbourne. Speaking on that shared frustration, Ruff notes, “It was a clear signal that business as usual on disarmament was headed nowhere. We thought that failure would be a wake-up call for the world summit by December 2005, but they did not agree on a single line for any summit issue.”

Photo: Martin Ollman

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Nuclear states had no interest in disarmament and would use their veto votes to knock down any measure proposed to that end. How could the world move forward? The group took inspiration from another weapons ban – the Ottawa Treaty, which had been signed into international law in 1999 and prohibited the use of anti-personnel landmines. The use of landmines in war has profound impacts on civilians long after conflict abates, with millions upon millions of live landmines still being decommissioned around the world. Significantly, the Ottawa Treaty was led by a middle power similar to Australia – Canada – and, instead of relying on the world’s biggest users of anti-personnel landmines to come to the table and negotiate, it involved bringing together a coalition of smaller nations to put pressure on the bigger players. Canada led this effort, working with a broad civil-society coalition, alongside UNICEF and the Red Cross, and joined early on by Norway and Austria. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for its efforts. Discussions between the MAPW and its international network on how best to move forward continued, and by October 2005 the IPPNW had endorsed ICAN. With the backing of IPPNW, the small team of Australians, and Ronald McCoy, now had

to build their movement from scratch, with few resources and from the relative isolation of Australia. Two things were needed: money to fund the work, and an experienced campaigner to take the lead on the project. The Poola Foundation, run by philanthropists Eve and Milan Kantor and Mark Wootton, stepped in and provided three years’ worth of funding, and Felicity Hill (née Ruby) took up a full-time role building ICAN as the project’s coordinator. With previous experience as a director at the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, Hill had extensive networks

The Peace Boat participates as an international steering group of ICAN

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of contacts globally. A draft proposal paper from ICAN laid out how the Australians would break the inertia on the issue: “Our campaign will work from one key operating assumption: unless public opinion is mobilised and nuclear abolition becomes a serious election issue, nothing much will change globally. Our campaign will work to change and challenge public apathy, which comes from a public that generally feels that it can’t change the world.” Now the group set out to stigmatise nuclear weapons using humour, hope, and horror.

Sue Coleman-Haseldine speaking to treaty negotiations at the United Nations New York, March 2017

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Shattering barriers As Sweeney aptly puts it, “There was a slight scepticism among people who were intellectually or conceptually supportive, who said, ‘Yeah, right – you’re this group in Melbourne that will stop nuclear weapons around the world.’” But Melbourne was a uniquely suited place to start an international movement: it has a strong culture of social engagement, with many global collaborations centred on the people and institutions of

the city. As one example, there are 30 World Health Organization collaborations centres in Melbourne, a disproportionate number for the city’s size. Proving that the work of the Laureates reverberates throughout history, ICAN was first hosted, through the Medical Association for the Prevention of Nuclear War (the Australian branch of IPPNW) on a desk at Melbourne University, in the Howard Florey building, named after the Australian Laureate who discovered penicillin. Ruff notes, “There were already people in Melbourne already working together in social justice, the environment, Indigenous support, and peace. That provided a home for ICAN.” Bill Williams exemplified the multi-pronged humanitarian approach of the city. “Bill was a tripod: [he] had a foot in all three camps [and a] significant role in creating a culture where we were discussing it. It was inclusive, robust, and accepting of diversity; generous, and able to focus on the main prize, not get distracted by the many different diversions or distractions in any

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campaign field,” Sweeney reminisces. ICAN knew that nuclear-armed nations would be dismissive of its goals, so it had to cast a wider net. How could it bring attention to a cause that had slipped out of public consciousness? The group brought a new public awareness to the scale of the devastation that nuclear weapons wreak, with Sue ColemanHaseldine, an Indigenous Australian survivor of the Maralinga tests, regularly telling the story of Australia’s cancer capital, Ceduna. Public health expert Dr Ruff would demonstrate the futility of any medical response to a nuclear winter. Through lobbying, relentless advocacy, and a disciplined approach, ICAN created partnerships with allied organisations and individuals, bringing in a diverse coalition of voices united against humanity’s greatest threat. In a short period of time, ICAN broke the ice of disarmament. Hawkins reflects: “There were plenty of small things – rallies with 25 people who showed up. There were plenty of days where it would be quiet talks in a school room, or a church room, or one-on-one meetings with a politician. It is not glamourous work all the time; it is hard yakka. It is hard work to try and get the messaging across on an issue that is highly political. It is one of the most political issues in the national-security

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world, and it directly impacts every single person on the planet. It is difficult for people to be comfortable talking about it.” The 2007 Melbourne launch of the group featured former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, a founding patron. The roster of the group’s supporters has since grown to include well-known advocates including Yoko Ono, Martin Sheen, and Herbie Hancock. A few weeks later ICAN launched internationally, and by 2010 the campaign had sharpened its focus to what it felt would have the best chance of success: a UN treaty

Sadly, Bill Williams never got to see how successful the campaign would be, passing away in 2016, one year before ICAN’s Nobel Peace Prize win in 2017. Photo Adam Dempsey.

“We need a determined worldwide movement to outlaw and abolish nukes. To get there in this generation, we need to build the wave of public opinion into a mighty crescendo: a massive, surging, irresistible force which carries us all the way to absolutely zero nukes. Without it, even the most inspirational of leaders will falter on the way” – ICAN

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Nobel Lecture given by the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate 2017, ICAN, delivered by Beatrice Fihn (right) and Setsuko Thurlow (centre), Oslo, 10 December, 2017

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banning the weapons. The group set up an international office in Oslo, and by 2013 it was recognised as the leading civil-society partner with governments, driving forward the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. ICAN now has 83 partner organisations, including all of the major national environment organisations, faith organisations, the peak national trade union body, along with many individual unions, human rights, health, Indigenous, social justice, and development organisations. Through March–July 2017, 10 years after the group came together in Melbourne, ICAN helped to bring together 135 nations to officially negotiate the Treaty at the UN headquarters. By September 2017 the Treaty had been opened for signatures, and it now has 39 out of the 50 signatory states needed to be legally binding for its participants. The Treaty prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons,

and allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory. On December 10, 2017 the Nobel Committee recognised ICAN’s work, awarding it the Nobel Peace Prize “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition on such weapons”. Australia’s sole Nobel Peace Prize winner is one of few in history that may one day be thanked for saving the world. Nuclear weapons are the world’s biggest threat, and a group of friends from Melbourne brought that danger into public consciousness, forcing nations worldwide to step up to the table.

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One step closer By Dimity Hawkins AM Co-Founder, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

n the 75th anniversary of the United Nations in October 2020, the 50th ratification for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was deposited in New York. This marked the beginning of the countdown to the Treaty entering into force, making nuclear weapons illegal in international law. For those involved in this work, including the many activists and advocates engaged through ICAN, this is a milestone moment. From the beginnings of the campaign, a ban on nuclear weapons has been a key step towards the ultimate goal – to eliminate these weapons. Generations of us have grown up with nuclear fear. For those of us who grew up in the Cold War, in amongst the flurry of nuclear tests or in the shadow of the constant threat of nuclear apocalypse, imagining a world without nuclear weapons was a big challenge. For those born in more recent decades, it’s often hard to imagine why we ever had these weapons. Across all these generations, we have found a common purpose in seeking to abolish nuclear weapons. Setsuko Thurlow was a 13-year-old schoolgirl when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. In 2017 she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of ICAN. On the news of the 50th ratification, she wrote, "I have committed my life to the abolition of nuclear weapons. I have nothing but gratitude for all who have worked for the success of our treaty. I have a powerful feeling of solidarity with tens of thousands of people across the world." For survivors of nuclear weapon use and testing, and those of us who work

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for the elimination of these weapons, the achievement of the ban is deeply gratifying, but it is not the end of the work. Having started a global conversation about what these weapons do, and what we want to do about them, we have challenged established narratives and norms. Having worked with governments and civil society across the globe – including engaging with the nuclear possessor states – we have achieved a prohibition on these weapons in international law. In working towards implementation of the Treaty, the positive obligations of victim assistance and environmental remediation will require a new level of engagement with survivor communities and governments, civil society and international expertise. From here, the stigmatisation of these weapons will continue, as we build further understanding of their impact. The prohibition will gather many more nations to the ban treaty, building an international unanimity against their possession and use. And we will continue to work to eliminate these weapons – to achieve our true goal of zero. The International Committee of the Red Cross reminds us that “what we cannot prepare for, we must prevent". The hibakusha of Japan beseech us never to forget the victims of nuclear use. The survivors of nuclear testing in our own country, across the Pacific and around the globe tell us there is still much to be done for nuclear justice. These voices have kept many of us focused for decades already, and they will continue to do so from here.

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STATE OF OUR INNOVATION NATION

WHAT IS THE STATE OF OUR INNOVATION NATION? By Paul Brescia AUSTRALIA’ S INNOVATION IMPERATIVES : A COUNTRY AT THE CROSSROADS By John Keeney

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WHAT IS THE STATE OF OUR INNOVATION NATION? Innovation is crucial to driving change. How well does Australia innovate? What are our strengths, and where are our weak points? How can we improve? What insights from our experience of innovation can Australia share with the world? Australia’s top minds explore the issues. By Paul Brescia

hen we started working on this critical review of Australia as an innovation nation in early 2019, we had no clue that the most disruptive year in living memory was just around the corner. No one did. When the pandemic hit we pivoted, like many Australian businesses. We now see this review as an examination of what Australia can achieve in this critical moment in its history. Will we see the same declines in productivity, wage growth and inflation? Or will our future embrace our strengths, correct our weaknesses, and bring the considered changes in policy and culture that are necessary to usher in an era of prosperity? Will our future take us beyond our reliance on fossil fuel resources that are increasingly diminishing in value? Will it fulfil our citizens' potential to continue to achieve great things? Will Australia be an innovation leader or laggard? This book contains essays and overviews by nearly 100 distinguished Australians: academics, politicians, entrepreneurs, researchers, and leaders of our scientific and economic communities. They share their perspectives on Australia’s challenges, and the boundless opportunities before us. We believe it provides a fresh counterpoint to the more formal studies on innovation commissioned by various governments in the past two decades, three of which we review within. This section is structured in nine chapters. The first, "Culture change", examines Australia’s

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business culture broadly. It examines how well our businesses embrace risk. What emphasis is there on innovation at the enterprise level? How does Australia see itself? Professor Mark Dodgson is an internationally renowned innovation scholar. “Too many boards of directors are sclerotic, compliance-orientated, risk-averse, and unaware of the nature and importance of innovation,” he writes. “Too many firms, large and small, lack the management skills to use innovation to survive and thrive in a highly competitive and increasingly challenging world.” The second chapter, "Funding our future", looks at how we can best target funds to spur innovation, and creatively deploy finance to improve outcomes. Phil Ruthven, of IBISWorld, gives a broad economic examination of where opportunity lies. Labor’s Clare O’Neil calls for government to be a major buyer of Australian innovation, and to support home-grown goods and services as they can successfully scale up to target global markets. Dean Foley of Indigenous entrepreneurial group Barayamal examines the venture capital gap between Indigenous-owned businesses and others, and the loss of potential that causes. Chapter two also includes a section on ethical investing, and how it is transforming the finance sector and the economy more broadly. These principles need to be taken up on a wider scale if we are to pick investments based on sustainable longterm benefits, to the benefit of both investors and

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the nation. This is social-financial innovation at its best, and Australia is a per capita global leader. Chapter three, "Smarter cities", examines what we want Australia’s cities to look like. This applies both to our large metropolises and our important regional centres. What we build, and how we build it, has the potential to limit individuals and enterprises or to push them forward. Much of Australia’s future success will depend on the diffusion of innovation, and how well our cities nourish the potential of the people within them. Caroline McMillen celebrates the success of Newcastle, which has bounced back following the decline of its steelmaking industry. Andrew Barr, Chief Minister of the ACT, writes on the achievements of the world’s most successful planned city, Canberra. Reggie Cabal, CEO of Orix, examines technology parks and their role in fostering innovation. Dr Chris Jones, of the Australian Electric Vehicle Association, makes a strong argument that Australia is behind the pack in terms of infrastructure needed for the inevitable shift away from fossil-fuel vehicles. Chapter four, "Revitalising manufacturing", looks at Australia’s future as a manufacturing nation. Professors Roy Green and Veena Sahajwalla, and industry heavyweights David Chuter, Jeff Lang, and Brooke Donnelly, all note that we are yet to reach our potential. They believe that Australia can and should market itself more vigorously on the world stage as a centre for highly advanced manufacturing powered by renewable energy, with sustainable models for materials throughout the production process. Chapter five, "A brighter spark in a changing climate", looks at Australia’s natural resources – water, agriculture, and energy – to examine how they will need to adapt in a world already affected by global warming. Frank Jotzo, an energy economist at the Australian National University, writes that “the future spells a declining trajectory for fossil fuels. Australia’s coal exports, and later its gas exports, are set to fall." “Luckily for Australia," Jotzo continues "the continent is endowed not only with abundant fossil fuels but with a practically unlimited potential to produce cheap, renewable energy, if we make the right investments and policy changes today.” Other writers in the chapter show how the benefits of tomorrow will only be won with investments and policy guidance today. The Millennium Drought gave Australia’s water industry experts practice in how we can apply innovation to deal

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with the changes to come. Chapter six, "Knowledge is power", takes a look at how we can improve education, from preschool to high school, tertiary, and post-graduate levels. It is within classrooms, and beyond them, that we will build the workforce of the future. Education will equip all Australians with the confidence, skills, and science literacy necessary for an innovative nation to thrive. Chapter seven, "Respect the science", features some of Australia’s leading scientific minds across astronomy, medical research, and applied science in the form of commercialisation. This includes Chief Scientist Dr Cathy Foley; CSIRO head Dr Larry Marshall, and the 2020 winner of the Prime Minister’s Innovation Prize, Professor Thomas Maschmeyer. These leaders are at the coalface of how science impacts our lives. They should be celebrated, and listened to, as much as our sporting stars. Chapter eight, Recalibrating for the Industries of the Future, looks at quantum technologies, our burgeoning space industry, artificial intelligence, and the broad impact of technology on established sectors. Australia is becoming a globally important player in quantum computing, already hosting some of the most advanced research in the world. In space, we can leverage our talent and our scientific and geographical advantages. The final chapter, "Health, medtech, and biomedicine", celebrates Australia’s great successes in the field, such as the invention of ultrasound, the Cochlear ear implant and the electronic heart pacemaker. More critically this chapter examines how it has in recent years Australia has not captured the full value of its medical research. The chapter features opinion pieces from research institutes and industry giants Pfizer, Janssen, Novartis and AstraZeneca. One of Australia’s recent Nobel Laureates, microbiologist Barry Marshall, offers a novel perspective on how to close the gap to true innovation. Take your time with these pieces. They are gems of wisdom from the greatest minds in Australia. Consider the vantage point of each voice, and note that this is but a small slice of our nation’s vast wealth of expertise and knowledge, though one that we feel is representative. As the following essay examines, there are many successes and clear shortcomings in Australia's innovation efforts. But our potential is limitless.

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AUSTRALIA’S INNOVATION IMPERATIVES: A COUNTRY AT THE CROSSROADS By many global comparisons, Australia underperforms in science and technology, and in related commercialisation. An analysis of Australia’s successes and shortcomings over the past 50 years in these increasingly critical areas shows a nation in decline, by numerous metrics. In this overview One Mandate looks at Australia’s history, culture, policy and education to examine the problem in full and suggests actions and avenues for improvement, while recognising a great and unrealised potential. By John Keeney; research by Elizabeth Gracie

his is not a manifesto. If it were, it would begin, in shrill tones, by recounting a very real history of national underperformance. Australia is a prosperous, stable and potentially capable nation. But it has persistently ignored or under-resourced its development in science, technology and innovation. And, despite being a highly educated nation, it has failed to understand the vital link between science and innovation. These failings are alarmingly common among our business leaders, who often use the words “innovation” and "commercialisation” as if these activities exist in total isolation from science. Australia has not, as many other countries with smaller populations have, been able to create competitive multinational corporations that produce products and services of enduring value on a global scale. There is a tendency to blame the tyranny of distance. But this is absurd – it no longer exists. This presumed tyranny has not affected our farmers, the best

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and most creative of whom have been successful in opening new markets. In different ways, so too has our mining industry. Right across the spectrum, many in leadership have slumbered into a complacent belief that primary production and services will sustain us. We do not do well in measures of R&D expenditure as a proportion of GDP. Budgets for many of our best scientific programs and institutions have declined in recent years. Our manufacturing industry has shrunk. We have allowed it to atrophy. We have not created an inclusive national narrative that elevates science, technology, and innovation as worthy pursuits. These pursuits and their associated ideals are not espoused sufficiently in our education system, nor held up as inspirations to our youth. The value of competitive sport is extolled by all, but a related sense of competitiveness in the creation and commercialisation of useful technology, and in business, is sidelined in our culture.

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Our venture capital industry, while improving somewhat, has for years been underfinanced, unimaginative and overly risk averse. Our track record in the commercialisation of our own IP is poor. In many cases, we have simply given it away. And we are not creating the volume of patents that we should be. We have not asked fundamental questions about whether our education system is equipping our youth to adapt to – or, better still, to make – the future. Unlike a burgeoning China, we are not good at making 10-, 20-, and 30-year plans – nor at following them when we do. We have failed to seek out, in any concerted way, the best young minds from overseas either in science or in technology incubation. Given how much Australia has to offer, this amounts to a dereliction of duty. Indeed, we have not asked fundamental questions long or forcefully enough about any of these issues. Nor have we created enough of the structures, programs, or incentives that would position us to reach our full potential. These questions urgently need to be asked and answered – and the answers converted into action. Our future prosperity and that of our children depend upon it.

All the above statements are fundamentally true; nevertheless, this is not a manifesto. It is an appeal for all thinking Australians to understand and address these problems in a concerted way. Many manifestos, such as those by Edmund Burke, Thomas Payne, and Karl Marx, call for revolution. But that outsized word is inapplicable to Australia today, even if the problems are dire. What is needed is classic liberalism. Not “liberal” in the sense the word is so often misused today, but the liberalism of the Enlightenment school of thought that emerged in the late 18th century, which espoused the scientific method, rationality, progress, fraternity, and liberty. The liberalism of a commitment to goals, institutions, and rationality, and to steady and incremental change. This includes leadership that can promote horizon-jumping and drive projects of transformative change. Above all, what is required are structures that are independent, durable, and beyond the purview of any single governmental administration. In other words, continuity – of thought and action.

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Problems of this sort require a 30-year outlook. And plans to match. For those who find our approach negative, we say no: we are simply being realistic. There has been important progress in certain areas over the past 30 years, notably in the availability of venture capital

(from a near-zero base). The Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) program has expanded and spawned some outstanding collaborations, but has been less than ideal in its original and primary goal of commercialisation. The CSIRO under Dr Larry Marshall has admirably ramped up commercialisation and at least doubled its earnings. Our current Chief Scientist, Dr Alan Finkel, ambitiously pursues a hydrogen industry. There are numerous other positive indicators. But the story of Australia’s knowledge-based industry, applied science, and commercialisation remains one of below-par results. Australia, in short, continues to function below its true potential. We are guided by the words of philosopher Karl Popper, who observed that “we are obliged to be optimistic”. Popper, a latter-day Enlightenment figure, stated this as though it were a law of nature. We agree and would add that a fulfilled optimism is based on measured and appropriate long-term action, not merely on new committees and white papers. In our case, export dollars from new and value-added scitech products is the key criterion. What follows is an overview of our present situation designed to examine the nature of the problems and to cite positive examples, as many of our distinguished contributing authors have done. It is an appeal to Australians to dwell upon the serious questions that confront us. The problems that underlie those questions will persist if we do not act.

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THE METRICS OF CONCERN Overall R&D Spending as a % of GDP

Government and industry research and development spending South Korea Japan Finland Sweden Denmark Germany USA France Australia China Netherlands Norway United Kingdom Canada Spain Russia Slovakia Greece

0.0

0.5

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

3.5

4.0

4.5 4.3%

2.8% 2.7% 2.1%

1.7%

Source: OECD Research and Development Statistics

Government R&D spending as a % of GDP

Federal expenditure on research and development in OECD Countries, 2015 South Korea Denmark Portugal Finland Germany Norway Sweden Austria Netherlands USA Japan France Russia United Kingdom Greece Australia Slovakia Spain

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.2 1.18%

0.89%

0.75%

0.57% 0.40%

Source: OECD.Stat government budget outlays for R&D GDP figures taken from EconomyWatch

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The upper graph shows that Australia is roughly in the middle of the pack when it comes to R&D spending as a percentage of GDP. The figure is declining, and many countries with smaller populations, such as the Netherlands, actually outperform us on a GDP per capita basis. The lower graph is more worrying and shows Australia’s very poor performance in R&D. In terms of actual dollars spent, Australia ranks far below countries like China, the UK, Russia, Canada, Italy and South Korea.

SOURCES: www.industry.gov.au – Science, Research and Innovation Budget Tables. GDP figures taken from Australian Bureau of Statistics. R&D Spending (PPP) figures taken from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics

Rank

Country

R&D Spending (PPP)

Global share (%)

United States

$476.5 billion

26.4%

China

$370.6 billion

20.6%

Japan

$170.5 billion

9.5%

Germany

$109.8 billion

6.1%

South Korea

$73.2 billion

4.1%

France

$60.8 billion

3.4%

India

$48.1 billion

2.7%

United Kingdom

$44.2 billion

2.5%

Brazil

$42.1 billion

2.3%

#10

Russia

$39.8 billion

2.2%

#11

Italy

$29.6 billion

1.6%

#12

Canada

$27.6 billion

1.5%

#13

Australia

$23.1 billion

1.3%

#14

Spain

$19.3 billion

1.1%

#15

Netherlands

$16.5 billion

0.9%

All other countries

$249.8 billion

13.9%

Australia’s spending on R&D over time

Federal expenditure on research and development as a % of GDP, 1978-2015

0.6% 0.4%

1978-79 1979-80 1980-81 1981-82 1982-83 1983-84 1984-85 1985-86 1986-87 1987-99 1988-89 1989-90 1990-91 1991-92 1992-93 1993-94 1994-95 1995-96 1996-97 1997-98 1998-99 1999-00 2000-01 2001-02 2002-03 2003-04 2004-05 2005-06 2006-07 2007-08 2008-09 2009-10 2010-11 2011-12 2012-13 2013-14

0.2%

Prime Malcolm Minister Fraser

Bob Hawke

Paul Keating

John Howard

KevinRudd Julia Gillard

Source: www.industry.gov.au - Science, Research and Innovation Budget Tables GDP figures taken from Australian Bureau of Statistics

1989

1991-1996

2012-2015

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Tony Abbott

Science strategy implemented into annual Budget via the Science and Technology Budget Statement Paul Keating and the Labor Party implement strategic policies such as One Nation, Creative Nation and Innovate Australia. Government funding for research and development fall 0.1% over three years to the equal lowest recorded % of GDP in Australian history in 2014-2015

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Australian achievement trends Mean scores in major and subsequent assessment domains 550

Reading

Maths

Science

540 530 520 510 500 490 480 2000

2003

2006

2009

2012

2015

2018

SOURCE: PISA 2018 Results, ACER student achievement report

There are numerous other statistical comparisons that further expose Australia as comparatively weak and ill-prepared to compete in advanced technology in the global marketplace of the 21st century, to retain prosperity and create new industry jobs. A SHORT HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA’S ECONOMIC, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT Any useful examination of Australia’s present circumstances requires a review of the nation’s past. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to comprehend the scale of our current problems without some historical context. As early as the 1790s, Australia offered settlers and freed convicts land grants at zero cost. This largesse continued in all colonies (now states) until the early 1830s. Various regulations were imposed to ensure the productive use of land and avoid speculation. Thus, an agricultural nation was born. By 1830, Australia’s export of wool to the UK surpassed that of whale oil. Mining commenced in South Australia in 1841, and by 1850 more export revenue was being generated from copper and lead than by wool and wheat combined. In 1851, gold was discovered near Orange, New South Wales, followed by other major strikes in various locations in all colonies.

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A gold rush was on. Australia’s population quadrupled in 20 years, from 430,000 in 1851 to 1.7 million in 1871. The cities were significant beneficiaries of large influxes of British capital, with major outlays on infrastructure, communications, and construction. The wool industry also flourished, and supplanted mining as the primary source of export revenue by the 1870s. The need for overseas labour laid the foundation for the country’s multiculturalism. Between 1820 and 1870, Australia’s GDP per capita was double that of the US and three times that of the UK. This sudden prosperity did not lead to massive inequality. According to a 2018 study in the Economic History Review, the result was “a revolutionary levelling of incomes up to the 1870s”. This pattern has largely continued until the present day. Many deeply embedded cultural norms were formed during Australia’s first century: a belief in the “fair go” and equality, and a faith in primary production, whether agricultural or mining. The boom created a shortage of workers, and Australian wages were among the highest in the world at the time – a pattern that has continued to the present day. Manufacturing also took flight during this period. John Dickson, a Scotsman, brought the

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State of Our Innovation Nation first steam engine to Australia in 1815; local manufacturing was well underway by 1830. Thomas Mort (1816–1878) devised a method for exporting frozen meat; William Sandford (1841–1932) founded the Commonwealth Iron and Steel Foundry at Lithgow, New South Wales; and Walter Duffield (1816–1882) introduced roller flour mills to South Australia. During this period, the University of Sydney was founded, in 1851, followed by the University of Melbourne in 1853 and the University of Adelaide in 1856. This was an era of vigorous growth. Remarkably, Queensland, which did not separate from New South Wales until 1859, did not cast any iron until 1862, yet was building its own locomotives within 30 years. Australia’s ties to Britain delivered huge benefits during this period. An immense transfer of technology occurred, with many local adaptations emerging. There was also a great deal of investment, enterprise, and vigour. Smaller regional towns developed a sturdy self-dependence as Australia grew into the most urbanised nation on Earth. This era may have also created a reliance on overseas technology as an enduring cultural mindset. By 1890, Australia had a population of 3.2 million and the highest GDP per capita in the world, at least 20 per cent ahead of the US. Yet by 1900 it had been overtaken by New Zealand. In 1950 Australia was in 5th place globally, ahead of Canada, with the US leading the way. Today, by this measure Australia ranks 14th, indicating a steady decline. Though this metric is not all-defining, it is a significant marker and a cause for concern. The six colonies became states with Federation in 1901 and Australia became a dominion of the British Empire. The new Federal Government did not at first engage with the business or scientific communities, but in 1916, at the height of World War I, Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes established the Advisory Council of Science and Industry to advise the Government on scientific matters and how science could be employed in the service of Australian industry. In 1920 the small group was renamed the Commonwealth Institute of Science and Industry. It was poorly funded at first – its initial grant was just £250, in conjunction with the New South Wales and Queensland governments. Its first project was research into the prickly pear

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

menace. The invasive South American cactus was eradicated within 10 years with the introduction of the cactoblastis moth. In 1926 it was given substantial funding and was renamed the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and then in 1949 became the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO. Its initial work was mostly in primary industries, but during World War II its activities were substantially expanded as part of Australia’s war effort. Australia’s manufacturing capabilities increased substantially during the War, when local industry was forced to develop many items of equipment that had previously been imported. This trend continued during the long Menzies era, a period of sustained economic growth and technological change marked by the arrival of television, the creation of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission (now the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation) and the establishment of Mawson Station, Australia’s first research facility in Antarctica. The government signed a range of international trade agreements, and 1966 saw the creation of the Australian dollar. In his 2015 book The Menzies Era: The Years That Shaped Modern Australia, former Prime Minister John Howard portrays his political hero as the bridge to modern times. Others, though, have described Menzies’ long reign as a period of stultification. In 1992 then Prime Minister Paul Keating savaged the Menzies era as “when they put the country into neutral and where we gently ground to a halt in the nowhere land of the early 1980s”. Keating had a point. Almost a decade earlier, the dynamic duo of Bob Hawke (Prime Minister) and Keating (Treasurer), mindful of the centrality of science and innovation to economic performance, enacted a wide array of reforms, though substantial government R&D increases came later. Barry Jones was given the portfolio of Science, Technology and Environment and brought exceptional levels of intelligence and passion to the job. It can be argued that the Hawke Government’s greatest impact on innovation and commercialisation was indirect, through sweeping economic reform. Pursuing a considered neoliberal economic agenda, the Hawke/Keating government floated the Australian dollar and enacted a tax credit in 1986 that trebled private-sector R&D

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spending. In 1990, towards the end of his nineyear tenure as Treasurer, Keating announced the Government’s intention to reduce carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2000. The “Toronto target” was established at the urging of Jones, who had proclaimed climate change a problem since at least the early 1980s. The CRC program was launched in 1992 by then Prime Minister Keating, who also sensibly restructured the Ministry of Science to include industry, innovation, and R&D. Keating also increased the Government’s R&D spending to a record high over a four-year period. Liberal (that is, conservative, in Australian political parlance) John Howard was elected in 1996 and appointed as his Treasurer Peter Costello, who proved exceptionally able. A strong economic manager and a former Treasurer himself, Howard grasped the imperatives of science and R&D. However, fiscal restraint led to some budget reductions during his tenure, though the CSIRO was spared. Significantly, Howard’s government created the Australian Research Council (ARC), a $500 million program of typically small, focused discovery science grants. Primary-policy programs in science and innovation were named “Investing for Growth” and “Knowledge and Innovation”, and, later, “Backing Australia’s Ability”. Labor’s Kevin Rudd defeated Howard in 2007 and hired Terry Cutler, a CSIRO Deputy Chairman and versatile technology consultant and thinker with a PhD in history, to lead a national innovation review entitled “Venturous Australia”, also known as the Cutler Review. Though he devoted nearly a year to the project, Cutler felt that more should have been accomplished, though his work remains a seminal reference. Senator Kim Carr, long one of the strongest pro-innovation and science advocates in Australia, became Minister of Science, Industry and Innovation. He brought great energy to the task of encouraging innovation and made numerous moving speeches on the subject. Launched in 2009, one tightly focused program, “Commercialisation Australia”, helped smaller firms to create new products and bring them to market. A “Venturous Australia” recommendation, the initiative continued until 2014. In 2007 the Global Financial Crisis hit. It was much less severe in Australia than overseas (a fact still largely underappreciated by the wider populace), but it was highly disruptive. Politics,

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too, entered an unstable phase after the continuity of the Hawke/Keating and Howard/Costello eras, which had spanned a combined 23 years. Attracting funding for science is a struggle at the best of times; periods of discontinuity exact a further toll. Julia Gillard replaced Rudd as Prime Minister. Her minority government’s commitment to science and R&D was patchy, but her Liberal successor, climate change denier Tony Abbott, inexplicably declined to appoint a Science Minister. Funding for science and R&D declined and funding for commercialisation Australia was eliminated. After two-and-a-half years in office and numerous controversies, Abbott was ousted by his own MPs in favour of Malcolm Turnbull. By this point, Australia had earned the unfortunate title of “the Italy of the South Pacific”, owing to its rapid turnover of Prime Ministers. Turnbull was previously a highly successful businessman with a lifelong interest and involvement in politics. He had been an entrepreneur and a banker familiar with venture capital, and was fully cognisant of the importance of science and R&D. Thus, he held great promise. Initially, he put a stake in the ground by appointing Deputy Secretaries of Innovation and Science and pledging $1.1 billion to the advancement of these causes. Arthur Sinodinos, an informed and dedicated advocate of innovation, became Minister of Industry, Science and Innovation, one of three during the Turnbull era. But a continuation of rancorous political infighting hindered Turnbull’s performance, which was not without accomplishment. During his administration, the Office of Innovation and Science Australia (IISA) was formed. It was led by Bill Ferris, a respected private equity manager and long-time champion of technology development. The board’s deputy chairman was Alan Finkel, by various criteria the most well-rounded and ambitious Chief Scientist in Australia’s history. The board also featured venture capital and corporate leaders of stature. IISA produced a comprehensive and well-ordered national review in 2017. Compiled and written by consulting firm McKinsey, it was entitled Prosperity through Innovation. With a sense of urgency, it made 24 concise recommendations across five priority areas and set out goals for 2030, thus producing a rudimentary 12-year plan.

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The report used plain language to describe the present situation: “Australia is falling behind on measures of commercialisation and collaboration, consistently ranking last or second last among OECD countries for business-research collaboration.” Unfortunately, the plan’s implementation at the political level has proven difficult ever since. In Australia, there is clearly a correlation between time in office and ability to construct and enact meaningful science and innovation policy, which in any case never tops the priority list of a new government. In Turnbull’s lengthy autobiography, A Bigger Picture, published in 2020, the work of IISA receives scant coverage. James Riley, editorial director of innovation policy newsletter AusInnovation, drew attention to issues of prioritisation in a summary of an interview with Turnbull on April 21, 2020: “The fact that … [the] creation and subsequent implementation [of the IISA Prosperity through Innovation report] do not figure more prominently in its architect’s political memoir is more a reflection that ‘innovation’ was never a priority political debate, notwithstanding the former PM’s own enthusiasm”. After a further three years of turbulent government and another vicious leadership spill, Turnbull was replaced by Scott Morrison in 2018. The latest available figures are grim. Business expenditure on R&D has fallen in Australia since its peak in the 2013–14 financial year, from $18.8 billion to $17.4 billion in 2017–18. As a proportion of GDP, overall expenditure on R&D in Australia fell to an all-time low of 1.79 per cent in 2017–18 – well below the OECD average of 2.38 per cent – while business expenditure on R&D as a percentage of GDP fell even further to 0.9 per cent. Morrison, who thus far appears to be a strong and popular leader and an effective manager, had not initially expressed any clear vision on science or R&D. Although he was, at least peripherally, involved (as Treasurer) in the creation of the IISA 2030 plan, implementation of that plan has been slow. And there has been turmoil over his government’s proposed changes to the R&D business tax rebate. In early October 2020, shortly before completion of this piece, the fiery – and many say wholly unnecessary – debate over R&D tax rebates was resolved in favour of business.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Morrison’s Treasurer Josh Frydenberg stated: “Research and development, the adoption of digital technology, and affordable and reliable energy will be critical to Australia's future economic prosperity.” We note that this is one of the very few statements to date that link the critical words “research and development” and “Australia’s future economic prosperity”, and that it was uttered only after a year-and-a-half of acrimonious debate on the R&D tax concession. Perhaps the Morrison Government has had an epiphany – or at least made a practical pivot – triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. It recently launched the Economic Recovery Plan, which foreshadows tax concessions and business incentives, as well as beefed-up support of digitisation and Australian industry. In October 2020, the Morrison Government allocated $1.5 billion over four years to assist revival in the manufacturing sector. It is possible, but unknowable at the time of writing, whether government reactions to economic recovery will engender a sustained and wider reconsideration of the importance of R&D and science to Australia’s future. David Chuter, CEO of the Innovative Manufacturing CRC, offers a guardedly positive analysis, at least in relation to the manufacturing initiative: “The Government’s rapid response to recovery via the manufacturing sector is commendable. Some observers may find $1.5 billion over four years inadequate across multiple sectors. But this misses a key point, as to how the money is invested. What is needed is a thoughtfully designed and applied catalyst, as we have successfully achieved at the Innovative Manufacturing CRC. Applied correctly, drawing partnership arrangements from industry and universities – who are vital players in any case – a five times (5×) multiplier effect or greater can occur on project investments. Private industry can and will be attracted if the overall model and conditions are well constructed.” Businessman Andrew Liveris, a former special advisor to the National COVID-19 Commission Advisory Board, told us that “support and tax credits for R&D have basically disappeared” and that “this may be one of the areas where a more outcomes-driven business eye might produce better results”. The most acute statement on “COVID as catalyst” has come not from Prime Minister

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Morrison but from the respected academic John H. Howard (not to be confused with the former Prime Minister), a scholar and regular commentator on Australian science and innovation: “The [COVID-19] crisis provides an opportunity to reinvigorate the economy around industries of the future. Although definitions vary, these are generally taken to cover quantum information science, robotics and artificial intelligence, 5G and advanced communication, visualisation, autonomous transport, nanomaterials, energy capture, storage and transmission, and advanced manufacturing. These areas draw heavily on knowledge and capabilities in information and computing science and engineering and technology. Without this engineering capability, the challenge for building Australia’s industrial base is formidable, and perhaps insurmountable.” Howard’s comments are compelling. Why? Because Australia has made progress in all of the future-focused industries he cites. That is, we are not starting from zero. Whether at the CSIRO, universities, CRCs, or in the private sector, inroads have been made in these fields. In some cases the country has a solid base already – in quantum computing, nanomaterials, and advanced manufacturing, for example. What is needed is an appropriate tax-credit environment, funding, and focus, as well as better collaboration. RINGING VOICES FROM THE PAST The question, or problem, of Australia’s low level

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of R&D expenditure is not new. Informed individuals with an understanding of science’s potential impact, R&D, and economics, such as John H. Howard, have pointed to both our shortcomings and abundant opportunities for decades. Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country was published in 1964. Horne wrote that “the stock of scientists and engineers should be doubled … it is not only research that is weak in Australia, but development, too, and there should surely be more spending on that”. In his sweeping and intelligent review, Horne identified Australia as a country that had lived – fortunately and undeservedly – on mineral and agricultural wealth, but had an inclination towards mediocrity in other areas. In 1982 Barry Jones wrote the prescient Sleepers Wake! Technology and the Future of Work, a globally admired book that has been reprinted multiple times by publisher Oxford University Press. Among his recommendations was this: “Increase expenditure on research and development in Australia … the Senate Industrial Research and Development in Australia report criticised the ‘dismal decline in public and private research and development … an Australian computer industry should be supported, although it will not be a major employer’”. A chorus of voices like these – infused with wide knowledge and deep authority – has rung out over the past 50 years. The majority have come from outside government. Jones was an

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exception, yet even the reformer Hawke was distinctly uncomfortable with him, and Jones was only ever made a junior minister. Jones confessed to being a less-than-ideal politician, too intellectual to be fully accepted politically. (The latter comment makes one wonder.) What is common among analysts like Jones is their focus on 10-, 20-, 30-, and 50-year outlooks. Less-visionary sceptics find them easy to criticise. While not all of Jones’ prognostications have come to pass, a striking number concerning employment and the nature of work have become the issues of today – and tomorrow. A more fundamental question arises: how can an advanced nation adequately steer itself without these long-term plans and without continuity in their implementation? We know that China has pragmatically followed such a course for the last 40 years – developing meticulous plans, particularly in relation to science and R&D, and deploying them, often on a time horizon of up to 100 years. Singapore offers a similar example. THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM Thus far we have dwelt only on R&D expenditure, an important metric, but one unable to provide a complete explanation of the critical shortcomings in Australian innovation outcomes – namely, the creation of new businesses that produce original products that are both desired and competitive on the world market. The inputs required to achieve this result

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

include effective commercialisation, ample venture capital, human talent of a high order, appropriate collaboration, and global business assessment and marketing skills. This list of elements forms a value chain: if it does not exist as a whole system, the chances of success are diminished. It is not enough for a university to create new research institutes that collaborate only halfheartedly with private-sector partners. Too few science or technology endeavours in Australia envision from the outset a commercialisation outcome that considers all of the links in the chain. There remains far too much fragmentation of effort and sketchily drafted business plans. COMMERCIALISATION The most important dynamic for national prosperity is the commercialisation of technologies. These must be exportable, make the nation more internationally competitive, and earn money. Dr Peter Farrell, who established the innovation hub now located at the University of New South Wales, is particularly firm on this point: “If it does not earn money,” he says, “it is not real innovation.” Dr Farrell is correct. Business success is proof of effective innovation. But this observation does not obviate the need for scientific endeavour, whether of the pure discovery or the translational kind. Scientific research is a vital part of

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the whole. It ought to be viewed as a quintessential resource in any advanced society. And in many other countries, it is – conspicuously so. Criticism by some in government and business of pure or discovery science as being too vague in direction to be useful misses a key point. Discovery science has often led to commercialisation. The development of laser technology and transistors are two of many striking examples. Many of the components of the extensively successful iPhone were made possible through pure research, conducted by governments, years before they were applied and modified by Steve Jobs at Apple. This is only one of numerous examples widely documented by Mariana Mazzacato, a widely praised economist, in her recent book The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public and Private Sector Myths. Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) stands out as a local example. Privatised in 1994, it became hugely successful on a global scale, with substantial and continual increases in share-market performance over the past decade. Founded in 1916, CSL’s decades of scientific research made it a growth and commercialisation opportunity par excellence. Fortunately, its privatisation and eventual share float – as well as its subsequent company development – were put in the competent hands of Dr Brian McNamee, one of those rare individuals who possess both significant scientific knowledge and business acumen. ResMed, founded by Dr Peter Farrell and another resounding international success, was based on years of experimental engineering and design, as was Cochlear, whose successful evolution was built on continuous R&D and experimental acoustical science. Farrell, another of those multi-talented achievers, has often attributed failed commercialisations to an either-or scenario: “They either didn’t understand the technology or were no good at business.” It is myopic in the extreme to assume that a national innovation ecosystem can prosper without a robust scientific and engineering base. Some valuable innovation and collaboration that leads to successful commercialisation can occur without direct scientific inputs. Yet the more closely one examines original new products that succeed, the more one observes the roots of their success in original science or the clever adaptation of original R&D. Catapult Sports, a successful Australian (now

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multinational) manufacturer of high-tech sportswear, is a case in point. The root technology of this company, which was founded in 2006 and publicly listed in 2014, can be traced to the original R&D work, beginning in 1999, of two engineers in the Cooperative Research Centre for Microtechnology in partnership with the Australian Institute of Sport. Seven years of development work created an engineering and scientific base for a now-flourishing company. But, aside from several notable success stories, commercialisation of our IP has been poor, and partial or total failures to commercialise are costly. The oft-mentioned Australian inventions of wi-fi and the black boxes used globally by airliners are two highly successful technologies that have become contentious examples of Australia failing to fully capitalise on its own IP. Another more complicated – and revealing – IP issue is laid bare by Dr Ian Frazer’s cervical cancer vaccine, from 1992. World-leading science

led to a successful and globally applicable vaccine, and a potentially enormous and sustainable business. But gaps in Australia’s distribution capacity saw consignment rights pass to the German pharmaceutical giant Merck. Since then, a culture aimed at addressing these business gaps has evolved, helped along by the Translational Research Institute in Brisbane, co-founded by Dr Frazer. The term “valley of death” is used there to describe a lack of infrastructure, knowledge, networks, or any other deficiency that can impede or prevent effective commercialisation and its broader economic benefit.

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State of Our Innovation Nation A STUNNING PARADOX Here lies a paradox – or a stark admission of failure in effective commercialisation. Australia is in the top-four countries globally for breakthrough research papers in medical science. It has also made significant discoveries in astronomy, renewable energy, recycling, and agriculture. Yet, as venture capitalist Bill Ferris, former chair of Innovation Australia and co-chair of the Garvan Medical Research Institute, stated in 2017: “Australia is struggling to even stay within the top-30 OECD nations in terms of any commercialisation metrics.” There is a deep disconnect between our research work and the subsequent steps to commercialisation. And this rift will not narrow until a more rigorous, multi-party, “whole-ofchain” approach is instilled as a discipline and employed from the start. We have witnessed this disconnect even at some of our CRCs, whose programs were designed to overcome this very

set of problems. A scientist or engineer who is intent on building a business and either has the necessary managerial skills or the good sense to recruit those skills is off to a good start. But such individuals are rare. This makes the demand for deliberate and meticulous team-building all the greater. Who can do this? Informed venture capitalists and private equity firms, or experienced consultants found in companies like McKinsey and Boston Consulting, should have the skills. But do they have the time and motivation to execute them? Incubation or innovation hubs are likely

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

candidates, though only if they are sufficiently functional, which some, clearly, are not. The skill levels present in the public sector are generally inadequate for the task. But the Government might encourage private sector involvement in a constructive manner, and could do so at relatively low cost. Ten or 20 excellent business plans and accompanying teams can make significant strides. The gulf in Australia between actionable research findings and effective commercialisation begs for more attention, particularly in the context of talent – which is always the determining factor. TALENT Modern Australia has become one of the most admired and desirable locations on Earth. We have been saying for decades that Australia has undersold itself in talent attraction. In 2019 the Department of Home Affairs launched an ambitious program to attract highly educated individuals across seven fields, including cybersecurity, quantum computing, and fintech. The Global Talent Independent program (GTI) allows for preferential, fast-tracked permanent-residence visas for up to 5,000 entrants each year. This is a good idea. The newly revised program follows another called Global Talent Employer Sponsored, which was widely regarded as a failure, having attracted fractional interest along with many complaints of lengthy delays. Edward Mandla, general manager of Mandelson Search and former president of the Australian Computer Society, has spoken clearly and well on the new scheme. He recounts the problems of the previous 457 Visas, which were abused, as he describes: “There is absolutely no doubt the system was exploited by multinational corporations to transfer employees to Australia to their subsidiaries to make higher profit margins.” Mandla’s face-to-face experience is notable: “Over the years, I've sat down with a huge number of migrants in Australia who are highly talented people and made a family decision to take a leap of faith to move here permanently, and their stories have always been disheartening. They all talk about the length and complexity of the process. It is not for the faint-hearted. It's expensive.” Though Australia does have an enormous potential ability to attract talent, this is not to say there is an easy or quick fix. Such programs

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need sustained effort, a period of trial and error, and correction processes. Mandla, with his long private-sector experience, understands this, possibly in a more intimate and practical way than many government operatives do. Reflecting on previous schemes, he explains: “This has not been the right way to market a country that needs highly talented people to increase productivity. The message has been firmly sent around the world over the last 15–20 years that Australia is a really hard country to get into.” There is some evidence now that GTI is the best iteration of a workable scheme to date; actual results will tell the story in full. Venture capitalist Harley Paroulakis, creator of the leading innovation hub in Darwin and involved in GTI, notes that “the biggest complexity is matching people to appropriate and fulfilling jobs”. This is telling and suggests that it is far from merely an immigration or home affairs issue. An ideal arrangement would logically feature a partnership network involving the private sector, state and territory government departments, universities, the CSIRO, and other participants. IT’S ABOUT PEOPLE’S LIVES AND CAREERS This is, in fact, a distinct two-step process: initial attraction, then quality placement. At present, it appears that the first step is focused on speed of approval and initial evaluation of qualifications. A greater, coordinated stage two consideration is essential to a complete effort. There is little, if any, value in attracting talented people if they become dissatisfied and depart, disillusioned, within two years. This requires care: we are asking people to make life-changing decisions. Marketing should also be more aggressive. Mr Mandla rightly suggests the placement of billboards on busy freeways where people are enduring two-hour commutes or appealing to people shivering through long winters in cold climes. He declares: “Get some case studies of people who’ve moved to Far North Queensland and are involved in startups and having a great life.” At this early stage, he is optimistic: “The program is sincere, and it appears that it would happen fast, so I think the Government’s got to be congratulated.” Two things remain certain. Australia can attract 5,000 or more of the right people annually,

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and should. But only continued hard work and sincere effort, to use Mandla’s word, will achieve this. If we do this, we will, in a virtuous cycle, continue to build critical mass in future industry capability. It is ours for the getting, and there is no excuse for failing to make this happen. EDUCATION Apart from Australia’s underdeveloped ability to attract overseas talent, a far greater challenge has loomed, and deepened, over recent decades: the education of our youth. Or, in other words, the nurturing of our own talent. This is an immense and knotty topic. Anything approaching a comprehensive review is beyond the scope of this essay, despite our extensive reading. Within the present context, one can only sound another alarm bell and make some considered suggestions. Also, an important qualification. Though we stress here the importance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) studies, we strongly support studies across the spectrum. To reaffirm this, we have included within this collection a striking piece from an innovation consultant who incisively argues for the importance of the humanities. We agree. We have also included pieces from education leaders whose preoccupations are course relevance and method/subject reform. The focus here is building industries of the future within Australia, and the majority of these depend upon STEM education. If we rely on sources such as the Gonski Review and Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores (the latter is administered by the OECD across 70 nations every three years), we find a litany of bad news. The Gonski Review, commissioned in 2010 and delivered in 2012, described an alarming situation. The initial report said that, in 2000, Australia was outperformed by only one country in reading and scientific literacy and by two in mathematical literacy. By 2009, though, six countries were outperforming Australia in reading and scientific literacy, and 12 had students who were better at maths. This downward trend continued, as measured by PISA. When the 2018 results are compared with those of 2015, Australia declined in its PISA scores for reading, mathematics and science by 4, 7, and 7 points, respectively – among

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the steepest falls among advanced countries. Other PISA take-aways also shock. For example, “Australia has been on a steady slide from means of 525/524 for literacy/mathematics in 2003 to means of 503/494 in 2015.” Further, PISA shows that “the example of Singapore is indicative of a widening achievement divide between Australian students and their highest-performing overseas peers”. These results are beyond poor. Indeed, they are frightening. A major review, also chaired by Gonski and which produced an accompanying 150-page report that became known as Gonski 2.0, was completed in 2018. It is a far more refined and substantive document than its predecessor and provides proof that sustained effort (read long-term plans with continuity) against major problems is essential. Importantly, it contains abundant and highly applicable recommendations of substance, though this view is not held unanimously, to judge by some media op-eds. On inspection, the Grattan Institute found Gonski 2.0 to be of great value, stating: “It’s a much more sophisticated and comprehensive strategy than past federal government efforts. And it is refreshing to see the national conversation finally turning away from ‘how much’ government funding, towards ‘how best to use’ extra government funding for schools.” THE NOBLE ART OF TEACHING Some may call them platitudes, but the three priorities established in Gonski 2.0 are worthy and commonsensical: early schooling with seamless transition; a system that is designed to evolve (with some radical changes proposed) and teaches students to deal with a changing world; and, last, the elevation of the profession of teaching itself – a perennial problem. It is healthy that there has been debate. But any solution will come only from the adoption of measures and subsequent funding, as well as their direct and ongoing application at grassroots level. Their measurement – which, importantly, the Gonski 2.0 review prescribes – is also crucial. This is where continuity enters the equation. At the time of Gonski 2.0, Simon Birmingham was the Minister for Education; he is now the Minister for Trade. At some point soon, if there is to be truly substantive progress, reform must be placed in the hands of long-term,

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career-dedicated educational leaders, and delivered by inspired teachers. The question that is curiously absent from all relevant reviews and discussion is, “What is occurring at home?” If we want to know why Asian students often excel in this country, we need look no further than the discipline and ambition levels instilled by parents. This puts us on another path – that of our culture. CULTURE Our culture surrounds us like air – invisible, sustaining, profoundly influential. Few would disagree with former Prime Minister John Howard’s 2007 description of Australia: “It is a wonderful nation. It is the greatest on Earth. We think we’re pretty good, and we are.” There is abundant evidence to support this position. And yet a troublesome underside of our culture, obscured by our affluence and ease of life, coexists with such sentiments. In 2017 Australia drifted upward in its GDPper-adult standing to be second in the world, trailing only Switzerland, according to the OECD. And at that time, it had been more than 25 years – an entire generation – since a recession had been felt, a circumstance made possible largely by the mining boom. It can be argued that comfort has made us complacent. But the sum of culture is more than economics; it encompasses deep-rooted beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours. Two distinctly Australian phrases are instructive: “she’ll be right” and “too hard”. What sort of national character emerges from a long history of physical isolation, colonial or secondary political status, and (partly undeserved) continuous prosperity? Donald Horne asked a similar question: “Have the conditions that lead to so much success also weakened adaptability and slowed down the reflexes of survival?” There are no pat answers to questions like these, but we ignore the edicts of culture at our peril. We cannot quantify these influences statistically. And yet it has become commonplace for knowledgeable observers to note that Australia is more risk-averse than some other cultures, to the detriment of innovation and commercialisation.

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The US phrase and business behaviour of “learning to fail fast” – seen there as a positive and necessary process – has not yet caught on in Australia. Ask anyone involved in the subject. This is an example of culture at work. Graeme Philipson has for 40 years been a writer and analyst in IT and a widely travelled historian and poet. Asked about our low level of commercialisation, he says, simply, “Lingering inferiority complex, lack of self-confidence.” This, too, is a remark about culture. Donald Horne, in explaining his reasons for writing The Lucky Country, declared, “In a sense, Australia does not have a mind. Intellectual life exists but is still fugitive.” This was written in 1964, and 20 years later its spirit was echoed in Barry Jones’ reflection about intellectualism and trust in politics. Is it still true? No one would seriously protest Australia’s passion for sport. But it is reasonable to ask what might happen if a similar level of energy and discipline were to be applied to business, science, or applied technology development. One reason for writing this essay is to examine progress and extol potential. Australia has improved culturally by numerous criteria relevant to the core concerns expressed here. Probably the most indicative of these is the burst of expansion and creativity witnessed in the tertiary-education sector through the creation of cross-disciplinary programs and new institutes. Since Horne wrote his book in the 1960s, Australia’s population has more than doubled. At that time, Australia was an obscure and little-understood backwater. In the past several decades, it has emerged on the world stage as a well-managed and appealing nation, and has made significant gains in soft power. Australia has built strong institutions, and stable and effective legal and financial systems. Its cities are efficient and highly liveable, and the country boasts the most harmonious multicultural society on Earth. Its universities have flowered. This cultural foundation underscores the country’s great potential and makes its current performance in R&D and commercialisation all the more lamentable. To examine Australia fairly, we must provide context. Though it is imperative to compare ourselves with other countries, beyond a point this proves unhelpful. As a cultural entity, a nation, we are young. One can argue that the country did not achieve a full sense of national identity

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until World War II, and surely not before World War I. The construction of the national capital, Canberra, did not commence until the 1920s. None of this should engender complacency – a feeling that we have plenty of time to hit our stride. Rather, it should energise our thinking about potential and how to fulfil it. Sociologists and anthropologists use the word “myth” to describe a shared cultural theme about what a nation – or civilisation – is: what it stands for, what it ought to achieve, and what individuals ought to aspire to or believe is possible or desirable. America rose and rose on the myth that anyone can achieve what they truly work for, in a land of opportunity. Today, Australia is motivated by a myth of this sort concerning our sporting prowess. But, as a young nation, there is little else of this overarching and deeply ingrained sense of shared identity at work, apart, perhaps, from the vestiges of an egalitarian society and the “fair go”. How can Australia expand its outlook and self-expectations? How can it enlarge its self-perception to include science, technology, and

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entrepreneurialism as vital parts of its identity? There is no simple answer, no panacea. Progress lies in a thousand little things. The French and Germans name streets and build statues honouring writers and scientists. We should, too. In Israel, another young country, science and technology are topics of intense interest that spur stirring conversations in cafes. SCIENTISTS, RISE UP, BE HEARD! Scientists should endeavour to make their voices heard, individually and collectively. They perform marvellous work. So do, often enough, leaders of technology-based businesses. Admittedly, they are busy. But if they want to tangibly exercise corporate and social responsibility, they need to be seen and heard. While there are countless local small gatherings for musical, sporting, and social activities, when was the last local speech or discussion you heard on the need for science and technology? Scientists and technology leaders can make these things happen. Book clubs, of which there are thousands,

ought to nominate Ben Kehoe’s recent book Innovation in Australia. It's an easy read, a topical, lively book well worth discussing – more so than another work of “exciting” fiction, considering the stakes involved. And the subject is very motivating, being fundamental to our children’s and grandchildren's futures. More books should be written on science and business success and aimed at the layperson. Journalists should educate themselves on the subject and address it in their work to appeal to a wider audience. Delivered well, the subject is light years from boring. Parents ought to examine course-work options and consider the jobs of the future before counselling their children on secondary-school and tertiary choices. Education starts at home. MPs should be quizzed about their positions on science funding and related subjects, as they are now on health and education. Right now, the single most direct fulcrum is the media and the creation of an engaging narrative about these subjects. The Australian Academy of Science does this via an expert team devoted to social media and its two million followers on Facebook. The policy newsletter InnovationAus does a fine job for a smaller audience. This is progress – two of a thousand little things. We need a national and continuing conversation about science and technology. This should be a primary item on the list of “a thousand little things”: an essential building block for our cultural progress. Ask yourself if a country can advance successfully in the 21st century without a vigorous mix of science, technology, innovation, and commercialisation. Will it be able to create new jobs and grow its economy? Improve its society? What happens if Australia fails to gain traction in these areas? THREE NATIONAL INNOVATION PLANS AND WHAT THEY SAY If we are the educated and engaged society we believe ourselves to be, we ought to be better informed about the issues raised here. The building of a narrative begins at the local – indeed, the individual, the personal – level. And such a narrative would in part be based on the best information available – in this case three major government studies made for the public since 2008.

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In 2018 a surprising thing happened – though “outright disturbing” may be a more accurate description. IISA’s Australia 2030: Prosperity through Innovation plan was backed by a $28 million advertising budget; and, according to the Government, the plan was unpopular with the public. This is breathtaking. There are two views on this. Professor Roy Green, who was the long-time dean of the UTS business school and for decades has been an active scholar and commentator on innovation policy, says: “Of course it was unpopular – people didn’t understand it.” Professor Green has a point. Massive undertakings need to be explained clearly to the public. This is a responsibility of leadership. But surely there is a point at which the Government has done what it can and individual responsibility should take over. Are Australians just incurious? Or suffering from poor concentration or literacy skills? The executive summary of the IISA 2030 document is a well-structured and succinct nine pages, with easy-to-read graphics and boxed items for emphasis. It is easily found online and instantly downloadable. Perhaps the advertising agency was uninspired or poorly supervised and the campaign simply did not work. But a national issue of this importance deserves rousing, televised speeches by impassioned leaders, not merely a TV ad campaign. It is also plausible that the public’s reported negativity reflects governmental indifference: the people can sense that this is a low-priority issue for most of our politicians, as Malcolm Turnbull noted. Yes, there has been some slow progress in a nation not renowned for long-term planning. Today, there are three insightful plans in place

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that incorporate the role of science and commercialisation in our future. These represent a significant advance on where we were 30 years ago. Let us have a brief look at these plans, all of which are accessible online. First, we recall a precursor to more contemporary plans. Nearly 20 years ago, the Howard Government produced Backing Australia’s Ability. This was an internally generated policy-and-expenditure statement rather than a searching review, yet it had considerable merit. The Howard Government clearly understood the innovation imperative. This underscores history’s lesson that longer-lived administrations enact better science-and-innovation policy – in modern Australia, at least. The concise 24-page document, issued in 2001, encapsulates several sharply focused funding schemes, amounting to $4.5 billion. These include the creation of the R&D tax rebate with a premium level of 175 per cent, and a focus on skills, university infrastructure, IP protection, consideration of SMEs, and energy technologies. The document also gives a nod to the importance of a national narrative at the grassroots: “To develop the community’s understanding of, and support for, innovation … [and] to bring it in line with our competitor countries, the Government will examine ways to increase philanthropic support for innovation”. This sentiment was echoed by Dr Terry Cutler in a letter to the then Minister for Industry and Innovation, Kim Carr, upon the release in 2008 of Dr Cutler’s Venturous Australia report. Dr Cutler wrote: “This document needs to be seen as just the start of the continuing national dialogue [our italics] on innovation, and the wealth of submissions and material assembled during this project will remain very helpful in this ongoing process.” VENTUROUS AUSTRALIA Venturous Australia has been superseded, but it remains notable as the first national, expansive, and widely collaborative effort to grapple with Australia’s innovation problems and future. Explaining the sense of urgency behind Venturous Australia, Dr Cutler wrote: “Australia’s focus on innovation policy intensified in the 1980s – after a prolonged decline in our innovation performance, and a commensurate fall in our relative prosperity [our italics]. This policy focus bore fruit in sharply rising levels of R&D and other forms of innovation. However, the rate of

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State of Our Innovation Nation improvement has stalled over the last decade and some indicators suggest absolute decline.” Many dozens of board members were active collaborators on Venturous Australia. Government and academia were well represented, the business sector less so. Over 700 submissions were received. The total report is 224 pages, with a 19-page introductory overview serving as a summary. As a national review, it focused principally on the structure and mechanisms within government and contained 72 recommendations. These are, in some cases, inspiring and thoughtful, but mostly very general – for example, “a rigorous policy of evaluating all Australian Government innovation programs – and other relevant programs – [should] be established”. Among the more intriguing ideas proffered is recommendation 12.1: “The Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council will be replaced by a new National Innovation Council, chaired by the Prime Minister, and supported by a small but high-level Office of Innovation. An International Innovation Advisory Panel is formed to provide advice to the Council on international engagement.” This makes sense and has occurred. It is difficult to find evidence that Venturous Australia left a lasting imprint on the country during the politically and economically tumultuous years following 2007. Likewise, there is little to substantiate that one of its closing aspirational goals – that “a new culture of innovation is embedded within the public sector” – has been achieved. In 2015, Professor Roy Green, assisted by John H. Howard, published a report instigated by a Senate review into innovation. Certain of its statements give one the feeling of being forced to watch a bad movie, hogtied and helpless, for the fourth time: “Australians are good at the development of new ideas, whether through scientific discovery, technological invention, or the ingenuity of clever people. But we are not good at transferring them into innovations and ensuring their diffusion to lift firm-level productivity and national economic performance.” This is not to say the report overall is ill-conceived or poorly written. It is quite lucid and constructive over its 70 pages. But it also imparts, retrospectively, the feeling that government and business had been aimless with regards to science and innovation for a period of years.

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It also reinforces an exasperated comment by Professor Green: “Our government, in both creating and enacting policy on science and innovation, has been more or less persistently incoherent, misguided, and timorous.” Which brings us to fresher waters. AUSTRALIA 2030: PROSPERITY THROUGH INNOVATION This abovementioned plan, completed in 2018 by IISA, is by a number of criteria a clear improvement on Venturous Australia. It features both specificity and a clear timeframe, and its nine-page executive summary paints for all Australians – or those who will look at it – a clear picture of our challenges and opportunities. In his opening letter, then chairman Bill Ferris juxtaposes two key themes. The first is complacency due to prosperity: “This year, Australians became world-record holders thanks to our 26 years of continuous economic growth. Much of this growth has been underpinned by two of Australia’s traditional, big export sectors: agriculture and mining.” The second is a required sense of urgency: “Yet just at the time when Australia needs to accelerate its innovation performance, we are falling behind our global peers, particularly in student performance in science and mathematics, and in business investment in research and development. This is more than a canary chirp in our economic mineshaft: it is a clarion call for national action.” Please read it. CSIRO – AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL OUTLOOK If anyone has ever doubted the CSIRO’s relevance to the future of Australia, the remarkable document Australian National Outlook (ANO) should instantly dispel such thoughts – if not, pinch yourself to make sure you are awake. The 11-page summary is easy to read and nicely illustrated, and the 70-page longform version well organised and documented, precise, and interesting. This visionary assessment was modelled by a handpicked team of CSIRO computer forecasters. Importantly, they undertook the project, which was completed in 2019, in concert with an appropriate array of independent collaborators. This group included several leading universities and a diverse range of private and not-for-profit sector participants from National Australia Bank, Shell, Lendlease, legal and accounting firms, and major charities.

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This is the most comprehensive model for Australia’s future economic, environmental, and personal lifestyle choices ever created. It is a forecast that posits outcomes in 2060 and is soundly based on a number of tangible, realworld criteria. It is not complicated and is based on a wealth of verifiable evidence in the form of facts and trends. Though it is not alarmist, it makes clear that Australia is at a crossroads: go one way and our future looks prosperous; go another, and allow a steady slippage towards a predictably unfavourable outcome in terms of individual income and lifestyle. The brilliance of the ANO forecast is its provision of these two well-reasoned and quantitatively based scenarios. The first is dubbed “slow decline”, the second “outlook vision”. It is difficult to imagine anyone who has an interest in their own future – whether in relation to work, the launch of a business, or lifestyle prospects – not being engaged by what the ANO has to offer. An example that characterises the ANO’s depth, even-handedness and underlying positivism: “There is no doubt that the outlook vision presents an extremely high bar for future productivity growth. There are also diverging opinions as to whether and how it may best be met, but other countries, such as Sweden, have experienced such lifts and it is well within historic productivity growth rates in Australia ... Australia achieved consistently high productivity growth through the 1980s and 1990s”. While productivity rates may seem obscure and theoretical to some readers, the ANO does a good job of explaining how this measurement connects to many other aspects of daily life. And its concern with societal factors, such as how individuals live – rarely central in the usual economic/innovation/science studies – is profoundly affecting. The following can be found under the heading “Trust”: “These inclusive institutions encourage people to participate in a choice of vocations that make best use of their skills, create opportunities for all, regardless of social and economic status at birth, and improve living standards while fairly sharing the benefits of increased prosperity.” Whereas the scope of the ANO in some ways transcends the concerns raised in this essay, it is clear throughout that science, technology, and education will underpin the outlook vision

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– that is, the desirable trajectory of the country. Equally, the slow decline – which Australia has already begun – will continue, inexorably, if current trends in these key areas continue. Above all, we find the ANO a liberating and positive assessment, because it proposes several goals and an adequate timeframe in which to achieve them. REAL-WORLD, PERSONAL ISSUES The ANO identifies real-world issues as its ultimate preoccupations. These are items of interest to nearly everyone, including weekly wages, household energy costs, and commuting times and distances. Any future improvements in these metrics will be linked, the ANO foresees, to five major shifts that need to occur: in our industry base, city planning, energy production, land use and agricultural practices, and culture. The CSIRO and its partners deserve applause for this effort. But, more to the point, they deserve many more readers and inspired thinking and action as a result. The ANO is the only forecast we have seen that weaves together the various fundamental strands that make up a culture – our very own – and produces a whole-of-society blueprint. We use the term “blueprint” because that, in the end, is all the ANO is. The required changes are large-scale but not earth-shattering. They will call for, as we suggested at the beginning of this piece, a liberal approach in the sense of steady, incremental change – as well as some spirited horizon jumping. Whether Australia has the gumption to undertake it remains to be seen. The ANO makes clear what the consequences of failure to implement change will be: “Without strong actions to address the challenges outlined in the previous section, Australia risks falling into a slow decline, with relatively poor economic, social, and environmental outcomes.” BUSINESS AS FULCRUM Any successful nation needs effective government policy to create a fertile environment for business. This becomes obvious in myriad ways when reviewing the economic histories of various advanced and developing countries during the past century. And government is crucial to funding high-risk, long-term research that will produce a stronger national base for innovation and commercialisation. However, governments are not good at the creation and daily management of business. And

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nor should they be. The mindset and essential skills required for governance are very different to those essential to business. It is business that ought to be the engine of effective innovation and, to a greater extent, commercialisation. It maintains the best operating structures, motivations, and efficiencies to effect and deploy innovation. Is Australian business innovative in 2021? The broad answer: no; on an international comparison basis, we are not. But there are ample instances in which the answer is a qualified “yes”, and several cases that demonstrate excellence and highlight the as yet incompletely realised, considerable potential of our business community. Let us explore this. The latest data from OECD tools that measure expenditure by business in R&D show, comparatively, a weak figure for Australia between 2014 and 2018. We have experienced a steady decline from 1.2 per cent in 2014 to 0.9 per cent in 2018. These figures are thrust into sharp relief when compared with the corresponding figures for other countries. In the same period, the US rose steadily from 1.94 to 2.05 per cent; Sweden from 2.08 to 2.36 per cent; and Israel from 3.54 to 4.36 per cent. Finland, on the other hand, declined slightly from 2.13 per cent to 1.81 per cent. In this category, Australia has consistently placed near the bottom of the OECD rankings over the past 30 years. LARGE, OLD, AND INFLEXIBLE COMPANIES AT THE TOP Ben Kehoe’s recent book Innovation in Australia examines our 10 largest ASX-listed companies. He exposes a startling contrast between our modern, technology-based, new-wealth-creating companies and the Big Ten, nine of which were founded before 1924. On this list of well-known giants, which includes our Big Four banks and Telstra, BHP, Wesfarmers, and Woolworths, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) is the sole claimant to leveraging science-based products to the global marketplace. This has been reflected in CSL’s dramatic share-price rises over the past 10 years – that is, in new wealth creation. In the US, a corresponding list of top 10 companies includes five that have been founded since 1970: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. These behemoths were, at their origins, commercialising science or engineering, and they continue to innovate today at a rapid pace.

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Should one protest that US–Australia comparisons are unrealistic or unfair, let us look at other examples. Nokia, in Finland, was founded as a pulp mill in 1864. As it has moved into various industries, the company has consistently demonstrated high levels of imagination and agility. Having optimised its role in mobile telephony, it sold its mobile phone division to Microsoft and has since made forward-looking acquisitions and commenced work on the Internet of Things (IoT), while retaining revenues through network equipment sales and its position in the Global Fortune 500. Ericsson, in Sweden, founded in 1876, has innovated and grown consistently. It invented Bluetooth, created 49,000 patents, and is the world leader in 5G implementation. We single out Finland and Sweden here because their approaches to diversification relate to a thought-provoking paper published in 2007 by CEDA. Its author, Professor Keith Smith of the University of Tasmania’s Innovation Centre, examines the perceived negative effects of a country’s reliance on its natural resources, which he terms “the resource curse”. Professor Smith concludes that the resources and agricultural industries can and do make beneficial contributions to innovation and an evolving economy. He makes several incisive points on the importance of the resource industries beyond their sheer contribution to GDP, and how their presence – directly or indirectly – can boost the development of unrelated innovation success. Indeed, the NAB Australian Business Innovation Index found in its 2019 report that the mining industry had been the most innovative sector in the country. This is doubtless a positive for the

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Australian economy and our resources industry. What is less clear, and more debatable, are the connections in Australia between the dominance of the resource sector, its own innovation, and any uplift effect on other new-industry growth sectors. Professor Smith cites several countries where just such an economic evolution has occurred: “Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands have developed significant high-tech sectors. These have supplemented the low- and medium-tech specialisations but have not replaced them.” We have never suggested that our natural-resource industries be replaced. What we are arguing for is a more diversified economy, one that displays what economists call a higher degree of complexity. Australia has made comparatively meagre progress towards developing a diversity of “significant high-tech sectors” demonstrating substantial world-market acceptance, as is the case in Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands, all of which have substantially smaller populations than Australia. This holds true despite the passage of 14 years since the publication of Professor Smith’s report. And during that time, the resources boom (roughly 2002–2012) created a false sense of prosperity and, almost certainly, complacency. If we chart Australia’s progress against the authoritative and highly detailed figures found in Harvard’s Atlas of Economic Complexity, Professor Smith’s hypotheses find themselves in the realm of the fanciful, and bend towards the absurd when measured over a period exceeding two decades. Economic complexity is a vital measurement of forward economic growth, based on the number and complexity of products a country successfully exports. Via its use of micro-analytics, the Harvard Atlas also analyses maturity in the capability to produce more complex products. Complexity means – significantly – “value added”. It also carries an implication of originality. Between 1995 and 2018, Australia fell from 55th out of the more than 150 countries on this measure of economic complexity to a dismal 87th. This steady decline is a product of stagnation at home, but it also describes a position of being surpassed by other countries that include, not surprisingly, the US, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, and, yes, Finland and Sweden. Yet even more startling are the much higher ratings, and steady upward movement, of economic complexity in countries that are

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overtaking us rapidly. These include Mexico, Romania, Slovenia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Cyprus, Tunisia, and Malaysia. Singapore has held a very high position for over 20 years, with per-capita GDP achievements above Australia’s – despite having zero natural resources apart from an ideal geographic location. Compared with Nokia and Ericsson, Australia’s dominant telephone and communications company, Telstra, has tended to invest in little R&D and shown minimal corporate imagination. In 2006 it even shut down its well-regarded Telstra Research Laboratories, which employed hundreds of engineers and scientists. In 2008 David Skellern, the inventor of the first commercial cable wi-fi and later the CEO of NICTA, which created six companies in the ICT field, declared: “Companies like Telstra are a disgrace when it comes to research and development. Telstra made $4 billion profit last year; in the last few years, it closed down a 650-person R&D centre. It now seeks all its knowledge for what it is going to do in the future from multinational global network equipment providers.” Since Dr Skellern’s remarks, Telstra’s commitment to R&D may have made something of a resurgence. It is known that current CEO Andy Penn has a personal interest in the area. But Telstra’s R&D shortcomings over the years reflect a broader, national weakness. PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2016 Global Innovation 1000 study found that, in that year, only five Australian companies made the top 1000 worldwide for R&D expenditure. By that point Telstra sat alongside an accomplished group including CSL, Atlassian, Cochlear, and Aristocrat Leisure. To balance the picture of Telstra today, the company employs 500 individuals in R&D and product design. It has long-standing cooperative agreements with both Ericsson and Microsoft, and is performing work related to autonomous vehicles with the Queensland Department of Roads at a value of $3.5 million. Telstra Health, a subsidiary devoted to digital operations and the largest organisation of its kind in the country, maintains a staff of 200 or more in R&D and new-product development. That said, actual commercialisation of new products and revenue accrual are difficult to ascertain in the organisation. This is surprising, because one would expect, if only for investor relations purposes, that the company would trumpet fruitful new R&D efforts.

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In the 2019 Forbes 100 list of the world’s most innovative companies we find, unsurprisingly, many entries from the US, while Thailand, Chile, Belgium, Ireland, Russia, and Canada are all represented. Australia? Not one of our companies made the list. The above two indicators – the PwC and Forbes magazine studies – are neither all-encompassing nor definitive. But the numbers suggest long-term R&D problems within corporate Australia. And they are not the only indicators. NAB BUSINESS INNOVATION INDEX To further our examination of Australia’s innovation record within the business sector, a quick review of NAB’s Business Innovation Index will be helpful. This is a national annual survey conducted under the auspices of the bank’s chief economist, Alan Oster, and managed full-time by Dean Pearson, head of Industry and Behavioural Economics. The Index defines innovation as doing things “differently, more quickly or more cost-efficiently”. While this is less stringent than some of our own definitions of innovation (which invariably encompass profitable commercialisation), it is no doubt a useful gauge of vitality, energy, and new thinking. Overall, for 2019, the index shows a decline in innovative behaviour: Australian business fell to a survey-low 57.6 points this year, down from 64.3 in 2018. There also appears to be a lack of overall confidence: “It seems business leaders have become less willing to take risks and explore new ideas,” one knowledgeable contributor to the Index lamented. Dean Pearson states that “businesses also believe Australia’s ‘innovation culture’ remains unimpressive, rating it lowest since this survey began in 2016”. Trying to remain positive in the face of this bleak result, we consider it a plus that business leaders surveyed reported they are endeavouring to evaluate the level of innovation and, in their own way, measure it. The bottom line: Australia holds immense potential. To date, we simply have not harnessed it as fully or as capably as we might have. LARGE COMPANIES AND CULTURAL CHANGE The former Dow Chemical Company CEO Andrew Liveris said to us: “Business is an afterthought in this country versus the US and elsewhere.” He made a special point of adding that “our CEOs

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need to step up and become role models for our young people”. This is true, and it raises the question of what role our large corporates ought to play in spurring innovation. In an era of increasing self-interest, many would reject the notion that leading innovative practice and thought might fit into the corporate social responsibility obligations of a major company. Further, it is uncertain whether many major Australian corporates are flexible and farsighted enough to innovate even for their own self-interest, let alone as an act of socially responsible behaviour. But if Australian business culture is to evolve, at least some of the impetus for change needs to come from those now in positions of power and influence within these corporates. It is worth asking why collaborative R&D programs are most often initiated by universities and the government-funded CRCs rather than by corporates. Indeed, consider corporations such as Wesfarmers – to pick one of our top 10 at random. It has sufficient capital to experiment and benefit itself through relatively small diversification measures and collaborations. A respected and long-standing professor of business and innovation from one of the big eight universities (who requests anonymity) criticises Australia’s larger and older corporations generally as being “way too comfortable … it is as though many of them are simply waiting for inevitable disruption, unprepared, unthinking”. He continues this assessment with a sense of urgency: “Contrast this behaviour with that of one of our newer outstanding companies such as NextDC … [In terms of] growth, engagement in technology and overall culture … the differences are very plain.” As we explore more deeply, a few encouraging examples come to light. Boral, often seen as a prosaic, old-style building materials company, has been quietly dynamic in the arena of new-materials science. It has steadily grown a world-class R&D team, which over a decade developed Envisia, a lower-carbon concrete that is now a commercial success. Ross Harper, Boral’s group president, Sustainability and Innovation, advises that “many of our larger companies have the capability, but need to understand what the commitment to R&D actually is and what it requires, and they should map the benefits to their core business”. In Boral’s case, the focus on new materials

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led the company into new territory: it has now acquired a US firm active in polymer development with a sizeable R&D group. Bosch, the multinational electronics giant, has funded several strategic start-up investments in agricultural high tech in Australia, specific to opportunities in this country. One, The Yield, is on a mission to transform food and farming practices by building secure, scalable digital technology. BRIGHT SPARKS The NAB Business Innovation Index also examines small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with fewer than 200 employees. It found a much higher degree of innovation in younger firms, with those two years old or younger being engaged in high levels of innovation (6.0, and those in the two- to five-year age range in very high levels (7.1). Those in the five- to 10-year age group also maintain a strong level of innovation (6.1). This coincides with our general finding that there is a great deal of energy within the SME community in Australia. This suggests that the increase over the past decade of angel and other venture capital investing, and quite possibly a generational shift in the culture of entrepreneurialism, may be sustainable. This momentum is underlined by a number of IPOs in recent years based on real innovation, such as by Open Learning, Xero, Zip, Afterpay, Titomic, Nearmap, Osteopore, Uniti Wireless, Splitit, and many others, some of which have a viable opportunity to compete on the world market. In 2016 the ASX ranked third in the world for new technology IPOs, ahead of NASDAQ for the second year in a row. By this yardstick – taken alone and with caution – Australia appears to be functioning better than some of our previous remarks and the downbeat macro data might indicate. It is not unreasonable to suggest that a very significant portion of our innovation and economic future depends upon SMEs. A number of our most successful companies today, some of which have competed successfully in global markets, were small enterprises only 20 or fewer years ago: ResMed, Cochlear, CSL, NextDC, Canberra Data Centre, Atlassian, Wisetech, Electro Optic Systems (EOS) CarSales.com, Seek.com, and TechnologyOne, for example. Notably, all of these were led by individuals or

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small teams with strong science or technology skills and experience, and who are, by nature, entrepreneurial. Professor Danny Samson of the University of Melbourne has long been recognised as a leading analyst of business and innovation. He provides an encouraging observation: “The younger generation has, over the past 10 years or so, shown a definite trend difference in course selection and interest areas. There has been a pronounced upswing in genuine enthusiasm for startups and entrepreneurial opportunities. This is attitudinal change across a generation. There is less interest among them in becoming part of what I call the traditional business machine, and more interest in being part of new value creation, which is very pleasing to see.” If today’s young entrepreneurs and students seek role models – and they should – they will find them in the companies named above. OUR COUNTRY’S ENORMOUS POTENTIAL This enquiry began with a series of harsh but demonstrable contentions. The aim has been not to criticise Australia excessively but to encourage a rational assessment of its present status. This is worthwhile, as Australia has a remarkable future ahead, should we optimise our opportunities. This is the purpose of the “book within a book” State of Our Innovation Nation 2021 and Beyond. Unlike other more structured and focused studies, we chose to create a less formal collection of views and ideas – a contribution to the wider narrative, which we hope will grow. As a not-for-profit publisher devoted to a more science-literate and innovative Australia, we can only offer one, or perhaps a few, of the “thousand little things” it takes to benefit our country, encourage positive change, and drive the national conversation. We do not make formal recommendations; there are enough fine, well-reasoned ones in the key studies mentioned previously. We do suggest these be read, particularly the IISA’s Australia 2030: Prosperity Through innovation report and the remarkable Australian National Outlook by the CSIRO. Remember: in their executive summary form, these are only 11 and nine pages, respectively, and they are available online right now. With all of the commentary about low metrics and declines cited earlier, it would be

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both neglectful and churlish not to commend and summarise a number of great things that Australia has achieved in the spheres of science, technology, and innovation over the past 40 years – which is roughly the period of our operational history and personal experience in Australia. Let us close with a round-up of truly positive Australian achievements and trends in science, technology, and innovation over that period. The list begins with our winners of the Nobel Prize, a peerless global honour and recognition of excellence. AUSTALIAN EXCELLENCE MOTIVATES In the period 1996–2017 alone, Australia won five Nobel Prizes, for a current total of 15 – a very strong per-capita performance. Peter Doherty won the Medicine or Physiology Prize in 1996. Robin Warren and Barry Marshall also won in Medicine, in 2005. Elizabeth Blackburn became our first female winner in 2009. Brian Schmidt won Australia’s first Nobel Prize in Astrophysics in 2011 for discovering that the universe is expanding faster than previously understood. In 2017 the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the Melbourne-based nuclear disarmament organisation, won our first Nobel Peace Prize – and unanimous praise around the world from those who follow the subject. In a survey we conducted of 80 senior figures in business, government, and science, only five had some or much knowledge of this major achievement – a comment on the vitality of our national narrative. All the abovementioned winners are active today, including Peter Doherty, who remains highly engaged at his eponymous foundation in Melbourne at age 81. COOPERATIVE RESEARCH CENTRES The Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) program was launched by the Keating Government in 1990. These funded, project-oriented efforts unite universities and private-sector funding participants in pursuit of specific goals. Limited to six-year funding terms, which are occasionally renewable based on merit, some 230 have been established to date, with around 40 currently operating. They have spurred significant collaboration, development of new IP, and, to some extent, viable commercialisation, as was the case with the highly regarded Vision CRC and

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its successful contact-lens inventions. More than half of contact lenses sold in the US are now made from the material invented by Vision CRC. In some cases, wisely, certain CRCs have not been devoted single-mindedly to profitable commercialisation, as was the case with Water Sensitive Cities CRC under the leadership of Professor Tony Wong. Rather, this organisation developed a substantial body of critical studies and knowledge, and during its tenure earned a global reputation for advancing the field. Such endeavours clearly benefit Australia’s academic standing and cultural soft power and make positive contributions to world society. Continuity of overall management by Tony Peacock for more than 10 years has undoubtedly benefited the program. Total funding amounts for new CRCs have grown steadily, with newer launches in excess of $100 million being created in recent years. THE ARC PROGRAM – CENTRES OF EXCELLENCE In 2001, the Australian Research Council (ARC) was established by the Howard Government. The ARC has evolved as a refined and targeted generator of discovery science under strong leadership, most notably that of Dr Aidan Byrne (2012–2016), a physicist who guided the critical post-creation period of its Centres of Excellence. As of 2020, these centres – there are nine in total – were funded in diverse areas ranging from dark matter particle physics to automated decision-making and society. As well, targeted grants for single projects continue, often for small amounts but for crucial work and experimentation. DEPARTMENT OF INDUSTRY GROWTH CENTRES A separate and practical program aimed at industry-growth outcomes was launched by the federal Department of Industry in 2018. Through an industry-led process, the Industry Growth Centres Initiative aims to drive innovation, productivity, and competitiveness. Their distinction, in part, is a focus on deep involvement from industry, 10-year strategies, and an orientation towards business and policy reform. There are six areas of concentration, including advanced manufacturing, cyber-security and medical technologies. In theory this is a fine concept, an example of a serious government effort to encourage industry into the innovation process. To succeed, it may require more work

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and realignment, consistency of effort, and, possibly, better management. There may be teething problems, and possibly an undesirable overlap with the CRC program. A recent ACIL Allen Consulting report on the Initiative was commissioned by the Government, but not released. There are suggestions that this was due to its less-than-ideal findings. But a 2019 Nous Group report indicated a number of positives, while stating: “It is still too early to definitively assess the levels of additionality or sector-wide impact achieved by each of the Growth Centres.” This seems a classic case of a good idea that needs refinement, strong management, and time to grow – or, continuity. The Growth Centres are charged with complex tasks in a challenging environment. Such developments take time, and there is ample, if not enormous, funding. This initiative was well intended, and its architects exhibited palpable enthusiasm for it. Whereas reasonable criticism is generally valuable, in this case sustained effort and review seem to be the wisest watchwords. THE MEDICAL RESEARCH FUTURE FUND The Medical Research Future Fund is one of the most obscure potential levers of innovation, little known even to staff members within its administrative centre, the Australian Department of Health. This is a $20 billion fund, part of Australia’s overall $180 billion Future Fund, which is quietly but profitably managed in Melbourne on behalf of all Australian citizens. The Fund is designated in part to assist in funding medical research, which may include commercialisation of technologies. The National Health and Medical Research Council acts in an advisory capacity. CSIRO This huge, varied, “all-of-science” national entity remains of immense importance. Dr Larry Marshall became its CEO in 2016. Australianborn, he had spent many years as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley; expectations for positive new developments were therefore high. In many respects they have been fulfilled. Commercialisation activity and earnings have climbed. Once wholly dependent on government funding, the CSIRO today earns over $500 million a year and Dr Marshall has established

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positive links with industry and engineered cultural change. The CSIRO has had a steady increase in earnings over the past 30 years, and it is fair to say that its commercialisation is presently at an all-time peak. Optimists, including ourselves, feel that the potential for future achievement is tremendous. Importantly, the CSIRO performs several vital social and educational roles, and in our view it should never confine itself solely to commercialisation but rather do more across the board. AgriFutures (Formerly Rural Industries Research and Development Corporations) Since its formation in 1989, this group of specialised bodies has been devoted to specific agricultural research areas of economic importance, such as cotton, wherein breakthrough CSIRO science has created export wealth since the 1990s. The Australian Meat and Livestock Corporation alone has an R&D budget of $180 million, while that of the Grains Research and Development Corporation exceeds $200 million. Australia’s agricultural industry is forecast to grow from its current $60 billion turnover to $100 billion over the next decade – spurred, in part, by the 15 RIRDCs. The peak body changed its name two years ago to reflect a modern outlook and is now called AgriFutures. THE AUSTRALIAN SPACE AGENCY This is the country’s most recent major, science-based commercial thrust. Founded in 2018, it opened offices in Adelaide in 2020 within the city’s emerging technology park Lot Fourteen. This coincided with the launch of the CRC for SmartSat, which is devoted to a commercial plan based primarily upon software development. There are also space-industry activities happening elsewhere, particularly in Darwin. The goal is to triple the size of Australia’s space industry and create 20,000 jobs by 2030. AUSTRALIAN INVENTIONS OF NOTE Beyond government science and technology infrastructure and the programs described above lies the terrain of individual ingenuity – inventions conceived and realised by one person or a small team. There is no doubt that Australia has been inventive. Our appeal for more effective industry-building and revenue-earning

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commercialisation exists a couple of steps or more beyond that of invention/creation. But without that initial spark, nothing will happen. The list of successful inventions in Australia sharpens the appetite for more commercialisation. It stirs an expectation of greater outcomes ahead. Australians are familiar with our invention of the black box and wi-fi. Less familiar, perhaps, are the first commercial ultrasound (1961), gene shears (1986), polymer banknotes (1988, and currently licensed to more than 15 countries), and the world’s first underwater PC (1993). Gene silencing was a CSIRO triumph (1995), and Ian Frazer’s cervical cancer vaccine (2006) was a profound contribution to global health. And there have been many others, right up to the present day. A look further back, to 1854, captures what was arguably the world’s first refrigeration system, developed by James Harrison, a Melbourne publisher. The world’s first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, was produced in Melbourne in 1906. There has always been a streak of bush ingenuity about Australia. The very act of taming a giant, strange, and challenging continent seems to have engendered a creative, can-do spirit. A look ahead sees this nation growing in well-equipped infrastructure and cooperative synergies, especially in the biomedical and life sciences fields. Home-grown specialist expertise in water management, aquaculture, infrastructure and sophisticated construction, town planning, and numerous other exportable skills have earned global respect. We are on the verge of an energy revolution, with South Australia now nearing renewable-energy independence and the world’s largest solar farm under construction in the Northern Territory, spiking awareness and, better still, action. Hydrogen energy, among other emerging industries in which we have a solid, if nascent, base, holds immense promise. The IT community, particularly the fintech sector, has been creatively bubbling. A serious rethink of our future manufacturing enterprise is underway via the Innovative Manufacturing CRC under David Chuter, and several other organisations appear to be

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newly energised in the sphere of Manufacturing 4.0. The Australian Technology Network’s applied science initiatives from four member universities chart new territory in a practical way under Luke Sheehy. Dynamic science-based companies with growth and export profiles of excellence, such as Titomic and EOS, are led by science and by business-proficient founders with passion. Meanwhile, our farmers – intent on growing a $60 billion industry to $100 billion – are embracing science and technology as never before. This list could go on at length: we have a potentially strong base of activity, for a newly enlivened, diversified economy. And from an utterly unexpected angle comes a new and optimistic lens on present-day Australia: our response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This time, it was not luck that produced an outstanding management success; our response has been an act of good governance and citizen awareness, a conscious collaboration underscored by a belief in science and a sense of the common good, and a triumph in health care. Few nations mobilised better across a range of actions to produce a countrywide, cooperative outcome. We showed grace under pressure and were alert to the priorities. Brilliant. Can we shift this performance to another plane? AT THE CROSSROADS The coming decade is crucial. Australia, by any rational examination, is at a crossroads. The data, facts, and forecasts have never been laid out in such sharp relief, and our choices never more clearly described by science, thinkers, and certain far-sighted leaders across the spectrum. History provides its lessons freely, particularly regarding past pitfalls. We have every reason to be optimistic, but decisions made and directions followed during this time will be of outsized importance to Australia’s future generations. We must seize the decade and transform our destiny. The 21st century is ours to shape. Our inherent advantages are so abundantly greater than those of so many countries. So why don’t we shape it? Australia, you are better than you know.

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CULTURE CHANGE WILL WE BE AN INNOVATION NATION? Ben Kehoe WHERE TO NEXT FOR AUSTRALIA? Beth Webster FIRMS MUST EMBRACE INNOVATION FIRST Mark Dodgson AO LABOR’S VISION FOR AN INNOVATIVE AUSTRALIA Anthony Albanese A TIME FOR BOLDER INNOVATION POLICY Melinda Cilento PREPARE FOR HELL Dr Adir Schiffman CAPTURING INNOVATION Dean Pearson INNOVATION IS NOT AN OPTIONAL ADD-ON Sammy Kumar RESPECT THE HUMANITIES Tony Goldsby-Smith HIGHER CALLING Glenn Keys

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WILL WE BE AN INNOVATION NATION? Since the period of economic restructuring in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Australia opened itself to the world with a dream of becoming globally competitive, what has happened? By Ben Kehoe

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t was Malcolm Turnbull’s innovation-policy initiative in 2016 (the National Innovation and Science Agenda Report) that rekindled my interest in exploring the entirety of innovation in Australia. In the late 1980s I represented a national organisation that participated in debates about microeconomic reform in a number of forums, workshops and conferences over a two-tothree-year period. I also spoke at many conferences on the topic of how the Australian context influences business. It was during that time I first heard union leaders say, “Australia needs to grow the pie before we redistribute it!” When was the last time we had a genuine conversation about wealth and prosperity creation in Australia? We came close during those periods of concentrated microeconomic reform in the 1980s and early 1990s, with global competitiveness the driving aspiration. One reason I wrote the book Innovation in Australia: Creating prosperity for future generations is our failure since then to have a substantive conversation about innovation and wealth creation in Australia. A key message in the book is that our national culture is overly focused on lifestyle and we’ve become far too comfortable and complacent. We have a love affair with recreation and sport. Meanwhile, 29 years of continuous economic growth reinforced our complacency. Well, that run is over. COVID-19 has seen to that. We are prosperous because of our natural resources. In fact, using a criterion like wealth per capita, we are among the richest countries in the world. But is it sustainable?

Australia needs to confront some brutal facts as we move into the future. We must both do better and be better, and this will require leadership from business and industry. There are important decisions to be made. In 1991, a prominent Australian economist at the time, Helen Hughes, was quoted as saying in the Innovation in Australia Report prepared for the Industry Research and Development Board that: “Australia is the only industrialised country that has not increased its proportion of merchandise exports to GDP in the last 30 years.” In that same document, three conclusions were highlighted. Conclusion 1: An increase in exported manufactured goods and services is the key to increasing Australia’s wealth generation. Conclusion 2: The establishment of corporations of significant size is a prerequisite for sharp growth in manufacturing. Conclusion 3: Innovation is a determinant of sustained export growth. It was in this context that I started my Innovation in Australia journey. So, what has changed in the 30 years since those words were written? Not much. Australia’s innovation credentials – 2020 The Why Australia – Benchmark Report is published annually by Austrade. It appears to be Australia’s pitch to the world. Its 2020 chapter on Innovation and Skills is informative but sadly symbolic of the commercialisation challenge facing Australian innovation. It outlines six innovation credentials for our

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country: • technological readiness • the CSIRO ranking in the top 1 per cent of the world’s scientific institutions • seven universities ranked in the top 100 in the world (the 3rd highest number of any nation) • about 44 per cent of our workforce having tertiary qualifications • about 50 per cent of Australian firms being "innovation active" • our global entrepreneurship capabilities (we are ranked 5th in the Global Entrepreneurship Index). Entrepreneurship in Australia as a ‘movement’ is a positive sign, but it is a phenomenon of the last decade. We now highlight businesses that are innovation-active in official Australian Bureau of Statistics figures. According to the latest published figures: • 44 per cent of Australian businesses are innovation-active. • The wholesale trade (61 per cent) and manufacturing (59 per cent) industries had the highest proportion of innovation-active businesses. • 37 per cent of Australian businesses introduced an innovation, with 17 per cent of businesses introducing a goods and/or service innovation and 32 per cent of businesses introducing a process innovation. However, there is one measure that is notably absent from the reporting: • the number of "for profit" businesses operating in Australia (or globally) as a result of our R&D expenditure. Australia spends just under 2 per cent of our annual GDP on R&D (which equates to about $32 billion). That’s a lot of money. We need to ask: • what is our innovation success rate or even the return on our R&D investment? • what "for profit" businesses, industries and Australian jobs have been created over the last 10–20 years? • what Australian intellectual property has been commercialised over the last 10–20 years? • what international revenue has been created for Australia? • which industries are growing because of Australian investment in R&D? In my working life in business (which now

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extends to more than 40 years), Australia’s track record in commercialisation is, at best, modest. Since the period of economic restructuring in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Australia opened itself to the world with a dream of becoming globally competitive, what has happened? Not much.

We are prosperous because of our natural resources. In fact, using a criterion like wealth per capita, we are among the richest countries in the world. But is it sustainable? Six specific challenges for the commercialisation of Australian R&D There are multiple issues that make the commercialisation of Australian innovation more difficult. These issues are both cultural and systemic. Let me name some – there are many more. 1. The Australia culture is devoted to recreation, lifestyle and sport. For over a century many of our major industrial relations debates have focused on recreation (initially there was two weeks’ annual leave; then three; then four). Even now we are still debating penalty rates. In at least one state there are annual public holidays devoted to sporting events: the first Tuesday in November for the Melbourne Cup and the Friday before the AFL Grand Final. In many states there are statues commemorating our sporting heroes. These issues are symbols of the Australian culture. Where are the symbols celebrating business and/or innovation? 2. Our focus on our natural resources. Australia has a long history of "living off the sheep’s back" and our mineral resources. Our comparative economic wellbeing is based on these natural resources. The last 29 years of economic growth were underwritten by a mining boom.

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Business and innovation have run a poor second. In recent years, one business leader described the Australian economy as “a commodities bubble inside a mining bubble inside a property bubble”.

Throughout our history, decisions have been made not to invest in the development of the following business ideas: computers, the black box flight recorder, transistors and satellites. Indeed, various space technologies had their origins in Australia, but for reasons of incompetence, complacency or lack of foresight, appropriate investment did not happen. 3. The absence of genuine models of commercialisation and innovative leaders. There are very few outstanding models of commercialisation that we might claim as Australian global business success stories. Many of our innovations have been sold off internationally. Australian global brands are hard to name. QANTAS springs to mind, but it was started by government. Sweden (a country of only 10.5 million people), on the other hand, has at least seven global brands operating in Australia. Recently, successful Australian companies like Atlassian and Aconex (which was sold to Oracle) have emerged. Canva and Airwallex have become "unicorns" – start-up companies valued at over $1 billion. But how many Australians can name them? Why is that? There is an absence of innovative business leaders in Australia to serve as role models. At the simplest level, learning occurs

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using three tools – storytelling, modelling and active experimentation. There are very few stories of great Australian business leaders. Only four business leaders have won the Australian of the Year award since 1960. I suspect there are more Australian school students wanting to become professional sportspeople or members of professions rather than builders of great businesses. 4. Our low level of manufacturing commitment and competence. Over 60 years, Australian manufacturing has declined to less than 6 per cent of GDP. While the low number is troubling, what is even more disturbing is the rate of the decline. Since 1990, when global competitiveness was an aspiration, we have declined substantially and now proudly proclaim to have made the transition to a service economy. Who made that decision? And when? And is that our long-term aspiration? Over the same period, some countries have significantly developed their manufacturing capacity. China is not the only one! Mexico and Vietnam are hot on their heels. COVID-19 has highlighted the weakness of our manufacturing capacity. Redeveloping a national manufacturing capacity is a 30–50 -year undertaking. It is a long, hard road. But other countries have done it. The federal government has named six industry growth centres for Australia. Advanced manufacturing is one. More recently a $1.5 billion manufacturing initiative has been announced. The big question is: as a nation, do we have the will to sustain the momentum? 5. We have a system limited by our 20th century worldview. This is a huge topic in its own right. I can say that while I was growing up, business was not an aspiration for me. Within society, business was treated with some suspicion, amid rumblings about unfairness and discrimination. The family script was: "do well at school, attend university and get a secure job in the public service". This was, in many cases, the highest aspiration. My family story centred on the public service. At my high school, there was no mention of business as a career option that I can recollect.

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State of Our Innovation Nation At the time, business was only just being offered as a field of tertiary study. Management was an emerging profession. Accounting was the only business qualification. Now there is a multiplicity of business degrees, and digital technology is the emerging platform. Management and management information systems have evolved to the point where big data and artificial intelligence have arrived. No longer futuristic concepts, they are parts of the now. Innovation is not negotiable. However, our government and business languages are limited by 20th century economic and financial paradigms. GDP, debts and deficits, productivity, unemployment, inflation, revenue, debtors and overdrafts are all important, but they reflect a predominantly economic/financial view. Shareholder value is a concept that has been found wanting and there is now a movement to stakeholder value. In many ways, the economic measures that evolved in the 20th century limit our innovation conversation. The ASX further reflects our 20th century mindset. Of the top 10 ASX-listed companies, all were founded before 1970. Surely, in a country like Australia , some of these top 10 businesses should be symbols of a 21st century economy? When I started as a pioneer in the strategy consulting area in the late 1970s, I remember business leaders arguing that strategy was “all bullshit”. They had a budget – and it was all they needed. As it happens, the federal budget in Australia is a big event each year. The media get excited. Some people stop what they’re doing to digest the detail. What if, instead, we had a national focus on progress towards higher Australian aspirations: on building prosperity and capability for generations to come – i.e. for the 22nd century? Would anyone care so long as we had our recreation and lifestyle? As a nation, we need a new level of thinking and conversation. 6. The absence of a great aspiration. Our first identifiable national aspiration was the move to form Australia back in 1901 after 20 years of debate. Federation was a singular achievement. Prior to that, our early settlements were isolated and each colony reported back to Great Britain. During the 1788-1901 colonial period, innovation in the colonies was random and based on need. There was no Australia as we know it today. Even now, we do not celebrate the formation of Australia – a great innovation. Instead, we celebrate

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the landing of Captain Phillip at Port Jackson as Australia Day. Post-Federation, there have been periods of national unity (and disunity) around multiple wars: • the Boer War • WWI – where the ANZAC tradition was born • WWII – the Kokoda campaign and the Battle of Milne Bay were defining moments for Australia. • the Korean War • the Vietnam War and • the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. For many, these commitments consolidated a sense of national pride. More broadly, they were grand gestures of loyalty to the homeland or attempts to develop strategic relationships with allies. However, in the 120 years since Federation it is difficult to name any great aspirations for Australia as a nation. As the editor of one book (Great Australian Speeches) suggested: “Australians are famously distrustful of flowery phrases and unnecessary verbosity, preferring instead a language that is lean, direct and to the point - probably a reflection of a people historically more preoccupied with staying alive than comfortably developing mission or vision statements.” Or maybe it’s a recipe for mediocrity. We are not as good as we think we are During the economic-reform period of the 1980s and early 1990s, "benchmarking" was a buzzword. Companies needed to be benchmarking against "best practice", however that was measured. I hear little conversation about benchmarking nowadays , other than sporting comparisons. The "great social luminary" Alan Jones is apoplectic about the fact Australia can’t beat the All Blacks and is not the leading rugby nation in the world. There are also those who are fired up after each Olympics about how our performance was below standard and we need to throw more money at lifting our game. I started to look for data about how Australia compared against the rest of the world in other areas. I set sail on "benchmarking Australia". Our current performance Having been told for most of my adult life that Australia is a small country but we "punches above our weight", I was more than a little surprised to discover that, in fact, we don’t. To punch above our weight would mean we are in the top 10 of all the comparative indices listed below. If anything, we pursue mediocracy with passion.

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Index

What it measures

Our ranking

Good Country Index

What each country on Earth contributes to the common good of humanity

20th

Legatum Prosperity Index

A range of factors including wealth, economic growth, education levels, personal health, wellbeing and quality of life

17th

Social Progress Index

A range of factors including health care, infrastructure and civil liberties

15th

Global Competitiveness Index

How internationally competitive our indus16th tries are

Global Innovation Index

How innovative we are

23rd

Global Entrepreneurship Index

How entrepreneurial we are

5th

Ease of Doing Business Index

How easy it is do business in Australia

14th

Manufacturing Index

The value added to our GDP by manufacturing

103rd

Manufacturing Self-Sufficiency

How self-sufficient we are in terms of what we manufacture

Last

Economic Complexity

The productive capabilities of our economy

93rd

Great aspirations: there are footsteps on the moon We are more than a century into our national journey. Who are we becoming? What might a great aspiration (a moonshot) look like if it’s to help Australia climb into the top 10 of all of these global indices? I outlined 10 potential moonshots in my book: 1. To become the healthiest nation in the world. 2. For biotechnology to replace mining as the major driver of Australia’s wealth creation. 3. To develop a global top 5 food/fibre brand. 4. To develop a national transport system modelled on the best in the world. 5. To become a renewable energy hub for the world (and especially Asia). 6. To become water-resilient for a far greater population than we have now. (50 million). 7. To become one of the world’s top 10 defence technology exporters.

To develop an advanced manufacturing sector that contributes 15 per cent of our gross value-added product. 9. To develop trade links with at least 50 per cent of Asia by 2050. 10. Literally landing a person on the moon via an Australian space project. The catalyst for change COVID-19 can be the catalyst for change that Australia needs to embrace to ensure our longterm prosperity. We are now living in a world where the institutions that have sustained society during my lifetime and those of previous generations are under extraordinary pressure. We can choose to create a new paradigm – or else the world will do it for us and we’ll be left behind. We are living in a liminal moment. Much of what we knew and loved is gone forever. The opportunity to recreate, revitalise and reset Australia for this new world is upon us. We need to grab the opportunity with both hands and transition from a mediocre 20th century economy into an innovation leader. COVID-19 is a challenge of profound depth at every level. While in the here and now the lived experience is difficult, it is also the opportunity of a century, if not a millennium. Capitalising on an opportunity requires a different form of leadership – one we are not accustomed to in Australia. I’m talking about leadership that can take us to places we might not choose to go to if left to wallow in our complacency and comfortable lifestyles. We need business leaders working with government to lead a conversation to deliver a 22nd-century industry base. It’s important for the participants in the conversation to understand four fundamentals: 1. Business is the primary wealth-creation sector in society. 2. Innovation is a core pillar of wealth creation. 3. The commercialisation of Australian intellectual property is a major platform for prosperity. 4. For Australia to thrive in the later part of this century, some cultural challenges must be confronted.

Ben Kehoe is a management consulting pioneer in Australia. Since the late 1970s, he has worked with 250+ organisations and businesses. In that time, he has engaged in over 20,000 hours of conversation on the future with business leaders of Australia. In 2019, he wrote and published Innovation in Australia: Creating Prosperity for Future Generations.

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WHERE TO NEXT FOR AUSTRALIA? Research into innovation reveals it takes multidecade efforts to reap results. Economists and scientists need to better align now for the country to see optimal outcomes by 2050.

elying on serendipity or the magicof-the-market for our future material wellbeing is a triumph of hope over evidence. The world bumbled along, buffeted by chance and good fortune, for thousands of years. But since World War II, several developed nations have taken calculated steps towards securing a comparative advantage in one or more industries. It was not just a matter of doing things smarter. Often, they created new industries and unleashed latent needs. Consequently, products such as white goods and smart phones, and entities such as the Internet and digital entertainment, have become necessities and colossal sources of wealth creation. The US is a case study in this curated development. After the war, on the advice of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the Truman administration increased strategic and mission-orientated R&D by more than 10-fold. This spawned clusters of technological excellence – biomed, radar, communications, electronics, weapons – that by the 1970s had increased employment by over 60 per cent relative to the counterfactual. Since the 1970s, other developed countries have similarly geared up. Rapid economic development in Japan, Israel, South Korea and Germany is testament to a focused and bipartisan approach to science and technology. Australia, too, has sought a piece of the action. After the war, the Country and National party leaders, Earle Page and John McEwen, garnered considerable community support for an agricultural research and development

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bureau. In the 1980s, these early rural R&D institutions were streamlined into R&D corporations by Labor’s Minister for Primary Industry, John Kerin. This model of mission-driven R&D, with in-built translation, has been crucial to the success of Australian agriculture. Our mining industry – another export success story – has had decades of organised support from the logistics, R&D, education and training sectors. Australia led the world in autonomous vehicles and now leads the world in digital mining. The 1980s Hawke-Keating plan for industry restructuring – closing inefficient tariff-reliant industries and creating new value-added downstream industries – got us only so far. We hastened the death of the inefficient automotive and clothing industries, but failed to create the downstream, high value-added industries that we had anticipated. In the 1990s, we were rescued by the rise of China and its burgeoning demand for higher education services, iron ore and coal. But in the face of rising geopolitical tensions, the single-buyer model of export success is looking decidedly fragile. So, where to from here? Do we continue to rely on agriculture, mining and education for the bulk of our export income? Or do we

By Beth Webster

It took decades of investment into R&D to build the sophisticated institutions and complex industry ecosystems that underlie Silicon Valley

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refresh our national business model and catalyse emerging areas of economic promise? If the latter, then we need to get serious. It took decades of investment into R&D to build the sophisticated institutions and complex industry ecosystems that underlie Silicon Valley, the Nagoya industrial precinct and the German Mittelstand community. Success requires not only large-scale government funding into R&D and technological procurement, but supportive formal and informal institutions. Universities, industry groups, businesses and unions need to find a degree of consensus on a collective approach to the task, while governments, in turn, need to lend their weight via a package of complementary regulations and fiscal interventions. As things stand, we are far from achieving a productive level of consensus in Australia. The national policy paralysis is attributable to the failure of economists and scientists to converse in a common language. The science community continues to advocate for funding by presenting case studies that policymakers can easily dismiss as unrepresentative. Cost-benefit analysis is the workhorse of good policy, not stories. Although no one in their right mind would approve a new pharmaceutical drug based on ad hoc evidence, science advocates seem to think this is an acceptable approach when pushing for funding. The reflexive response of economists in government agencies is to assume that all calls for business support are rent-seeking. This suspicion is understandable given the history of rent-seeking by business for tax, tariff and investment attraction grants. But it is economists’ rudimentary theoretical and empirical understanding of the role of science and institutions in economic development that is the nub of the problem. The economics of knowledge is barely taught in most universities. The gulf between the two parties remains. In recent years, the effect of public funding for research and innovation has been

subject to objective, data-based evaluation. Swinburne and the evaluation units of multiple Australian governments have found that industry interventions to promote business efficiency and access to new markets do work. Presently, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic is clearly the top priority. However, we should also see this crisis as an opportunity to pause, take stock and refresh our economic plans. COVID should not consume all the oxygen in the policy room. What do we want 2050 to look like?

Professor Beth Webster is Director of the Centre for Transformative Innovation at Swinburne University of Technology, and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research Impact and Policy. She has a PhD in economics from the University of Cambridge and an M.Ec and B.Ec (Hons) from Monash University. She is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia.

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FIRMS MUST EMBRACE INNOVATION FIRST Australia needs to change its business culture. Science and research provide new opportunities and governments can facilitate greater activity, but innovation performance in Australia and elsewhere depends on actions in business.

ost innovation in every nation happens in firms. Australian businesses have a mixed record in innovation – the application of new ideas to advantage. We have some outstanding successes, for example, in parts of the mining, food and health industries, in some service sectors and amongst technology start-ups. However, we simply do not have enough of them to rebalance the economy in the face of the challenges that lie ahead for Australia. Too many boards of directors are sclerotic, compliance-orientated, risk-averse and unaware of the nature and importance of innovation. Too many firms, large and small, lack the management skills to use innovation to survive and thrive in a highly competitive and increasingly challenging world. Amid the re-assessments taking place as a result of COVID-19, there is a priceless opportunity for Australian businesses to rethink how innovation is managed and, more fundamentally, reassess its nature and purpose. The global pandemic has shaken economies to their core and disturbed the social status quo. Factoring in ongoing political turmoil and the climate crisis, conditions are prime for a fundamental reset of innovation in business. What do we know? The findings of research into innovation during the past 70 years have been unambiguous. Innovative businesses live longer, grow more and generate larger profits. Innovation is risky and failures are inevitable, but failure to innovate is the greater risk.

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Innovation is found across a wide range of activities: in new products and services, operations and production, organisational structures, paths to market and business models. Innovative firms adopt portfolio approaches, with the bulk of activity devoted to incremental changes, a proportion directed towards more substantial initiatives, and a small element designed to explore future options. Even the most innovative firms do not innovate by themselves: collaboration is crucial – with suppliers, customers, other firms and research institutions. Successful firms have effective processes in place to manage innovation, including in R&D and new product and service development, linking them with business objectives. Innovation strategies are core elements in the master plans of successful firms. The best-run innovative firms have supportive governance structures, typically involving board-level responsibility for innovation, regular reporting on performance and clear and consistent articulation by leaders on the importance of investment in innovation. Such firms percolate the understanding that innovation is everyone’s responsibility, encourage employees to get excited about new ideas, and circumvent obstacles to change, often found in the permafrost of middle-management.

By Mark Dodgson AO

What is new? Firms are having to navigate the turbulence created by the pandemic, threats to global trade and institutions, political and social polarisation, and disruptive technological change.

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They are adjusting to progressive movements such as Me Too and Black Lives Matter, and to a majority-Millennial workforce with evolved expectations of the working life. In this fluid environment, firms have the opportunity to rethink the very nature of business. Pre-COVID-19, moves were afoot to rethink the purpose of business amid growing evidence that addressing societal issues and stakeholders’ priorities helps produce longterm value. A new approach to innovation has to be part of this reformation. Groups such as the US Business Roundtable of leading CEOs have questioned the singular pursuit of shareholder value, as opposed to creating value for stakeholders including employees, customers, suppliers and the broader community. The World Economic Forum’s "Great Reset" is marshalling support for a fundamental reset of the foundations of the economic and social system for a more equitable, sustainable and resilient future. The Great Reset provides a framework for the rethinking and reshaping of business purpose and behaviour. Australian businesses need to lead and manage innovation in this new context. What is to be done? Australian firms have to rethink and reset their innovation strategies, processes and practices in the light of new circumstances. This would involve deliberation on what has worked in the past and what might work better in an uncertain future. It requires the search for new opportunities and the astute application of new approaches, including novel governance arrangements, different organisational structures and the introduction of more appropriate metrics of performance. Universities have a role to play in creating new options for the future, though business schools would need to undergo deepseated change if they’re to contribute significantly. Viewed by vice-chancellors primarily as ATMs full of student fees, and with many staff wedded to producing meaningless academic articles, these schools need to prioritise

collaborative research with firms, helping to deliver insights into the new environment. Training imperatives need to shift towards fostering skills in innovation and entrepreneurship. Firms, in turn, need to commit to supporting and working with externally-orientated and business-savvy academics. Most fundamentally, and in line with thought leaders such as the World Economic Forum, businesses need to be more open and engaging with their stakeholders. Rather than being hailed as a positive, innovation is often associated with job losses, insecurity and increased workloads. The language of innovation – change, flexibility, agility, adaptability – needs to be applied beyond the confines of business efficiency to articulate the very purpose of business. Firms need to emphasise innovation’s value in improving quality of life and creating meaningful work, as well as reducing social inequality and cultivating environmental sustainability. We need more and better information on the working conditions of those making, delivering and warehousing goods, and on the environmental cost of their manufacture and transportation. There needs to be an explosion in the crowdsourcing and crowdfunding of innovations and in the testing and prototyping of new ideas in hackathons, accelerators and incubators. Greater diversity in design teams is required. What else? We need new educational and training programs, from those that encourage more females and minorities into careers in technology and innovation, to those that stimulate solutions across social and environmental causes. A greater diversity of voices has to be heard, not only on what innovations are needed but on how they are to be created. Innovation thrives in workplaces that embrace inclusion, playfulness, happiness and fulfilment. There is no future in doing business in the same old ways. There is a different future awaiting, potentially a better one for all. By finetuning their innovation strategies, businesses can help make this one possible future a reality.

Mark Dodgson AO is professor of Innovation Studies at the University of Queensland Business School, and visiting professor at Imperial College London. He has written or edited 18 books on innovation, and over 100 articles and book chapters, and has researched and taught innovation in more than 60 countries.

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LABOR’S VISION FOR AN INNOVATIVE AUSTRALIA

Science is the key to creating a better Australia. We must devote more funding to research and development, and plan for Australia to be a renewableenergy superpower in a carbon-constrained world.

fter years in which science was pounded in the culture wars, a terrible battle has snapped us back to reality. The COVID-19 pandemic has renewed our respect for science and its experts, rather than the instant ones who spring up like mushrooms after a downpour. With this has come an understanding that it is science that can take us from lockdown to unlocking our potential as a nation. Science

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

will be at the core of our future economic growth, as well as our new industries and the jobs they will create. I appreciate that thinking about the future can be difficult when the challenges of the present might seem insurmountable. Lives have been lost, state borders have been closed and freedoms we took for granted have been compromised for the greater good.

By the Hon Anthony Albanese MP

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But if there is an upside to this awful period, it is that the pandemic has given us a chance to create a better Australia – and science is the key. Australians have a proud record of invention, and yet, strangely, we do not properly celebrate our achievements. While we keep adding to its pages, scientific progress is not a story we are adept at telling. We need to raise the standard of the national conversation. We cannot speak of science as though it were an act of faith. Climate change, for instance, is no more a matter of belief than is the coronavirus. Finding solutions will depend on heeding the evidence. We cannot let opinion or ideology trump truth. Jolted awake by the pandemic, we all came together. The same values that are steering us through this crisis are those that will see us flourish when it is behind us.

Guided by science, we can fight climate change and create jobs at the same time Australia has been fortunate compared with many countries. Our relative success in containing the pandemic has been partly a result of geography, but it is also thanks to our high level of scientific and medical expertise – and the fact that it was listened to. As we dare to picture a post-pandemic Australia, Labor is looking to the future with clear eyes, open minds and optimism. It is what Labor does. When the world was in turmoil, John Curtin and Ben Chifley spoke not just of victory in war but of victory in peace. Curtin didn’t live to see the peace, but Chifley worked his guts out for that second triumph. Among his priorities were enlarging the CSIRO and establishing the Australian National University. As Chifley said: “Scientific research is a necessity for the maintenance of our standard of living and even for our survival.” It is a truth that has been brought sharply into focus by the pandemic. For one thing, we

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should not be the only OECD nation with-out the equivalent of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sadly, this pandemic won’t be the last we face. Returning to our pre-pandemic complacency is not an option. Consider the ignoring of fire experts who predicted the eastern-state infernos of 2019–20 before the first wisp of smoke. There was neither listening nor respect. But there was hellfire. Meanwhile, droughts worsen and temperature records are broken. But we don’t have to surrender. Guided by science, we can fight climate change and create jobs at the same time. We can have a future as a renewable-energy superpower, with all the associated environmental and economic benefits. There are so many opportunities – but as Labor understands instinctively, you can get the policy settings right only when you respect and heed the science. And when the science is clear, politicians should act. Action on climate change that provides investment certainty will create jobs and lower energy costs while reducing emissions. And it will help build the economic diversity and strength we so urgently need. The pandemic has highlighted just how lacking in resilience our economy is. The cautionary tale of Australia’s car industry is emblematic. This Government withdrew co-investment funding and dared manufacturers to leave – an invitation they accepted. This act of self-sabotage knocked us down the technological totem pole and further narrowed an economic base that has become overly reliant on services and the export of raw materials. One result is we are making ourselves vulnerable to a decline in living standards. And when the next crisis severs global supply lines, we will be exposed. This is our chance to start turning things around. We must strengthen our capacity to create. We must become serious about high-tech manufacturing. But our research and development investment has fallen below two per cent of GDP – below countries such as South Korea, Israel, Sweden, Denmark and Singapore. Unless we invest in R&D we will be restricted to reading the story of our proud manufacturing history, when we should be writing the next chapter.

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As a nation, we need to be thinking about what share of our national income should be set aside for R&D. Just as the Reserve Bank provides a degree of certainty to the financial markets on the future path of interest rates, government needs to provide guidance on projected R&D spending. That way, the Australian community can invest in science with confidence. We could do much better at commercialising research, thereby building up industries at home and selling their product to the world. Our failure in this area reduces potential revenue from intellectual property, undermining investment, entrepreneurship and technological growth. Labor has backed calls from the tech sector for the R&D tax-incentive refunds to be paid early. As part of our desire to partner with the private sector, a future Labor Government would encourage the superannuation industry to invest in infrastructure, technology and R&D in a way that is consistent with members’ interests. Such a measure would benefit all of us well into the future. Take artificial intelligence. In 2018 alone, AI contributed an estimated $US2 billion to the global economy. Within a decade that figure is forecast to reach nearly $US16 billion. At the last federal election, Labor championed the establishment of a National Centre of AI Excellence, which would help chart the likely national investment required in this area by bringing together those with a stake in AI’s application in our economy. Such a centre needs to be established now. We have the talent and brainpower in this country to be world leaders in scientific endeavour, but haven’t always shown the capacity to retain our most brilliant minds. Scientific progress starts early. The number of Australian school students studying science has been dwindling for decades. There simply aren’t enough jobs waiting for them. And only 16 per cent of Australians working in STEM are women. We also need to be thinking about how to integrate our scientific research into national projects and objectives. We need to ask ourselves exactly what we want science to deliver.

We want a nation adapted to a carbon-constrained world. We want our cities and regions to remain habitable and productive. And we want our sights set on previously unthought of possibilities. These are goals, whatever our differences, that we can agree upon. Let us make the most of recent wake-up calls. The bushfires showed what happens when we walk away from science into the darkness of denial; a virus has illuminated the path back. The moment is ours to seize.

The Hon Anthony Albanese MP has been the Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labor Party since 2019. He has been Member of Parliament for Grayndler since 1996.

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A TIME FOR BOLDER INNOVATION POLICY Australia must seize this moment to shift the national conversation, and commit to building a stronger culture in support of innovation across business and the community. By Melinda Cilento

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ustralia, like many countries around the world, is considering how to reshape policy to deliver jobs-rich growth and lay the foundations for future prosperity in the face of great headwinds and uncertainty. Looking anew at innovation policy is a crucial early step. While there are new complexities to Australia’s policy challenges, serious issues had emerged prior to the COVID-19 crisis. Increases in population and working hours were enabling economic growth. Productivity, however – the driver of both competitiveness and sustained prosperity – was languishing, and, as a result, so too was innovation. Too few businesses in Australia – large or small – have been investing enough in innovation, particularly compared with international peers. Despite these worrying trends, it has been difficult to capture the imagination of the Australian community around the benefits of innovation. Research by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) confirms this. Our 2018 Community Pulse survey examined attitudes to economic growth and the policy issues that mattered most to the community. The results showed that respondents did not see business investment in new technologies and training as important. Evidently, Australians remain disconnected from the benefits of innovation to their daily lives. If we cannot connect the benefits of innovation to the wider community (in terms of jobs, income and better products and services), or to business (in terms of competitiveness and performance), it will be difficult to gain widespread support for a renewed focus on policy changes that enable innovation in Australia.

Ironically, the COVID-19 crisis presents an unexpected opportunity. There has been, for example, significant interest and pride in the role of our great research institutes – such as the CSIRO and the Peter Doherty Institute – in understanding and tracking the virus and developing a vaccine. We have also seen innovations that have saved lives, prevented infections, enabled businesses to remain open and preserve jobs, as well as ensured access to goods and services for households. Businesses big and small have changed their models and innovated at a pace few imagined possible just months ago. Many of these innovations are not transformative in the sense of being new to Australia or the world – and we must strive for more of those – but they have delivered better outcomes and opportunities. We must use these examples to connect innovation and its benefits to the wider community in ways that we have failed to in the past. This is a moment to shift the national conversation on innovation and work to build a stronger culture in support of innovation across business and the community. In this vein, there is a precedent in the experience of Singapore during and after the SARS epidemic. Underlying many of the bolder business and policy changes seen in recent months has been an acceptance of greater risk; significant decisions are being made faster than ever before across all sectors. Not all decisions should be made as though the nation’s in crisis, but neither is risk aversion conducive to judicious investment in innovation. There are lessons to be learned in how we have balanced issues of risk and reward. A 2019 report by the Australian Institute of

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Company Directors highlighted the adverse impact on innovation of risk-averse boards and mapped smarter directorial action. This focus is welcome, and the top two barriers to innovation raised in the survey – human-talent shortages and financial impediments – must be a policy priority. Business and government will need to work together to address these issues, particularly given the uncertainties around future capital and labour movements – uncertainties that may otherwise diminish risk-appetite. Confidence in our ability to attract the best and brightest minds through skilled migration and gain financial clout through foreign investment is an important foundation for business decision-making on innovation investment. A renewed focus on supply-chain resilience and diversification has reignited debate on Australia’s manufacturing industry. We cannot afford a "back-to-the-future" approach that relies on protection and governmental propping up of uncompetitive sectors and businesses. However, there is renewed appetite for putting industry policy back on the table. That, in turn, would foreshadow prioritising innovation as a driver of industry competitiveness. Even more ambitious is the case put by Mariana Mazzucato in her book The Entrepreneurial State. Mazzucato reflects on the big government-backed R&D investments that underpin so much of modern technology – the Internet, GPS, touch screens. She laments the lack of credit given to the public sector for driving these investments and argues strongly for a mission-led approach to innovation that looks beyond investing only in “shovel-ready projects”. This can be interpreted as a call to place some calculated bets on various uncertain but potentially highly valuable innovations, or, in the words of CSIRO CEO Larry Marshall, looking to “play in the areas where we have an unfair advantage”. The establishment of Australia’s Space Agency is a bold move generating new business opportunities as well as some genuine "firsts" for Australia. And, by the accounts of those leading the agency, it is exciting the imagination of many young Australians who never imagined they would have the chance to travel into space. If that translates into a broader interest in innovation

and risk-taking, all the better. The value of investing in basic R&D and knowledge creation sits at the heart of mission-led innovation and is the focus of Jump-Starting America by economists Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson. The authors present compelling evidence of the substantial public and private returns from investment in basic science and innovation. As one example, by their estimate, having drawn on evidence from the US, New Zealand and Europe, the cost of creating an additional job through the expansion of R&D is around $US25,000 – half the estimated cost of a job created by stimulus spending in the recession precipitated by the Global Financial Crisis. This is worth considering as we contemplate a policy agenda to support sustained economic activity, job creation and income growth. In Australia, there is an opportunity to jumpstart our future. The keys are a focus on investment in R&D and innovation, and exploring more proactive government collaboration with business in pursuit of delivering sustained benefits to the community.

Melinda Cilento is the chief executive of CEDA. She is a non-executive director of Australian Unity and co-chair of Reconciliation Australia. She is also a member of the Parliamentary Budget Office panel of expert advisors.

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PREPARE FOR HELL Dr Adir Schiffman is brutally honest about what’s involved in growing a startup: endless problems, endless disasters, endless catastrophes. But, if you are able to solve most of them effectively, you end up with a high-quality company. By Dr Adir Schiffman

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nnovating is, mostly, not fun. Except in the most financially reckless of times, the idea of the startup as a resource-rich juggernaut is entirely fictional. In reality, embarking on a disruptive, innovative endeavour means creating something previously untried that will likely fail, or trying again where others have failed. The best word association for “startup” is not “fun” but “failure”. Consequently, founders and early-stage startup employees experience a tremendous amount of stress. Work life is a rollercoaster of emotions where victories feel small and transient, while defeats are frequent and often feel terminal, particularly in the early stages. This daily dose of relentless anxiety severely degrades happiness, damages health and strains relationships inside and outside work. My consistent advice to potential founders is to run a mile from startups if they can find happiness in any other field of endeavour. Startups should be the exclusive domain of those helplessly addicted to innovating and creating. That said, the preparedness of these innovators to embrace the risk of failure is vital for any country seeking to sustain a prosperous and happy society. In the current information age, technology companies simply deliver more – more jobs growth, better quality jobs and higher value exports – than any other industry. Given that almost every successful technology company began as a fragile startup, it is vital that government supports these early-stage businesses to give founders the best shot of beating the odds and succeeding. The corollary, of course, is that founders must also help themselves by developing a high degree of resilience and perspective. Over

the past 20 years I’ve founded a dozen companies and many have made pleasing exits. Some have even grown beyond $100m of revenue and listed on public markets. In the process I’ve learned that a key determinant of startup success is how well founders learn to make critical decisions in a high-stress environment. The first lesson for founders is how to face reality. Founders are, by nature, optimists – no one realistic about probabilities would launch a startup – and thus acknowledging problems can be difficult for them. Indeed, this was my biggest mistake during the 2009 Global Financial Crisis. On the eve of the crisis our company had grown for seven straight years, had never fired anyone except for performance reasons, and continually moved to larger and nicer offices. We were not emotionally primed to accept anything but growth, and my personal sense of self-worth was inextricably tied to this success. Founders are often counselled to surround themselves with experienced advisors, but my wrong choices during this time were not for a lack of good advice. I had a very experienced and wise board of directors, several of whom had early warning of the impending disaster via their own businesses. Rich, smart and successful, they repeatedly implored me to cut costs and fire staff well before the worst set in. Yet I thought they were all pessimists who didn’t understand our business. The result of this self-delusion was terrible. Many people suffered huge stress and turmoil that would have been lessened significantly had I listened to my board and acted early. No doubt this same scenario will play out many times over during the COVID-19 crisis.

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Accepting reality early is the foundation upon which good decisions are based. The difference between an optimist and a pessimist should lie not in their acceptance of problems, but rather in their perspective on possibility. The Failed Pessimist imagines endless storms and so never leaves harbour. As 19th century Presbyterian theologian William Shedd said: “A ship is safe in harbour, but that’s not what ships are for.” This is no personality for a founder. But nor do all optimists make good founders. The Failed Optimist is equally ill-suited to innovation and acknowledges the storm only after the ship is smashed upon the rocks. In contrast, the Successful Optimist will acknowledge the storm on the horizon, and then set sail regardless. They have assembled a strong crew and have confidence that together they can make sound decisions and adapt quickly

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

to ensure safe passage. This perspective lies at the heart of the best founders, and often it is the presence of just such an unexpected storm that challenges a capable founder and crew to innovate in even better ways. Helping founders see reality while maintaining the confidence to press on is fundamental to supporting an innovation ecosystem. The science author Steven Johnson once noted that “if you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect”. A case in point is the recent Australian approach of aggregating founders into clusters, which has proved valuable not simply in aiding collaborative development of ideas but also in assisting founders with perspective. All founders face similar problems, and the opportunity to engage serendipitously

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Innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect and honestly with other founders in close proximity is hugely valuable. Founders can provide one another with an external perspective that helps them accept reality, while reinforcing the optimism and positivity that are inherent in the founder character. Another pitfall faced by most founders is their lack of financial acumen. Financial literacy is the windscreen wiper of business. As companies race to reach their objectives all manner of mud is thrown upon the vehicle and obscures the windscreen. Without a strong grasp of finance, founders will simply not have a clear view of their current position and will not notice the cliff towards which they are headed (and there is always a cliff nearby!). Most founders consider finance a boring, administrative “cost centre” in their quest to complete code and make sales before running out of cash. In 2009, as my businesses rapidly lost clients and burned through the balance sheet, I realised that my grasp of financial statements was inadequate to allow me to participate constructively in planning discussions. So, one long weekend I went away with my young family and, between relaxing in the spa with them and trying to de-stress, I read Accounting For Dummies from cover-tocover and made notes. A founder who cannot stand before a board and comprehensively explain the numbers, without a finance person for a crutch, is a dangerous CEO. Successful innovation is not simply about writing great code, funding developers

or translating research. It also demands that leaders are given the tools and expertise to succeed, and finance is king among these. Finally, great founders accept that sometimes things will fail. In his ground-breaking book The Innovator’s Dilemma, the late Clay Christensen observed that about 95 per cent of new products fail. Sometimes, though, the failure of an entire startup becomes inevitable. Even though we all constantly fall short in life, for the longest time Australian culture considered any type of failure as a permanent personal blemish. This was particularly damaging for innovation and startups, as the more one pushes boundaries, the more one fails – and no organisation tries to defy convention more than the startup. Thankfully, several developments have begun reshaping the Australian perspective towards failure within an innovation context. The rise of venture capital has been a force for good, not simply from a funding perspective but also in the virtue of their very model. This model accepts that while most startups will ultimately fail, a small number of huge wins will drive big overall returns. It therefore views the failed founder not as a loser, but rather as having undertaken tuition on someone else’s dime (namely their last investor), and sees the failed founder as less likely to make rookie mistakes than the first-time one. Israel has always celebrated this "try, try again" model and Australia’s newfound admiration for the “Israeli Startup Nation” has also boosted our innovation culture. Like all developed economies, Australia is reliant on the technology industry to drive jobs growth, particularly via small innovative tech companies. Other countries, including France, Canada, the UK, US and Singapore, are well ahead of us and have active programs to nurture startups and founders. Innovative founders represent our best chance of driving technology to become our leading export over the next decade. It is the most reliable approach to creating a happy and prosperous life for future generations, and to ensuring our Australian way of life continues well into the future.

Dr. Adir Schiffman has been a board member for multiple successful startups, including sportstech company Catapult and online mattress retailer Sleeping Duck.

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CAPTURING INNOVATION How can we track progress in innovation if we do not have something to measure it against? The team at NAB has been following businesses since 2016 in an innovation index.

or many businesses, innovation can seem like an abstract concept. But we know that innovation is common across the entire business sector. Driven by their passion for customers and competitive pressures, many business owners innovate continuously, irrespective of the size of their business. But few perceive themselves as innovators and often do not even call what they are doing “innovation”. Rather, they are more likely to speak of improvements or simple changes they have made to their everyday processes or incremental enhancements to their products or services. Perceptions are important. While often underestimating their own level of innova-

Businesses are not usually willing or able to make drastic or rapid change. A simpler option can be to do nothing, often referred to as status quo bias. tion, a large majority of business owners does not consider Australia to be a “highly” innovative country. This view is particularly prevalent among very large firms and can shape their view of Australia’s short- and medium-term economic outlook. Most businesses also typically view the culture of innovation within their industry sector as much weaker than that within their own business. Importantly, highly innovative firms are typically more optimistic about Australia’s future, as well as more confident about their own business conditions.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

There is no simple diagnostic for capturing innovation. Australia needs to better track innovation and its key drivers. While traditional indicators – R&D spending, patent filings, labour-force skills, broadband accessibility, startups, collaborations between business and higher education – add to our understanding of the innovation environment, they do not fully capture innovation across all sizes and types of business. Traditional metrics often skew results in favour of large businesses that are more likely to have a formal or structured approach to innovation, while smaller companies typically do not label such activities as innovation. As a result, Australia is potentially underestimating the level of innovation in this country. NAB’s Behavioural Economics team sought to develop a new proxy of economy-wide innovation by breaking down the key drivers of innovation to construct the NAB Business Innovation Index. The index has been running annually since 2016 and is derived from a survey of around 1,700 Australian businesses ranging from small to very large. It is based on the extent to which firms have adjusted, improved or changed anything in their business that has allowed them to do things differently, more quickly, or more cost-efficiently. The latest reading for 2020 saw innovation ratings tumble to all-time survey lows in the wake of COVID-19. Amid widespread supply-chain and cashflow disruptions, forced business closures and labour shedding, innovation arising from businesses doing things “more quickly” and “cost efficiently” sank. But the overall index masked some fundamental changes in the way many Australian businesses were operating and adapting. Innovation from businesses doing things “differently” rose sharply. Examples of how

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businesses were able to pivot during the virus include: cabinet makers producing plastic protection shields; tech companies providing “ibots” to assist call centres in managing higher volumes; motels becoming quarantine centres; real estate agents conducting online auctions; distillers producing hand sanitisers; and pharmacies using mobile terminals to take prescriptions to customers’ homes. And while overall innovation has fallen during the pandemic, the index highlights how businesses can apply their ingenuity to adapting to a post-virus world. Businesses are not usually willing or able to make drastic or rapid change. A simpler option can be to do nothing, often referred to as status quo bias. While perhaps irrational, sticking to choices that have worked in the past is often viewed as safer due to another fundamental principle of behavioural economics – loss aversion. Typically, businesses (like professional athletes) view the pain derived from losses as greater than the joy derived from gains. Necessity is clearly the mother of invention: some of the sectors hit hardest by the pandemic, such as Recreational and Personal Services, Accommodation and Cafes and Restaurants, were among the most innovative. Not only have many businesses had to innovate by doing things differently during COVID-19, many believe they will persist with the changes they have made. Having experienced change for the better, they are taking the opportunity to build these into their longerterm business models. Some of NAB’s more interesting findings over the past few years have centred on innovation behaviours among smaller enterprises. Importantly, the research suggests small businesses innovate more than they realise and reveals the energy and dynamism among younger businesses, with a break point occurring at around 10 years of operation . Innovation can be "radical" (the development of a new business, product and/or process that is transformative) or "incremental" (an improvement to an existing product, service or process). Incremental innovation among small-medium enterprises (SMEs) is both much more extensive than radical innovation and more likely to go unreported. Importantly, being highly innovative can have a strong, positive impact on business

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performance. That said, the most innovative firms tend to be at opposite ends of the spectrum – very high-performing businesses (with strong business conditions and capital to match) and very low-performing businesses (weak conditions with little capital and desperate for survival). Innovation among high-performing firms is often accompanied by capital investment. And once an innovation occurs,

the accompanying investment can help to diffuse innovation throughout the organisation and further drive growth. Generally, businesses innovate in an effort to drive growth and revenues. However, this is typically a much bigger driver of innovation for large businesses, while SMEs are more likely to be motivated by factors such as differentiating their business, widening their customer base and enabling them to manage change and respond to key trends. The research has also revealed certain culture-building benefits of innovation. While numerous factors drive the culture of

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innovation within a business, the most important is leadership. Innovation is strongest in firms whose leaders are committed to being innovation-oriented and pro-change. The next biggest factor is understanding and embracing new technology. Other key factors include execution (the ability not just to generate new ideas but also implement them), customer focus (having a firm understanding of their

requirements); and vision (having goals that are clearly articulated and understood by all those within the business). SMEs with a strong culture of innovation tend to involve all their stakeholders more so than do medium- or low-innovation firms. Interestingly, how businesses perceive the benefits of innovation (both for their customers and for their business), varies significantly

according to how long a business has been operating: innovation benefits are most highly valued by SMEs in their first decade of operation. While many small businesses view innovation as a key to their success, it is more embedded in the broad strategy of younger businesses. Strategy, both overall and innovation-specific, is known to be a core driver of innovation activities and success. Yet relatively few businesses, regardless of age, have welldeveloped processes or structures in place to select and prioritise which innovation projects get approved and funded. Relative to strategic focus, innovation processes and structures are weak, and without implementation mechanisms in place, any innovation strategy will be limited in its impact. Knowing their markets and customers, undertaking constant process reviews, learning from failure, stoking passion and drive: these imperatives are at the heart of a thriving culture of innovation. Highly innovative SMEs also identified their ability to generate and implement new ideas as key aspects of their culture. Significantly, small businesses report having the most intimate knowledge of their customers. The most significant barrier to innovation and business change is simply not having enough time to turn ideas into reality. Another is funding. Regardless of the innovation approach, output will be a direct function of input. SMEs are most likely to fund their innovation activities with their own funds rather than through government grants, equity or debt. Newer businesses were far more likely to source their funds from government grants, crowdfunding or from family and friends. Finally, most SMEs have an immature approach to innovation measurement. While individual innovation projects can be accomplished without organisational measures of innovation, sustaining high levels of systematic innovation capability depends on businesses setting up the appropriate mechanisms.

Dean Pearson is the head of Industry Analysis at NAB. He has over 20 years' experience in analysing the economy both in Australia and globally.

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INNOVATION IS NOT AN OPTIONAL ADD-ON Innovative companies integrate their strategy into the operating model and culture, making innovation the responsibility of all staff. By Sammy Kumar

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nnovation is not just a necessity for business but an aspiration of humanity. We express our need for innovation in literature, art, sport and all of human endeavour. For business, though, innovation is a constant goal. A better, cheaper, faster way of providing a product or service is good for both the customer and the business. At some point in their evolution, companies seem to stagnate. Management of the status quo appears to overwhelm the true mission and purpose of the entity. The business wants to remove risk, recover investment and maintain market share; meanwhile, the skill set that drove innovation fades or moves on. (Analysts, media and even some board members reinforce this focus on protection and current financial yield at the expense of pursuing medium- to longer-term growth and client satisfaction.) When the business realises that it needs to innovate again, it can be too late. Too many Australian companies have positioned innovation as an abstracted growth initiative as opposed to a core competency. The problem with this strategy is that it pits the current business – the one driving all revenue – against a set of smaller initiatives that will seem inconsequential next to the needs of the primary revenue model. But those smaller initiatives may, when mature, drive a better customer experience and higher margins. The separation of innovation from the core business works for very few companies – and these are mainly companies that have mastered running innovation sprints outside the business and then bringing the new product back into the existing operation. A key point about innovation is that it must be pervasive throughout the organisation. It will not

act as a growth catalyst if it is not integrated into the operating model and culture. It needs to be the responsibility of all staff to find efficiencies, enable data-driven decision-making and accelerate their own personal development by finding ways to deliver better customer value. The integration of an innovation mindset into the culture of the business is essential, as this helps the business respond better to both new ideas and competitive threats. An openness to new ideas and new ways of working creates an inclusive culture in which levels of staff buy-in will rise. The problem for any organisation in a so-called business-as-usual phase is that innovating the operating model becomes next to impossible. This, in turn, makes the business slow to respond to competitive threats, vulnerable to disruption, and inefficient. Once a business reaches this phase it will also, most likely, be labouring under the weight of a dysfunctional culture that inhibits all the possible benefits of having innovation as a core competency. Trying to overlay innovation practices on top of this type of business will not drive the desired outcomes and may even hasten a cultural decline. In the past two decades, Australia has emulated many global models. We have spent big on incubators, accelerators, innovation labs and funds. Businesses and government green lit these initiatives, believing they would lead to highgrowth models on the side without disrupting the overarching status quo. They believed this would enable them to create the magic dust being copiously generated by the likes of Google and Amazon. Amazon led (and continues to lead) the world in return on R&D funding. Every company wanted to match them but did not want to

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State of Our Innovation Nation risk – or be forced to compete with – the current business. In order to emulate Amazon, the business would need to remove dividends so that capital could be invested into the re-build of foundational infrastructure and move away from the practice of lower risk, abstracted from core innovation. The two biggest mistakes made by business were, one, trying to run new models on top of legacy foundations; and, two, assuming the customer base would, for a lower cost of acquisition, be converted into your new models simply because you could directly market to them. There were very few success stories from the businesses that tried to build abstracted from core innovation models. The poor result reduced the both the willingness to keep innovating and the level of investment.

ebbs and flows of demand. What business in Australia requires is an energised transformation effort. Operating-model transformation is a key requirement to make Australian business competitive against better-funded and technologically enabled competitors. Technology transformation is no longer a choice but an absolute requirement. There can be no half measures. If the core technology is no longer fit for purpose, then disruption is no longer a matter of if but when. Business must have the capacity to innovate the core in order to drive two factors: a lower-cost technology transaction and the ability to add advantage to the business for a low cost. In focusing on operating-model and technology-foundation transformation, the business will need to reset itself. Following a period of reset, the business will be

Big business in Australia was not comfortable with failure and did not regard it as a necessary part of driving innovation fitness across the organisation. Unlike governments in China, Singapore and many other Asian countries, the government in Australia did not support these new products and services and, as a result, Australia – with a few notable exceptions – lags behind the rest of the world in developing unique IP and highly innovative business models. Key skill sets flowed overseas to environments where the new ideas were accepted, where funding and support had a vigorous ecosystem and where failure was seen as a rite of passage. In Australia, continuing with current practices is not going to yield the desired benefits for business or the country. An innovation mindset is required to reduce reliance on natural resources and make the economy less vulnerable to the

in a position to compete. It will drive innovation fitness in the organisation and will develop the type of culture that it needs to make innovation a core competency. But commitment is essential. Businesses need to accept that things will go wrong and there will be failures. This is the cost of building an innovative enterprise. My final word of advice is that businesses should articulate a moat in detail. This should become the mission of the business and the desired outcome of a transformation effort. In realising this moat, the company will have had to innovate the operating model and the technology foundation of the business, and in doing so it will yield an active culture in which innovation is once again a core competency. This new enterprise will be a beacon for inspired leaders, present and future.

Sammy Kumar is the co-founder of Sayers Group (Sayers). Sayers is an advisory, innovation and investment business, purpose-built for the new economy. Prior to this he was managing partner for PwC Australia’s Enterprise business, Strategy and Transformation, and its Asia practice.

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RESPECT THE HUMANITIES The arts and humanities are essential to innovation, as we need a nation capable of seeing beyond the obvious and thinking creatively. By Tony Goldsby-Smith

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he federal government has effectively devalued the humanities as a social good. Its new funding regime will vastly penalise students who want to study the humanities and instead encourage them to pursue “relevant” degrees in things like science, teaching and health. (One presumes that the kind of teachers they envisage won’t be teaching the humanities any more, so the elimination of the humanities will seep down into schools over time.) Is this a good thing? In particular, is it good for the country? The government’s reasoning boils down to relevance and “job readiness”. Behind this rationale lies the assumption that the humanities are of little use in the real world and are, at best, good for hobbies or the idle rich. Although the push for pragmatism in education is a desperate one, it is easy to sympathise with governmental and parental fears that we are not equipping our children for viable lives in the modern economy. In the face of this anxiety, any defence of the humanities can sound like special pleading. Nonetheless, I believe the government’s position is disastrous and short-sighted. I am unusually placed to voice this view because I am trained in the humanities (English literature, to be precise), taught the humanities but then forged a 30-year career in strategy-and-innovation consulting. I founded my own firm, employed a couple of hundred people during its lifespan, and in that time generated millions of dollars of revenue. Our clients included global firms, so we exported our skills. Like any good capitalist, I sold my firm in due course. So I have walked on both sides of the fence.

Presumably the government would like to have produced more people like me. But the question is, did my humanities training help or hinder me? Several years ago, I brought out to Australia one of the world’s leading business thinkers, Roger Martin, then dean of the Rotman Business School in Canada. He spoke about innovation to a large breakfast gathering at Sydney’s Opera House and took questions at the end. The last question came from a person who was not in business but in education. That person asked: “What message do you have for us in education about this world of business and innovation?” Martin shot back: “Lay off the humanities, for God’s sake!” Later, he explained his reasoning to me. The worst thing you can do as a strategist, he said, is to throw away your source of competitive advantage. The humanities had made countries like Australia great, so chasing technology

The humanities had made countries like Australia great, so chasing technology education in place of the humanities would paint you into failure over the long term.

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education in place of the humanities would paint you into failure over the long term. Was his view off the mark? Not according to Nobel Laureate in economics, Ed Phelps. Phelps asks the question: what was the source of the extraordinary wealth generated in just 10 countries during the industrial revolution? He considers but discounts the usual suspects – technology (it existed before) and capital (likewise). The real source of the wealth was what he calls “the Imaginarium” – the large group of people trained in the broad thinking of the liberal arts who turned their minds to commerce. They had the magic combination of conceptual thinking and freedom that generated possibilities; they empathised with their customers and invested in people. Phelps is adamant the Imaginarium lives on, but that we are in danger of strangling it. I concede that the humanities need to adapt to become more relevant, but in just the same way, business does, too. There is a flawed and naive assumption behind the government’s agenda that the “work” for which students need to be “job ready” is predictable and will need the STEM mind. But future work won’t be the same as today’s work. And it looks very likely that doing this future work successfully will require the agile, conceptual mind that the humanities foster. The great philosopher of rhetoric and modernity, Richard McKeon, once wrote an essay addressing this question of what future the liberal arts had. He argued that civilisation flourished at those rare times when the humanities and the sciences talked to and respected each other. True innovation and wealth came from that relationship. Few societies through history have got that conversation right. And we are in danger of making it a lot harder. The ramifications of this policy shift towards pragmatism will play out over the next decade or so, but I fear they will be disastrous. We will produce a nation of Dickensean Gradgrinds who think the world is just bricks and mortar, as well as a nation that neither innovates nor adapts. Dr Tony Golsby-Smith a leader in design thinking, strategy and innovation. Tony was the chair of design at Carnegie Mellon University and the founder of consulting firm Second Road. He is currently the chairman of Mimesis Technology.

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HIGHER CALLING Pursuing profit while serving a social purpose are not mutually exclusive. Why having a heart could be good for business. By Glenn Keys

usinesses around the world are looking for a new and different way to engage customers, staff, shareholders and the broader community. Over the years companies have tried to use Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a methodology to win over these four key stakeholders. Unfortunately, it has tended to fail, principally because CSR was not a fundamental component of the company’s DNA and would often get dropped as soon as there was pressure on the bottom line. Companies were using CSR as a marketing tool. Customers, staff and the community saw through the veneer to recognise it as the self-promotion it really was. However, companies that are serious about wanting to make a difference in their community, while still making a profit, have shown that having a social purpose at the core of their ethos meets the needs of not only customers, staff and the community but also shareholders. A social purpose gives the business a social licence to operate. It’s a commitment that resonates with customers and staff alike. So, what is a social purpose? It has been defined as follows: “A Social Purpose Business is a company whose enduring reason for being is to create a better world. It is an engine for good, creating social benefits by the very act of conducting business. Its growth is a positive force in society.” Social purpose in a commercial context needs differentiation from the driving force behind social enterprises or not-for-profit organisations. In the commercial context, the entity must still be profitable and commercially sound and sustainable. This requires the organisation to develop a strategy around its social purpose, including plans for delivery, monitoring and reportage. The benefits of having a social purpose at 1

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the core of your business occur across three keys areas: • Staff. The pluses here are manifold and include low turnover rates, high productivity and a high rate of staff-generated ideas around business activities. • Customers. They will share your company’s values and feel uplifted and engaged by their association with a socially responsible enterprise. • Company. If the above apply, then the benefits flow on to the company, whether in the shape of contract extensions, successful rebids or new business lines. We have seen that a flow-on from social purpose is improved employee retention. “Intrapreneurs” – an important concept – are staff stimulated by their employer’s aims and environment to create innovation within the company – to the benefit of the entire mission. Intrapreneurship produces new and exciting ideas for the company and these are nurtured and supported by management. There are many common misconceptions around social purpose in a commercial context. Social purpose and CSR are not the same thing. Within a business, CSR is typically driven by senior management or even the marketing division and is usually one of the first activities to be jettisoned when finances tighten. Social purpose, on the other hand, is deeply embedded in the company and stays regardless of financial outlook. Social purpose does not mean being a charity. To reiterate: commercial companies with a social purpose still need to make a profit. But they do so knowing they can also make a difference in their community. Profit is not sacrificed at the altar of social responsibility. But it is pursued responsibly in the knowledge that

Standberg C., social purpose advisor to Social Purpose Institute At United Way, Canada

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profit and purpose are not mutually exclusive. The founder and esteemed “grandfather” of business and management analysis, Professor Peter Drucker, wrote more than 20 books which remain seminal references. One of these, solely devoted to charities, laid bare how poorly many such organisations were managed in the 1950s and called for an infusion of private-sector rigour and management acuity. Having a social purpose behind commercial goals emerged over subsequent decades as one solution to the problems Drucker described.

Follow these steps to develop a social-purpose strategy for your company: • Ask, can my business have a social purpose from day one of operations? Ideally, the answer will be yes • Identify the social imperatives your company could meaningfully influence • Avoid trying to do too much too soon • Ensure your social purpose is consistent with your company and brand • Align the social purpose with stakeholder, shareholder and customer needs • Set goals for what you hope to achieve in the social space. At Aspen Medical, we engage our staff in a number of ways, including at a very personal level through our matching program: each year, staff can donate up to $750 to a charity of their choice and we will match the amount. In addition, a workplace giving program allows staff to donate from their pre-tax earnings; this is also matched. We also support staff in their fundraising initiatives, such as their achievement of raising nearly $30,000 for a women’s refuge centre; management matched this sum, too. We also offer staff two additional days’ leave each year so they can volunteer for a charity of their choice. Our customers’ wellbeing is central to our business. For more than 10 years we have been the Department of Health provider of the Remote Area Health Corps (RAHC), which offers

health professionals short-term placements in remote Indigenous communities. In addition, we have funded numerous health campaigns around trachoma, crusted scabies and rhematic heart disease). We also have a well-developed Indigenous nursing, allied health and Bachelor of Medicine scholarship programs, all funded by Aspen Medical. There is no doubt that when you truly have social purpose at the core of your business, more stakeholders – staff, customers, even shareholders – want to engage with your business. The keys are to ensure your social purpose is aligned with your company and that you engage stakeholders in the social purpose.

Glenn Keys is the founder and executive chairman of Canberra-based Aspen Medical, one of the world's leading providers of outsourced healthcare solutions. He has placed social responsibility and community involvement at the heart of Aspen Medical's culture.

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FUNDING OUR FUTURE AUSTRALIA’S INNOVATION CHALLENGE: 2023 & BEYOND Phil Ruthven AM INNOVATION DEMANDS NATIONAL ACTION Clare O’Neil MP INCENTIVISING INNOVATION Alan Garcia FUNDING INDIGENOUS ENTREPRENEURSHIP Dean Foley SUPER IDEA: FUNDING AFFORDABLE HOUSING Era Scheerlinck CAPITAL NEEDED IN AN INNOVATION NATION Yasser El-Ansary FINANCING INNOVATION: AN INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE David Gall FROM INVESTING TO POSITIVE IMPACT Matthew Browning THE TIME IS RIGHT FOR ETHICAL INVESTING John McMurdo INVESTING FOR GOOD Max Capetta RESPONSIBLE INVESTORS WILL SHAPE AUSTRALIA’S FUTURE Simon O’Connor

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AUSTRALIA’S INNOVATION CHALLENGE: 2021 & BEYOND Phil Ruthven AM Founder, IBISWorld & Ruthven Institute

ustralia is a remarkably innovative nation. Prior to European settlement in 1788, Indigenous Australians pioneered ecological sustainability and developed an extensive knowledge of native flora and fauna, both of which remain outstanding achievements in the 21st century. Since then, Australians have continued to demonstrate ingenuity in many areas, including science, medicine and manufacturing. The nation’s achievements to date, include 15 Nobel Prize-winning innovations shared among 16 Australian recipients since the Prize was first awarded in 1901 (coincidentally, Australia’s year of Federation). It’s a proud past – but what can Australia expect of the future? What challenges will we face in 2020 and beyond?

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State of Our Innovation Nation To answer this question, we need to consider several factors with regard to being innovative in an increasingly competitive world: • the changing world order; • our changing mix of industries; • the productivity challenge; • the elements of innovation (the who, what and how); and • the growing importance of intellectual property (IP) for business and economic success. The changing world-order The graph below suggests that the world – containing some 230 nations and protectorates – continues to amalgamate into larger cohorts. Over time, as a society and an economy, we have aggregated families (households) into tribes (local government), then into territories (states) and nations. These nations are now federating into eight regions, as highlighted below; and perhaps, as we move into the 22nd century, these regions will be presided over by an empowered world government or council of sorts. Regionalisation and globalisation are slow and painful processes, and there have been setbacks to both – take Brexit, for example. But, importantly, Australia is now part of the world’s largest region, the Asia Pacific, in terms of population and economic output. Indeed, the larger Asian megaregion (being the Asia Pacific and Indian subcontinent), accounts for two-thirds of Australia’s inbound tourism and immigration and 80% of our goods and services trade, respectively. A tectonic shift is underway in the global economy. The East, which already houses four-fifths of the world’s citizens, has also overtaken the West in GDP terms. Meanwhile, the economic and population pecking order of nations is changing fast, as we see in the following two graphs.

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In this 21st century, nations with the largest populations are becoming the largest economies, having embraced their own Industrial Age and also the Infotronics Age of information and communications technology (ICT) and service industries. This changing world order has enormous implications for our region. Although Australia comprises 18% of the Asia Pacific’s arable land – second only to China, which accounts for 54% – we only have just over 2% of the region’s GDP, and only 1% of its total population. So, if we are to be a good neighbour within the Asia Pacific, it is likely that Australia will, eventually, need to accommodate a larger population – a development will require appropriate infrastructure, a continued policy of peaceful multiculturalism, and innovative thinking with regard to the nation’s ecology. It is likely our standard of living (real GDP per capita) will also increase by a factor of three to four times in the process, as has been the case in past centuries (notwithstanding a slow recent decade). Our changing mix of industries At present, and as we progress towards the middle of the century, Australia’s industry mix is very different to that of past centuries, as demonstrated in the below chart. As is the case with all developed economies at present, the quaternary sector (coloured in green in the following graph is currently the fastest-growing services sector in Australia; although the quinary sector (coloured in blue in the above chart), especially the Health Care and Social Assistance industry, is also growing as a share of the nation’s GDP as we enter the 2020s. Service industries growth is underpinned by ICT, which, as of 2007, is in its second stage – being the Digital Era of fast broadband, big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics. Outsourcing creates new economic ages and industries, although this is not widely understood or appreciated. We wouldn’t have had an agriculture industry if households

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had remained self-sufficient (and inefficient, compared with dedicated farms), for example; nor would we have had a manufacturing industry if households had remained self-sufficient (and, again, inefficient, compared with factories) in preserving food and making clothes and furniture. Both those ages – the Agrarian and Industrial ages – have since been surpassed by our new Infotronics Age, which began in the mid-1960s and is expected to continue to the middle of this century. The current economic age has seen growth primarily in services industries: the result of outsourcing services from households as well as from corporations and overseas countries, as summarised in the below exhibit.

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It’s awe-inspiring to consider the extraordinary amount of innovation that has already occurred to date. We have industrialised billions of dollars of new services to individuals, households, businesses and overseas customers; and we can add to this the innovation that has taken place here and overseas in new enabling utilities. This outsourcing is now valued at over a trillion dollars in revenue; and has created hundreds of thousands of businesses over the past half-century, with many more to come in the decades ahead. Of course, being rich in resources, Australia is also seeing new growth cycles in some of our long-existing Agrarian and Industrial Age industries. For example, the mining industry enjoys a new growth cycle around every four decades, while the agriculture industry is expected to enter a new fourth era in the 2020s. However, due largely to capital intensity and the cyclical ups and downs observed in the mining industry, the total primary sector is unlikely to contribute more than 10% of the nation’s GDP for decades yet. While several other goods-based industries will continue to be important to Australia’s economy – including the construction industry, which is also experiencing the ups and downs of a 40-year life cycle – service industries will continue to dominate our GDP. What does all this suggest for future innovation? In the main, Australia will need innovation in the purely domestic industries to keep pace with the growing standard of living in other developed nations. But we need to be especially innovative in the export sector and overseas expansion by emulating, if not exceeding world’s best practice technology and systems. For example: • We need our mining industry – which currently generates half the nation’s exports – to become the world’s lowest-cost producer, and to perhaps generate greater value-added with world-competitive smelting (manufacturing) in due course. • We need to rejuvenate our currently tiny agriculture industry – which currently contributes just 2% of the nation’s GDP – to play a role in feeding the growing Asian megaregion. • Having become a more significant component of Australia’s exports activity, service industries – particularly in tourism, education and health – will also form part of the new innovation drive. The productivity challenge Productivity – measured as the growth in outputs per hour worked – is one of the main beneficiaries of innovation. The below chart points to a regrettable slowdown over the past decade.

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Productivity growth over the past decade has averaged less than 1.2% p.a., compared with 1.6% p.a. in the Infotronics Age (since 1965) and 2.1% p.a. in the Industrial Age (1865–1964). This slowdown is, in part, seen as a general malaise. Australia has not experienced a wake-up call in the form of a recession for nearly 30 years – or, in other words, for more than a generation. This has led to complacency: there have been no meaningful reforms for more than 10 years, and we have also suffered from largely visionless and populist politics over that time, as has much of the West. When examining industry performance, however, it’s worrying that only seven of our 19 industry divisions bettered the productivity average of 1.6% p.a. over the 10 years to June 2019. While these seven industries – headed by the Information Media and Telecommunications industry, and including the Health Care and Social Assistance industry – performed extraordinarily well, the rest returned averages ranging from ordinary to awful, as shown in the below chart.

We clearly need to adopt world’s best practice and get serious about innovation. So, just what does "innovation" include? The elements of innovation (the who, what and how) For many years, innovation has been identified mainly as research and development, or R&D. Australia’s federal government regarded R&D as the main source of innovation when, a few years after the Industrial Age began to be diluted by the Infotronics Age in the mid1960s, it established the Industrial Research and Development Grants Act 1967. The 1960s had yielded the highest GDP growth since Federation in 1901. This was boosted by a societal demand to make up for the lost opportunities (so to speak) of the previous 60 years, during which Australia and society at large had endured two depressions, a lot of recessions, two World Wars and the Korean War. Competition was growing on both a domestic and global scale; in response, the federal government introduced the aforementioned legislation to encourage more R&D among Australian companies, who had long been protected by high tariff barriers and approaching consumer saturation of traditional goods.

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But innovation equates to much more than R&D, as we see below. It has multi-faceted elements – in fact, R&D is estimated to account for less than a quarter of all innovation in Australia.

The above chart points to an estimated innovation spend of more than 4% of GDP in 2020, most of which is derived from a range of activities including start-ups, software (including AI), service products, systems and processes (plus a large amount of uncounted innovation). The message is clear: let’s forget our historical, or narrow, definitions of innovation. That said, it’s encouraging to see in the below chart that we are increasing our expenditure on enterprise R&D (albeit in a cyclical pattern), even though we have a long way to go

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State of Our Innovation Nation to match world’s best practice, which, when measured as a share of GDP, equates to over twice what we are currently investing. The growing importance of intellectual property (IP) In an increasingly competitive world, businesses are increasingly focused on the importance of uniqueness – in products, systems, long-term achievable strategies and organisational culture. These make up what is known as intellectual property, or IP. Although generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) dictate that IP is not acknowledged in a company’s audited balance sheets, investors have come to value IP far more than a company’s passive assets (land, buildings, equipment, stock and debtors). This is clearly demonstrated in the below chart, which traces the increased importance investors have placed on the IP of ASX-listed companies over several decades.

Clearly, the accounting profession has not yet come to grips with this reality. But the main lesson is that a business’s growth and profitability – and even its survival – depends increasingly on its IP. This is what innovation is all about: it leads to higher productivity, greater international competitiveness, and a better deal for customers, employees and society at large. So, beyond 2020? It will be a fascinating journey. As previewed, we are now in the Asian Century, where the East has already overtaken the GDP of the West, and where the two most populous nations – China and India – are regaining their historical economic supremacy. By integrating our immigration, tourism and trade, as we have been doing for decades, we are showing our willingness to be part of this new world order. With service industries now dominating our economic structure – as is the case for all advanced economies – we will probably find our innovators coming from a much wider base than in the 20th century. Hopefully, health will continue to be one of these sources; but other innovations and start-ups will come from a very diverse range of industries. Indeed, innovation itself is undergoing a metamorphosis, with a wider definition than R&D. This, too, is very prospective.Here’s to our inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs, including Australia’s growing list of Nobel Laureates. We can’t have enough of them, so let’s give them what they need to succeed and flourish. They not only improve our lives; they do Australia proud.

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INNOVATION DEMANDS NATIONAL ACTION The Shadow Minister for Innovation, Technology and the Future of Work calls for a rethink on public spending, in which government is the first buyer for Australian innovations. By the Hon Clare O’Neil MP

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nnovation is like exercise. It hurts when you start, but the more you do, the easier it gets. And, it’s absolutely essential for our country’s economic health. Right now, the Australian economy is barely exercising its innovation muscles. We’re relying too much on what we dig out of the ground and grow; we’ve become too reliant on a narrow range of exports to a narrow range of countries; and we’re not gaining enough national wealth from inventions or innovations. And these failings are hurting us far more than the aches and pains of reform. These economic problems are reflected on the flip side of the coin: the labour market. Wages have been stagnant for a decade. Casualisation and underemployment are rife. We’ve become too reliant on population growth for economic growth and we’ve become addicted to property speculation. As a nation, we’re paying a lucky few Australians enormous amounts to produce things of questionable value, and some of the people who do the most important work in the country barely earn enough to live on. If we want to leave our children a prosperous, sustainable, egalitarian country, we need to change how we’re doing things. Take the Research and Development Tax Incentive (RDTI). The RDTI is the principal policy the Australian Government uses to support new ideas and innovations in the economy. According to Treasury, around 13,000 companies are registered for the RDTI. The trouble is that we don’t know much about what those 13,000 companies are researching and developing. We don’t know whether it is in line with the strategic priorities of the national economy. We don’t know the cost-benefit analysis of the tax offsets. We don’t

know whether the RDTI is value for money or a waste of money. We just don’t know. Australia cannot afford to continue with such a passive approach to innovation. Globally, best-practice economies are proactive. They acknowledge that countries like Australia – with just 0.25% of the world’s population – are not going to be the best at everything. Best-practice economies are driving innovation by focusing policy and spending on a handful of national research and innovation priorities in areas of comparative advantage. Some are setting priorities through developing national missions – an approach advocated by economist Mariana Mazucatto. Under the Mazucatto approach, countries are prioritising their most important challenges – then focusing on policies, programs and investments that are in line with those priorities.

The lack of willingness to put innovation at the centre of public policy is hamstringing our economic future Australia is doing the opposite – letting a thousand flowers bloom. And our level of investment is going in the wrong direction. In the 2019 financial year, Canberra spent just $5.5 million of the Research Infrastructure Investment Plan – and

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innovation budgets have been slashed. The Federal Government’s spending on tertiary education in Australia is now 0.7 per cent of GDP – well below the OECD average of 1.1 per cent. Not only that, Australia ranks ninth out of 11 comparable nations on research and development spending – with our R&D investments lapped between two and four times by the US, Germany, Japan, Korea, Israel and Sweden. These approaches, and the lack of willingness to put innovation at the centre of public policy, is hamstringing our economic future. It doesn’t have to be this way. Australia has all the things we need to have a high-performance economy in the 21st century: a highly educated population, a system of government that actually works, abundant natural resources, the world’s best scientists, brilliant universities, some of the world’s most liveable cities and one of the world’s largest per capita reserves of retirements savings. Most countries would give anything to be in this position. The missing piece is government engagement, resourcing and strategy. To win in this new era, we need to get this right. The Federal Government’s view is that it’s enough for Australia to be an adopter or user of technological innovation. A consumer, in other words. I disagree. In my book, you’re not innovative if you buy someone else’s latest product or idea. You’re just another consumer. Australia needs, systemically and actively, to come up with new ways of thinking and doing things. In this, government can play a critical role. In fact, it must do so. We first need to nail the basics. Australia is not spending nearly enough on R&D. We need proper funding for universities and the CSIRO, and policies to support a more collaborative approach to innovation, along with a stronger focus on commercialisation. All this has been understood in policy circles for a decade. If government gets more active, so much more can be done. Government spending in Australia is more than a third of our GDP. We need to focus that spending to ensure it delivers the maximum social and economic benefit to the Australian people. That means instead of just dogmatically debating tax changes as though they are the only lever at our disposal, taking off the blinkers and following the evidence to find new ways to get government – the

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most significant single actor in the economy – to play a more constructive role. This much is clear: our anaemic economy needs a transfusion of red-blooded industry and innovation policies. Properly structured, government can be an innovator, using its critical mass to inspire, create and facilitate productive change. In other words, the Australian Government needs to think and act like a smart investor. As a smart investor, we need to focus on areas of competitive advantage – and national need. For instance, climate policy is both an existential threat to our way of life and a massive economic opportunity. With more natural renewable energy resources than any country in the world and the best scientists in the world, we have ample opportunity and expertise. As economist Ross Garnaut has written, renewable energy could be a catalyst for the development of new, globally competitive industries, including heavy manufacturing. Australia could also become a global leader in a vast array of subjects on which many other countries will be looking for expertise in the coming decades, such as coastal erosion, optimising energy use, smart infrastructure, new agricultural techniques, water conservation, climate-conscious cities and sunscreens with

enhanced skin-cancer protections. The opportunities are endless. But we need direction – and national purpose. Setting national missions could give Australia that national purpose, rallying our universities, governments, unions, scientists, super funds and businesses around specific policy goals. Imagine the vigour that could be unleashed by engaging millions of Australians in articulating common goals for our country and economy, then backing those moonshots with the critical mass of government. We also need high-quality institutions to create, coordinate, frame and deliver on national missions over the long term – and to ensure those missions are built on evidence rather than dogma. The importance of making good, long-term decisions can’t be overstated. Australians are a dynamic people. But the dynamism of our people is not reflected in our economy today. That needs to change – fast. Our governments need to become as sensible, pragmatic, practical, innovative and dynamic as the people they represent.

The Hon Clare O’Neil MP is the Shadow Minister for Innovation, Technology and the Future of Work, and the Member for Hotham, in Melbourne’s south east.

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INCENTIVISING INNOVATION For firms investing in R&D, one policy tool has an outsized – and measurable – impact.

lobally, governments provide programs to support business investment in R&D. For the past 35 years, R&D tax incentives have provided Australia-based businesses with financial support to develop new and/or improved products, processes, services, devices and materials. A country’s R&D policy settings must align with its broader strategic economic objectives, including productivity and other growth drivers. Productivity is often defined as the ratio of a volume of output and a volume of inputs. It measures how efficiently production inputs (such as capital and labour) are used to produce a certain level of output. It follows that Australia’s ability to improve its standard of living depends, in large part, on its ability to increase output per worker. In addition to demographic changes and labour force participation, productivity is a key determinant of long-term economic growth. Australia’s productivity is going backwards Empirical evidence indicates that higher productivity is tightly linked to higher wages. Unfortunately, the 2020 Productivity Commission report Can Australia be a productivity leader? showed that labour productivity fell in Australia for the first time since 1994, by 0.2 per cent. Australia still lags behind the United States, France and Germany in productivity. It ranks sixteenth in productivity among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member nations, despite ranking fifth in number of hours worked per person. An average worker in the US can produce in four days what it takes an Australian worker five days to produce. Australian workers produce less per hour than German and French workers. The challenges for Australia are our land mass, low population density and remoteness, and the effects that these have on efficiencies of scale visa-vis production/manufacturing and distribution channels. These are factors that undoubtedly

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influence our productivity results. It is important to note that approximately 80 per cent of Australian employment relates to the services industry. Therefore, increasing productivity in that field as a way to drive economic growth must be an immediate focus for policymakers.

By Alan Garcia

R&D tax incentives boost productivity Industry investment, particularly as it relates to services and technology, is a strong enabler of productivity growth. Research by Bayarcelik and Tasel has shown that R&D investment increases the technological potential of an economy. Research by CBI (2019) in the United Kingdom has demonstrated that R&D boosts innovation and productivity, and is considered a key driver of economic growth and long-term prosperity. Recent studies by the UK government, the OECD and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have highlighted that R&D incentives work to enhance productivity growth, increase business expenditure on R&D and create jobs. More specifically, a 2019 IMF study found that R&D tax incentives have a strong positive effect on stimulating investment in R&D by business, with R&D investment increasing by an average of 33 per cent as a result of the increased generosity of the UK’s R&D tax credit. OECD and IMF research has shown a strong correlation between government support for business R&D and increases in GDP. Stability and predictability needed Businesses that invest in R&D require stability and predictability to plan their R&D investment in the face of global economic volatility, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Research has shown that the beneficial effects of R&D tax incentives are greatly reduced when those incentives are modified frequently. By creating a stable program and committing to an internationally competitive R&D tax incentive, Australia will be able to attract investment and retain positive "spill-over" effects that will promote productivity and economic growth in the long term.

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Frequent changes and reductions to R&D tax incentives will reduce efficacy and lead many companies to consider either locating their R&D programs elsewhere and/or reducing their operations locally. Recent changes (e.g. the $100 million cap) and proposed further changes to Australia’s

Research and Development Tax Incentive (RDTI) have seen a corresponding drop in Australia’s business expenditure on R&D (BERD) as a percentage of GDP, from 1.0 per cent of GDP in 2015– 16 to 0.9 per cent of GDP in 2017–18. R&D tax incentives should be designed to meet the needs of large corporations and young, knowledge-based firms while protecting local resources and intellectual property from inappropriate cross-border planning. In Australia, the RDTI offers companies with turnover greater than $20 million a "non-refundable" net benefit of 8.5 per cent per eligible dollar, while smaller companies receive a "refundable" benefit of 43.5 per cent per eligible dollar. For start-ups, young firms and companies in industries involving long technology lead times, R&D tax incentives are less attractive unless a mechanism exists to "cash out" deductions if the companies are not profitable or are in tax loss. This is why the Australian system allows smaller companies to "cash out" deductions to the extent that the company is in tax loss. It is estimated that the vast majority of claimants (over 80 per cent) fall in the refundable category, so it is likely that a high proportion of revenues foregone are absorbed by SMEs, start-ups and micro businesses. Recent interpretations by regulators of eligible R&D activity and associated expenditure have caused an element of uncertainty across the business community, particularly with respect to software - and technology-related R&D claims. Arguably, this – along with regular changes to

Government Investment in the RDTI 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500

2011-12 2012-13 2013-14 2014-15 2015-16 2016-17 2017-18 2018-19

Refundable

Non-refundable

Source: Australian Government Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources. (2019). Science, research and innovation (SRI) budget tables (2019–20).

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State of Our Innovation Nation the RDTI program and the reduction in incentives available under it – has contributed to a drop in R&D expenditure, as shown in the following graph. A combination of legislated reductions to the benefit, business’ lack of confidence in the program and more attractive programs offshore have all had an influence. Collaboration premium The 3F and Prosperity 2030 reports recommended introducing a "collaboration premium" of up to 20 per cent to incentivise greater collaboration between the business and university sectors. Both reports recommended that the premium be limited to larger companies; however, a lower premium or cap would not only make the premium more affordable but also potentially allow it to be extended to all companies collaborating with Australian research institutions.

contention that R&D tax incentives improve productivity, generate important "spill-overs", and support STEM employment and wage growth. There is, however, a tension between the attempts of governments to reduce taxes foregone as a consequence of R&D tax incentives and the need to acknowledge the critical short-, medium- and long-term benefits that such incentives provide. If R&D tax benefits are reduced or restricted, it is considered that companies may reduce their existing baseline R&D expenditure in Australia (by reducing product and process R&D), defer higher-risk R&D and/or undertake R&D elsewhere.

Best practice in Europe A 2014 EU report put forward principles of best practice for R&D tax incentives, grouped into three categories: scope, target and practice. According to the report, tax incentives should, inter alia: • target expenditure that has strong knowledge-related flow-on effects. Research has shown that larger firms contribute more to ‘spill-over’ effects be volume-based (such as Australia’s RDTI) rather than incremental, as volume-based regimes are more readily understood and applied, do not distort investment planning and incentivise R&D expenditure at all levels • provide a carry-over facility to enable firms to receive the benefit even when they are not yet profitable (e.g. cash refunds, as per Australia’s RDTI) • target younger and smaller firms. We note that Australia’s RDTI provides a relatively generous benefit to companies with a turnover under $20 million, and this is one of the strengths of the existing program • conduct systematic evaluations (according to international standards) to ensure the efficacy of the regime. Conclusion Both global and local research supports the Alan Garcia was the Asia Pacific Regional R&D Partner for KPMG, between 2000 and 2020

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FUNDING INDIGENOUS ENTREPRENEURSHIP Dean Foley is the founder of the world’s first Indigenousstart up accelerator, Barayamal, or "Black Swan" in the Gamilaraay language. Our editors discussed venture capital, sustainable entrepreneurship, and black cladding in a wide-ranging interview with Foley.

rior to the colonisation of Australia, schoolchildren in Europe were only taught about white swans, while Australia’s First Nations people knew for millennia of the black swan. The "discovery" of the black swan in Australia forced Europeans to reconsider and change their perceptions about what a swan actually means. For Foley, the black swan represents the First Nations entrepreneurs who haven’t been recognised in the business world because of current perceptions – and that Barayamal will show the world that First Nations entrepreneurs exist and can build successful businesses that create a better world for everyone. What were your goals when you first founded Barayamal, and how have they changed over time? Foley: I started Barayamal because I didn’t believe in the existing system that was primarily operating from a Western entrepreneurship perspective. I wanted to learn how to run and grow businesses, but I was frustrated with government organisations that were supposed to "help" Indigenous people.

After starting from frustration and just wanting to do "cool" events and programs to support Indigenous Entrepreneurship, we’ve had to take things more seriously, measuring our impact to secure further philanthropic funding and develop a strategy that would allow us to compete against the status quo organisations that are still receiving millions of taxpayer dollars. As soon as I founded Barayamal, one of those government organisations I was frustrated with supposedly bankrolled a non-Indigenous program to run their “Indigenous” program by providing them with $500,000. Our budget at the time was $0 and it hasn’t gotten that much bigger so we’ve had to be creative and leverage the community support to beat these well-funded government programs. How big is the gap between venture capital (VC) funding between Indigenous and non-Indigenous businesses, and what impact does this have for startups? Foley: Venture capital is purely focused on a return on investment and making money which is okay, however, they are starting to get pressure

"Black cladding", while not strictly defined, is the process in which non-Indigenous businesses "partner" in an unfair, or inequitable way with Indigenous businesses to access corporate funds or government grants through the Indigenous Procurement Policy (IPP). The IPP sets a target of three per cent of all government contracts to go to Indigenous-owned businesses, and awarded $3.5bn of contracts between 2015 and 2020. In black-clad businesses, benefits to Indigenous communities are often limited, while decision making, supply and resourcing is kept firmly in the hands of the white partner, subverting the goal of the program.

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from their donors about ethical investing, so their media departments are trying to persuade people that they help everyone, which often isn’t true. I’ve reached out to a lot of VC funds to find out how they help First Nations people, but most of them didn’t get back to me. Those that do come up with creative stories, but don’t measure that stuff, even though they ask founders about other demographic questions when they invest in them. Based on the information I did collect and my correspondence with VC firms, I believe that 0–0.1 per cent of all VC funding, worth tens of billions of dollars, actually goes to Indigenous entrepreneurs. This is despite Indigenous people making up five per cent of the world and three per cent of Australia’s population. How has the conversation around Indigenous entrepreneurship changed in Australia over the past five years, and where do you think it needs to move towards? Foley: It’s changed from “do Indigenous entrepreneurs actually exist?” to realising Indigenous entrepreneurship was operating a lot longer before colonisation. Now it is gaining momentum and support. Unfortunately, a few well intentioned policies have led to a massive increase in black cladding and businesses that operate from primarily a Western entrepreneurship perspective (focused on benefiting individuals/shareholders instead of the greater community), which is only making a few people rich instead of helping close the disparity gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. However, these problems are gaining more awareness and the "tick in the box" procurement policies are getting more pressure to change, so there are actually tangible results in the community. You note that Barayamal is the world’s first Indigenous accelerator program, has your model been copied overseas since? Foley: Yes – someone from New Zealand reached out a couple of months later in 2017 about doing a similar thing there and I know there’s an accelerator in Canada now, too. There were a lot of Indigenous accelerators that popped up in Australia, too, which was interesting to see. How key is encouraging entrepreneurship in terms of self-determination for Australia’s

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Indigenous communities? And what are the broader social impacts of Indigenous businesses led by, and run for the benefit of, Indigenous communities? Foley: I think "encouraging" entrepreneurship is missing the point that Indigenous entrepreneurship has been around for thousands of years so we don’t need to motivate the community to innovate. The key is to empower Indigenous communities with the right policies and support to see things flourish again. At this stage the government still controls things, and we need them to trust Indigenous communities with a proven track record of positive results with direct funding and support to solve their own challenges. Indigenous people only make up 5% of the world’s population but protect 80% of the world’s biodiversity. When thinking about ethical investing and sustainability VC funds should be investing a lot more in Indigenous innovation. The results from supporting genuine Indigenous entrepreneurship go without saying. Assuming you had a dramatic increase in funding, how would you take Barayamal to the next level? Foley: The possibilities are endless. We would increase our investments and support of grassroots Indigenous businesses that are operating from an Indigenous entrepreneurship perspective and are genuinely helping out their communities. They are missing out on support from government and corporate support because they don’t tick their boxes. In addition, we would use the extra funding to help scale our programs through technology to help more people and increase our positive impact in Australia and around the world through Indigenous entrepreneurship.

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SUPER IDEA: FUNDING AFFORDABLE HOUSING Innovation can be used to solve social problems. One key driver of wealth inequality in Australia is home ownership. The Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees is calling for policy change to open up affordable homes as an asset class. By Eva Scheerlinck

t has been well documented that periods of economic collapse give rise to innovation and new investment opportunities. The aftermath of Australia’s economic collapse in the 1840s saw a rapid expansion of our rail network, while the Great Depression was followed by the arrival of electricity. So, what opportunities could the COVID crisis bring to the Australian economy? As part of their work to assist Australia’s economic recovery from the COVID shutdown, profit-to-member super funds have been considering where policy change could maximise investment that could help kick-start the economy, create jobs and provide much-needed services. In addition to opportunities identified in the energy and new-tech markets, affordable housing stands out as an area ripe for scaled-up investment by super funds. A rising problem It’s no secret that that housing affordability is a growing problem in our big cities. This is an area of concern to superannuation funds, whose members are increasingly finding it difficult to live in secure, quality housing near their workplace. It’s also become clear that a growing number of older Australians face retirement without the security of home ownership or, at the very least, access to affordable and stable rental housing. We know that older single women are the fastest-growing cohort of homeless people in Australia, and that even among more welloff Australians, the number of people entering

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retirement with mortgage debt is soaring. As this crisis escalates, so does the debate about how to solve it and what role, if any, our superannuation savings pool should play. The lines are drawn between those calling for a relaxation of the super preservation rules to allow Australians to tap into their super savings to buy their first home, and those who see an investment opportunity, where super-fund capital plays a significant role in increasing supply. There are many flaws in the push to allow access to super for housing. It would do nothing to address the root cause of Australia’s housing affordability problem (which is lack of supply) and could actually inflate house prices in much the same way that previous first home-owner grants have been shown to do. Not only could it exacerbate the problem, but as a public-policy approach, we should do better than asking Australians to choose between financial security in retirement and a roof over their heads. A role for superannuation funds By contrast, boosting the supply of affordable housing could have a real impact on prospective homeowners as well as renters. The Grattan Institute has estimated that building an extra 50,000 homes a year for the next decade would make house prices and rents 10–20 per cent lower than otherwise. In recent years, some of the bigger industry and public-sector super funds have begun exploring opportunities in the affordable housing market through both debt and equity investments.

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One large fund has successfully invested in build-to-rent housing projects by acquiring apartments or underwriting developments that come on the market cheaply, typically when a developer is struggling to finance the project or sell apartments. These key-worker affordable housing investments have seen hundreds of new or renovated apartments and units rented to nurses, teachers, police, paramedics, aged-and-disability support workers and other essential workers at 80 per cent of the market rate (the fund’s benchmark for affordable housing). But such projects are opportunistic and therefore difficult to scale up. Other funds have partnered with community housing groups to build developments where a portion is sold to community housing operators as well as key workers. Investing in bonds offered by the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporate (NHFIC) that meet funds’ investment risk-return criteria has also been popular and bond issuances are typically oversubscribed. Despite these efforts, a range of barriers means the overall level of institutional investment in affordable housing has remained stubbornly modest. In particular, the high cost of land is holding back the Australian market compared to overseas markets. But the COVID pandemic could be a gamechanger. With the spectre of a prolonged economic downturn, super funds are hopeful that both state and federal governments will be more alive to providing the financial incentives needed to turn affordable and social housing into a competitive asset class for super funds and other institutional investors. Super funds have a fiduciary obligation to invest in their members’ best interests. The risk-return characteristics of affordable housing must stack up in order to achieve scale. Policy intervention is needed. Tax settings need to be addressed and more land needs to be made available for development. For example, state governments could encourage more funds to invest in social housing by zoning land in a way that allows funds to use a portion of the space for more profitable enterprises, such as retail shops. Other

ideas include rent-to-buy developments that give working Australians an option to buy down the track, or shared equity arrangements whereby funds enable a person to buy a house they would otherwise not be able to afford in exchange for a share of the capital gains when the house is eventually sold. Encouragingly, the NSW Government has announced it will cut land tax for the next 20 years for new build-to-rent housing projects and provide a 50 per cent discount on land tax to developers who invested in build-to-rent schemes. Importantly, investing in the affordable housing space aligns with the long-term nature of superfund investment. And because funds typically hold their property investments for decades, they place a high emphasis on building quality, energy-efficient homes in locations with plenty of public amenities – a win for both workers and the environment. Now is the time to bury the idea that by allowing individuals to tap into their super we can somehow fix the affordable-housing problem. Working together, the superannuation sector and state and federal governments can create innovative housing investment opportunities that address supply issues and improve economic outcomes for more of us. Critically, this will leave workers’ retirement nest eggs alone and allow their super to grow and do the job it was set up to do.

Eva Scheerlinck is CEO of the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees (AIST) and is responsible for leading the peak body of the $1.4trn profit-to-member superannuation industry.

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CAPITAL NEEDED IN AN INNOVATION NATION The chief executive of the Australian Investment Council (AIC) notes that Australia is at an important crossroads, with capital demands not being met locally. By Yasser El-Ansary

xpanding the investment pipeline and continuing to support the transformative power of innovation and technology must form the central pillars of a more dynamic and agile Australian economy over the decades ahead. Australian jobs and industries rely on a steady flow of domestic and offshore capital to support investment into businesses across all sectors of the economy. Australia’s demand for capital continues to be greater than domestic supply, and as a result, the nation continues to be a net importer of capital. Private-capital firms play a vitally important role in attracting to Australia both domestic and offshore investment capital, which ultimately flows into job-creating Australian businesses.

There is much work to be done to transition and advance our economy, because, quite simply, we haven’t kept pace with the development in complexity and technological transformation of other countries

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The private sector, working in partnership with government, can be a powerful driver for new innovation and technology-based transformation across the economy. To achieve that outcome, we must use innovation policy to support early-stage businesses in realising their potential across all of the key sectors of our economy. When we look at the latest available rankings of economic complexity, developed by Harvard University’s Center for International Development, they show that despite Australia’s high standard of living we still have much work to do to transition into a more knowledge-based, high-value-adding economy. The centre’s Atlas of Economic Complexity ranked Australia 87th globally – the lowest of all developed economies and lower than many developing countries. Since 1996, when Australia was ranked 57th globally for economic complexity, it has dropped 30 places. In its analysis, Harvard University concludes that “compared to a decade prior, Australia’s economy has become less complex, driven by a lack of diversification of exports”. It is therefore important that the economic challenges that Australia faces are recognised and tackled through leadership in long-term and visionary policy reforms. Industry as a whole has a role to play in informing and engaging with all sides of politics on these challenges. There is much work to be done to transition and advance our economy, because quite simply, we haven’t kept pace with the development in complexity and technological transformation of other countries. The Harvard data confirm that. We must lift our economic productivity and competitiveness, and invest more in skills and

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talent. These long-term policy shifts will position Australia to capitalise on the next wave of economic growth that is within our grasp. Australia’s geographic position within Asia provides us with an opportunity that other countries around the world would love to have.

Australia’s other comparative advantages must be exploited to the greatest extent possible. Key policy recommendations that we believe support the case for broader economic reforms are outlined in the AIC’s Roadmap to Recovery policy paper, released in June 2020. In our view, the three pillars of Australia’s future economic prosperity must be: 1. maximising the penetration and utilisation of technology as an enabler of economy-wide

2. 3.

productivity growth and job creation; going "narrow and deep" in developing industries where Australia is, or could be, a world leader; and supporting Australia’s entrepreneurs and fast-growth businesses to create Australia’s next generation of world-leading businesses.

To realise the economic gains from the scaling-up phase of early-stage businesses, it is imperative that initiatives are put into place now to support the ongoing investment needed to sustain and grow our innovation ecosystem. Core policy solutions that will help grow the pool of capital available to support investment into Australian businesses and create employment opportunities for the future include: 1. introducing a new public and private sector co-investment fund to support Australian entrepreneurs and Australian fast-growth businesses. 2. filling skills and talent gaps in the short term and building a training and education pipeline that will support Australia’s growth industries over the long run. 3. implementing reforms to lift the competitiveness of our taxation system and our capacity to attract offshore investment 4. investing in hard and soft infrastructure to support the growth profile of the economy over the next two decades – utilising technology as a core enabler for the future. 5. fast-tracking the reduction of red tape and introducing greater efficiency to our regulatory environment. The COVID-19 global pandemic has been catastrophic for communities and economies all over the world. But in the words of Churchill, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Australia must be brave in the face of adversity and prepare ourselves now for a future in which knowledge and innovation will be the new currencies of leadership.

Yasser El-Ansary has been the Chief Executive of Australian Investment Council (known as AVCAL) since November 2013. Prior to this, Yasser was the General Manager of Policy and Advocacy for Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand.

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FINANCING INNOVATION: AN INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE If Australia funds sustainable projects, it will have a sustainable future. New funding models are providing opportunity, to tie finance to long-term environmental benefits. By David Gall

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ver many months, we’ve all observed the resilience and adaptability of Australians to changing circumstances. Many business owners have experienced a shock to their economic outlook and more face ongoing uncertainty as the pandemic drags on. In response to this hit to confidence, the financial services sector adapted quickly to support Australians in the aftermath. At the same time, our customers are leading the way in how they are supporting their own employees, with an enduring focus on care and empathy. We are also seeing a surge in innovation – often out of necessity – as existing business models pivot to new product lines and ways of working. We may never get a better test of resilience than what we’ve all collectively faced since the first quarter of 2020. And through this, some big questions have arisen. Here are two. Where are the further opportunities for innovation? and what do we want Australia to look like when we get to the other side? Throughout the world we are witnessing governments spending at unprecedented levels. This is for multiple reasons: to shore up confidence, to keep businesses afloat, to limit the loss of livelihoods caused by shutdowns. For businesses and institutions in strong economic positions at the beginning of the crisis, the opportunity will come again when they can invest and grow. The public and private sectors will each play an important role in investing in our economy to drive recovery, create new jobs and supercharge

innovation. The allocation and flow of capital to enable this is critically important. There are plenty of opportunities for Australia to allocate capital in areas where we have a natural competitive advantage. For example, we benefit from some of the best wind and solar resources in the world. We have a proven ability to deliver large infrastructure. We’re a nation of resilient small-business entrepreneurs. And we’re also very adaptable. This crisis has proved that. The choice of how to build on these strengths to create sustainable and innovative opportunities is ahead of us. It’s about making decisions for the long term to future-proof business models, but also to serve customers well and help communities prosper. The allocation of today’s capital towards sustainable projects requires a long-term view. It is one that will benefit generations of Australians for years to come. There is an important role for NAB here, and it begins with our own credentials. It includes an accelerated $70 billion commitment to environmental finance by 2025. Already, $17 billion has been arranged to support green infrastructure finance, capital markets and asset finance. A further $16 billion is supporting mortgage lending for energy-efficient 6-star residential housing. The role deepens when we consider the position we hold as capital connectors. We maintain a strong balance sheet to foster business investment, to improve productivity and to enable innovation. This enables us to be the leading arranger of climate finance

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in Australia, with over A$10 billion directed at renewable power from wind, solar parks and hydro since 2003. It also means we are uniquely placed to connect environmental, social and governance (ESG)-focused clients with the right investors, who can accelerate our clients’ progress towards achieving their goals. I’m talking about clients such as QIC Shopping Centre Fund (QSCF) – one of the largest shopping centre landlords in Australia – which issued a $300 million Climate Bond-certified green bond, the first to be issued by a retail property landlord. This green bond was well received by investors across Asia and Australia, attracting investors with green and ESG investment mandates who were new to QSCF. This is just one example. There are many others. Backing sustainable initiatives with the right capital now will build a more resilient Australia post-pandemic. When we think about the right capital, it is important to consider a diverse range of investors who are willing to invest right across the equity and debt stack. The diversity of investors is important: it ranges from retail right through to institutional investors, both global and domestic. And to successfully commercialise the sustainability initiatives that are being contemplated, access to a full and diverse range of funding options, as well as investors, will be required. NAB has all the ingredients to keep fast-tracking work in this space. Looking ahead, the role of banks in using capital for sustainability-driven financial innovation is exciting. For instance, sustainability-linked loans (SLLs) are offering some fresh opportunities to innovate. More broadly, SLLs are behaviour-based debt. They incentivise better environmental- and social- performance outcomes within the financing arrangement. Behaviour-based debt is an opportunity to incentivise faster and enact greater social impact in sectors not easily transitioned to more sustainable business models. We are noting this shift is overtaking proceeds-based sustainable debt in terms of volumes raised.

It also reflects a wider shift in financial services and the public conversation about tackling climate change. We’re proud to have already worked with AGL, Sydney Airport and other important clients to achieve these outcomes through SLLs. Enabling longer-term growth and innovation when we get to the other side of this crisis is a function of thinking sustainably and using capital in a better way. It is through capital – and great ideas – that Australia will reach its full potential. Ultimately, it will also make us less sensitive to shocks. As a bank, we’re committed to doing our bit. We urge all Australian business owners – from the corner shop to the large institutions – to keep thinking bigger and to keep innovating.

David Gall is group executive, Corporate and Institutional Banking, at NAB.

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FROM INVESTING TO POSITIVE IMPACT The origins of responsible and ethical investing lie with religious groups, that sought to invest according to their moral principles. Their strategy was to avoid harmful products or activities such as the slave trade, alcohol, tobacco and gambling. By Mathew Browning

he scope, definition and adoption of responsible investing have expanded over time to encompass many aspects of society, the natural world and corporate behaviour. From the 1960s onward, US colleges decided not to invest in apartheid South Africa, while a similar shift is now underway with fossil fuels. However, the rise of responsibly and ethically charged investment is not due to any single issue or event: an ever-shifting landscape of corporate scandals, environmental concerns, changing societal demands and rapid transformations in technology and business models make for constantly evolving dynamics. Defining responsible investing Gone are the days when investments were assessed solely on the basis of risk and return. “Non-financial” factors are now of growing importance, but the terminology and methods can be confusing. When “responsible investing” is discussed, a jumble of terms are used, often interchangeably, when in fact they may only partly overlap, or have slightly different meanings. So what is “responsible investing”? A useful starting point is the Responsible Investment Association of Australasia’s (RIAA) definition: responsible investing is an umbrella term used to describe “an investment process which takes environmental, social, governance (ESG) or ethical considerations into account”. This raises an important point: while ethical investing comes under the umbrella term

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“responsible investing”, not all responsible investing strategies will take ethical considerations into account. Let’s consider “ESG integration”, the most commonly used tool among modern-day investment managers seeking to adopt a responsible approach. ESG recognises that non-traditional environmental, social and governance factors have financial relevance. But from an ethical standpoint, ESG is not enough: it is only concerned about the financial implications of factors such as pollution, carbon footprint, or labour relations for companies – not whether they are right or wrong. Take an investment manager who’s weighing up a possible investment in energy giant BP. ESG analysis would involve considering the company’s carbon footprint and the possible effects of future carbon taxes on company profitability, but not a decision on whether BP’s business activity is fundamentally good or bad for the world. It is quite possible for companies that operate in detrimental industries to have top ESG ratings. For example, Aristocrat Leisure Limited – Australia’s largest gambling machine (pokies) manufacturer – has an ESG rating of AA, the second-highest rating possible. An investment based on principles Ethical investment goes both further and deeper than ESG analysis. An ethical investment strategy uses a range of tools, including ESG analysis, but also applies its own ethical filter based on the investor’s own principles. This can get

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complicated, because what is considered “ethical” can vary among investors and organisations. Ethical investment involves research and judgement as well as standards. It involves asking questions, gathering facts, and weighing up the potential ethical implications of investment decisions. How do you conduct a deeper assessment of an international supply chain that might, on the surface, meet ESG standards? Take Woolworths Group, a large Australian retailer that is often screened out by responsible investors due to its alcohol production and poker machine operations. Has the company’s decision to spin off these businesses made it eligible for investment? What about a retailer that sells some tobacco products? Linking investment decisions to impact While ethical investing has gained in popularity, the hurdles of financial and non-financial impact have to date prevented more mainstream acceptance. Many studies have shown that investing ethically doesn’t mean sacrificing returns, but what about the non-financial impact? Can the societal benefit derived from investing in one security over another be quantified and measured? Ethical investing can be used as a tool to benefit humanity and the natural world, but how can we be certain whether it is making a discernible difference to lowering greenhouse gases, tackling poverty, or increasing gender equality? The most commonly cited barrier to progress is not a lack of measurement, but rather the failure to adopt a single, universal standard – which increases investor trust and confidence. Currently a number of different standards are used to measure impact, including the Global Reporting Initiative and the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards. There is growing demand for a universal approach to measuring impact, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have emerged as the clear favourite for a measurement framework. The SDGs were officially launched in 2015 with the aim of creating a new global agenda for sustainable development. The 17 goals were

developed by governments, but government action alone won’t be enough to achieve them. The United Nations has estimated that meeting the 17 SDGs will require global investment of between $US5 trillion and $US7 trillion every year until 2030. UN Sustainable Development Goals in practice Acceptance of global SDGs provides a clear call to action for the private sector and a much needed framework for responsible investors. Some of the SDGs are easier to contribute to than others; sometimes it is easier to address an SDG through investment decisions; sometimes it is easier to incorporate the SDG in active ownership. But either way, through them, investors can contribute to solutions. Several funds have joined together to establish an AI-driven SDG investment platform – the Sustainable Development Investments Asset Owner Platform. The platform uses the definitions and taxonomy defined by the asset owners, and turns those rules and methodology into classifications for 8,000 companies. Asset owners can integrate this data across all investment processes – quantitative and fundamental – and monitor, map and steer their portfolios. The Impact Management Project (IMP), a forum for building global consensus on how to measure and manage impacts, has also been a prominent advocate of utilising the SDGs. The IMP provides a framework to understand the impact performance of different enterprises and investments against the SDGs and, with a network of over 2,000 organisations globally, will be integral in establishing standards for measurement, management and reporting. We expect and support further acceptance of the UN SDGs as a sustainability framework and an effective way of not only managing risk (social, environmental, governance) in a portfolio but also driving growth in investing that benefits people and planet.

Mathew Browning is the executive director, and chief executive officer at U Ethical. He is the former general manager of The Myer Family Company, and has over 25 years’ executive experience in financial, property and professional services in roles across Australia, Asia and the UK.

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THE TIME IS RIGHT FOR ETHICAL INVESTING With record breaking flows into sustainable funds, a proliferation of new sustainable investment options and the relative outperformance of sustainable funds during the global pandemic, ethical investing has been thrust into the spotlight.

By John McMurdo

ut why now? Did investors just get a conscience, or is there something more practical going on? The explosion of ethical investing is no overnight success story. But back in the 1980s, or the decade of greed, as it also known, the founders of Australian Ethical were actively going against the prevailing ideology of the time with their ethical approach to investing. However, rather than being do-gooders or hippies, today they seem more like visionaries who sought to harness the power of financial markets to bring about social change. They could see that living in a world where businesses were left to create continuing damage that governments were forced to clean up at huge cost was unsustainable. They could also see that philanthropy alone would never offer a scalable solution. But by infusing money with morals, they set out to fundamentally change the system so that it worked for the many rather than the few. In many ways, the pandemic has validated their approach. It has helped accelerate a shift in public discourse, making normal ideas that were once thought radical. Investors and businesses are becoming socially and environmentally conscious, and it’s no longer acceptable to say “I’m in this just to make money.” More than morals, ethical investing is now dominated by another more practical idea. That is that companies with good governance, that promote

diversity and actively minimise their environmental impact will outperform companies that don’t. Meanwhile, corporate leaders who still believe that pursuing a sustainability agenda runs counter to the wishes of their shareholders are being replaced, often forced out by investors who understand the material risk such an outdated view presents. Today, the urgent global need for businesses and investors to play a bigger societal role is difficult to ignore. The pandemic and consequent shutdown of entire economies around the world has sharpened the focus on the relationship between businesses and the communities in which they operate. And rather than being just a passing moment of reflection, it is a serious reappraisal of how things were and how they could be. For too long, we have toiled under the belief that you cannot do well by doing good. That the two are mutually exclusive. The false assumption has permeated many aspects of our lives, especially our investment decisions, where investing for good has been synonymous with compromise. With their 2020 vision, many more people are starting to see what we have been able to see clearly for some time: that ethics and returns are intrinsically linked. They understand that ethical investing is not philanthropy and does not require sacrificing returns in favour of impact. Instead, they understand that ethical investing means doing good and doing well. At the same time. And that is why its time has come.

John McMurdo is the CEO and managing director of Australian Ethical Investment, one of the longest-running ethical investment firms in Australia.

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INVESTING FOR GOOD Consideration of a company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices is a fast-growing trend in financial markets, being powered by the collective assertion of control by individual investors through the retirement savings industry.

he introduction of the Superannuation Guarantee Charge (SGC) in Australia in 1991 has inextricably linked those saving for retirement with their eventual investment outcome. This is replacing taxpayer-funded pensions and corporate-defined benefit schemes, which had previously ensured that individuals were provided with fixed retirement benefits regardless of investment outcomes. Today’s defined contribution world is based on individual investment choice and full ownership of the resultant specific investment outcome. This is naturally leading to a greater focus on how investment returns are derived. Many would question the merits of earning profits from companies that knowingly pollute the environment or profit from modern slavery or other unethical activities. Such actions result in broader costs being levied across the rest of the population. Principle-based investing is supported by economic theory that points to better-managed firms being better investments in the long term. Australia can play an important role in this phenomenon. According to the latest OECD estimates, the SGC has positioned Australia to have one of the largest retirement savings markets in the world. This positions us to drive change within investment portfolios and through to corporate behaviour. It is critical we ensure that a vision to “invest for good” also delivers strong financial outcomes. From “agent” to “stakeholder” theories of the firm In academia, the evolution of sustainability parallels the evolution of “theories of the firm”. Historically, the “agency theory of the firm” was dominant in economics. Managers were considered agents of the shareholders, hired to

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manage the firm. To maximise firm value, managers focused on minimising management (or agency) costs. From this perspective, many practices aimed at improving corporate sustainability were viewed as non-essential costs that reduced shareholder value. Such thinking naturally flowed into management of pension assets, as higher investment returns meant smaller employer contributions were required to provide pension benefits to staff in retirement. Over the last 20 years, the dominance of the “agency theory of the firm” has declined . An extensive literature now documents the importance of good corporate governance practices to maximise firm value. This literature also documents a growing list of “best practices” central to maximising profitability and firm value. This evidence has led to the emergence of a new paradigm referred to as the “stakeholder theory of the firm”. This new paradigm asserts that firm value is maximised by effectively managing the interests, concerns and incentives of all individuals who are stakeholders in a firm’s success – shareholders, management, labour, the environment and society at large. Shareholder wealth is maximised by motivating all stakeholders to seek the best possible outcome. Frequently cited examples include: • effective management of environmental impacts to mitigate costly regulatory shocks; • safe working conditions and fair wages to improve labour productivity; • building customer loyalty and brand value via community-wide service and engagement; and • having effective governance structures to aid decision making and overall firm management.

By Max Cappetta

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From this perspective, sustainability metrics capture the degree to which a firm addresses stakeholder interests. The stakeholder view posits that good practices are ultimately reflected in superior financial performance. The rise of member-directed superannuation funds in Australia is now converging with an appreciation of a new economic theory of the firm. There is hardly a more important engagement to

of not wanting to support companies involved in “unacceptable” practices or products. When considering exclusions based on sustainability grounds, investors should be aware of the risk that such exclusions introduce to their portfolio relative to standard benchmark portfolios. In some instances, the risk may be irrelevant and, based on principle, investors should simply reset their “benchmark” to include

be had than to ensure that individuals are aware of how their retirement incomes are being derived. This investment thematic will become entrenched in the mainstream during the coming decade, with many implications for the professional services industries, from advice to investment management. Focusing on ESG as a stock-selection rule-of-thumb is appealing. However, experience tells us that the investment challenge is never that simple.

only those companies that pass their sustainability tests. Alternatively, investors may consider a more activist approach. This could entail holding a below- benchmark position in poorer-rated companies and then using this shareholding to lobby management to change its practices. Redpoint believes that economic, environmental, social and governance (EESG) practices of companies can provide valuable investment insight. This view is founded on our investment thesis that EESG, a measure of “sustainability,” offers a new perspective on the quality of company management. Sustainability refers to “good corporate practices” regarding companies’ interactions with the broader economy, the environment and society, and their approach to governance.

Incorporating sustainability within an investment approach Many approaches to incorporating sustainability in equity portfolios are based on a process of exclusion. This stems from a principled position

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Whether investors exclude or downweigh, there remains ample scope for active management to be overlaid to build new investment strategies. Successfully meeting multiple investment objectives is not easy but certainly possible. Investors should clearly understand the interactions between: • their own principled position with respect to sustainability • their investment thesis of the return

across equity strategies. Socially responsible investment options remain somewhat niche at present but are likely to become mainstream as the decade unfolds. All parties need to appreciate that investing solely on the basis of sustainability criteria is insufficient. Sustainability is a necessary criteria for the long term, but it should be combined with a range of other stock-selection disciplines to deliver cost-effec-

opportunity of focusing on sustainability, and other investment characteristics investors are seeking.

tive and risk-efficient outcomes for investors. The size of the Australian savings market through the next decade will provide an unprecedented opportunity for Australian investors to drive sustainability issues across the globe. Investing over $2 trillion naturally leads to having exposure to a wide range of assets in all jurisdictions. We should grasp this opportunity and strive for greater sustainability and social responsibility. This is how we can have a positive impact on our future and that of generations to come.

•

Sustainable investing towards 2030 The 2020s will usher in a massive wealth rollover from superannuation to retirement. This is a natural point for individuals to consider many aspects of their life, including legacy. It is easy to foresee that there will be a convergence

Max Cappetta is the CEO of Redpoint Investment Management. Prior to Redpoint, Max was a co-founding shareholder of Continuum Capital Management from 2007, and a partner, executive director and head of Australian Equities at GMO Australia Limited.

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RESPONSIBLE INVESTORS WILL SHAPE AUSTRALIA’S FUTURE A significant force is emerging within financial markets that has the potential to shape a stronger, more sustainable and equitable future across Australia. By Simon O’Connor

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inancial markets, and particularly the investment industry, have strongly taken up the banner of sustainability and are sending a clear message to large corporations across the world that expectations have lifted regarding how they manage their environmental, social, cultural governance and ethical impacts. What we’re seeing is more than a mere trend. Rather, a permanent shift has occurred, driven by a desire to deliver stronger long-term investment outcomes that align with client interests and contribute to shaping a prosperous and sustainable future. Responsible investors have emerged as a major force in Australia in the wake of a 20-year evolution from a niche collection of investors that sought to avoid harm into a sophisticated network that manages the full gamut of investment risks, including those across environment, social and corporate governance (ESG). Now, the next iteration of this shift is emerging: an investment market that seeks to have real-world impact in shaping a stronger future. Underpinning this is the recognition that, quite simply, companies that create a safe working environment, protect human rights, promote diversity, respect stakeholder communities and minimise their contribution to climate change represent better investments. Responsible investors are seeing that factoring in people, society and the environment, alongside financial performance, when making and managing investments leads to better-informed decisions. It enables them to navigate turbulent

times – to avoid the biggest risks and capture more opportunities. Australia’s responsible investment market is continuing its upward trajectory, with the Responsible Investment Association Australasia's (RIAA) 19th annual Responsible Investment Benchmark Report Australia showing that responsible investment now represents 37 per cent ($1.149 trillion) of Australia’s total $3.155 trillion in professionally managed assets. The ongoing growth of this market has been driven by three main factors: an acknowledegment that managing ESG risks supports strong investment outcomes; an alignment with strong client preference for investments that avoid harm and do good; and a growing focus by regulators on how investors are managing significant ESG risks such as climate change and modern slavery. Global and national data show superior financial performance continues to be a defining feature of responsible investments. With a 20-year history behind this industry, there is now a strong body of evidence that shows investing responsibly delivers stronger risk-adjusted returns by avoiding the biggest risks and seeking investment opportunities. RIAA’s annual study shows responsible-investment Australian share funds and multi-sector growth funds outperforming mainstream funds over one-, three-, five- and 10-year time horizons. The views of investors and most Australians are aligning on issues from climate change to modern slavery. Nationwide research conducted by RIAA in 2020 shows the overwhelming majority of

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Australians now expect their savings (87 per cent) and superannuation (86 per cent) to be invested responsibly. Two in three people don’t want their money causing harm to the planet – whether via environmental degradation, the burning of fossil fuels or logging. Moreover, the majority of people expect their money to go beyond “avoiding harm” and to “do good”, with renewable energy and energy efficiency, sustainable water management, and healthcare and medical products identified as priorities. At the same time, financial regulators and central banks across the world have been clear in their view that the risks of climate change are distinctly financial in nature. In early 2020, the Reserve Bank of Australia joined with more than 60 other central banks to warn of the significant financial and economic risks if more is not done to reduce emissions and provide specific guidance on the integration of climate risks into decision-making. Furthermore, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and the Australian Securities Investment Commission have both signalled their expectation that investors and companies manage climate-change risks. There is no one way to engage in responsible investing and investment managers are applying a range of approaches. Consideration of ESG factors is now the expected minimum standard of good investment practice, with $1 trillion of Australia’s AUM managed using ESG integration as a primary responsible-investment approach. ESG integration involves the explicit inclusion by investment managers of ESG risks and opportunities into financial analysis, and investment decisions based on a systematic process and appropriate research sources. This approach is closely followed in popularity by corporate engagement and shareholder action. The former may happen through direct corporate engagement, such as communications with management or boards, filing or co-filing shareholder proposals, and proxy voting in alignment with comprehensive ESG guidelines.

It is this commitment to ESG integration, combined with active ownership from a sizeable proportion of Australia’s largest institutional investors, that has culminated in increasing shareholder advocacy on issues such as Indigenous cultural protection, sexual harassment, climate change and gender diversity. Where engagement hasn’t managed to influence corporate behaviour, shareholder disquiet has played out through large votes against boards, leadership spills and, increasingly, divestment by investors from the most harmful sectors. Negative screening is another important responsible-investment approach, with weapons, tobacco and gambling being the most frequently screened categories. Increasingly, however, it is the broad, system-wide risks that responsible investors are recognising a need to proactively manage if our economy and society are to flourish. The unforgettable year of 2020 has exposed that our economy is vulnerable. The catastrophic bushfires and COVID-19 pandemic highlighted that our markets are inextricably linked to the health of our environment and society. Longterm investors have recognised these links and, acting in their clients’ long-term interests, are now looking to lead in response to issues such as climate change. Recognising the enormous risks that climate inaction poses to the economy – and, in turn, investment returns – numerous Australian super funds are committing to reducing carbon intensity in their investment portfolio. This is an important signal that growing levels of capital are seeking to invest in companies making the shift to a lower-carbon economy, a trend that will increasingly influence markets and valuations in the decades ahead. Capital will be moving away from the most climate-harming businesses, driving investment towards the innovation economy that will deliver the transition to a lower-carbon economy by 2050. At the dawn of the 2020s, we find ourselves in a period in which the responsible-investment industry has reached a tipping point, poised to reshape not only finance but the very nature of corporate Australia.

Simon O’Connor is the CEO of the Responsible Investment Association Australasia (RIAA). He sits as the co-chair of the Australian Sustainable Finance Initiative, chairs the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance, and is a member of the Aotearoa New Zealand National Advisory Board on Impact Investment.

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SMARTER CITIES FROM RUST BELTS TO BRAIN BELTS Professor (Hon) I. Caroline McMillen AO FAHMS REGIONS, ECOSYSTEMS, INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP Professor Rowena Barrett THE REASON MOBILITY AS A SERVICE (MAAS) IS SUCH A CHALLENGE David A. Hensher WHAT SETS APART SUCCESSFUL INNOVATION PARKS Reggie Cabal CANBERRA: AUSTRALIA’S INNOVATION CAPITAL Andrew James Barr LIGHT RAIL’S REVIVAL Duncan Edgehill WRITING ON THE WALL Richard Wynne PUBLIC–PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS THAT BENEFIT ALL Rob Adams AUSTRALIA NEEDS AN ELECTRIC VEHICLE STRATEGY Dr Chris Jones ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A MARKET PERSPECTIVE Interview: Vikram Pawah DISASTER-DRIVEN INNOVATION Brett Bundock

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FROM RUST BELTS TO BRAIN BELTS Taking Newcastle as a case study, Professor Caroline McMillen explores the economic transformation of small cities and their regions through innovation, and argues that this approach will be crucial in the decades to come.

By Professor (Hon) I. Caroline McMillen AO FAHMS

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uring the past two decades, advanced economies have made the transition from a historical reliance on traditional manufacturing or resources to advanced manufacturing industries based on integration of cyber and physical systems cast as emerging, frontier or Industry 4.0 technologies. In their 2017 book, The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts Are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation, Antoine van Agtmael and Fred Bakker review 37 case studies of cities across Europe and the US that made successful transitions to an innovation-based economy. Common features of success across cities such as Pittsburgh, Eindhoven and Akron included the presence of strong collaborative research institutions and facilities characterised by deep specialist-science and technology capability that delivered innovation and a competitive advantage in global markets. As one example, Akron, an Ohio city with a population of 200,000, was formerly a global centre of tyre manufacture and a hub in America’s manufacturing supply chain, but from the end of the 1990s big companies abandoned their tyre plants and freight trains no longer stopped in Akron. The University of Akron, however, had built clear expertise in polymer science and their collaborations in this field were harnessed to drive a revitalisation of the industry base in the region. As highlighted in the University of Akron 2010–11 Report to the Community: “... regenerating feedback cycles have existed between most universities and their communities, but recent seismic rumbles of economic and technological change have made it abundantly clear that institutions must serve not only as anchors for regional economies, but also as stimulators, facilitators and connectors”.

During this period there was also a global focus on factors underpinning the economic recovery of cities that had experienced economic and social decline before emerging as what were characterised as "magnet" cities. In 2014, KPMG analysed the five-year net growth in population and GDP in over 160 non-capital or second cities across the world categorised by the size of their population as large (>1.75m), medium (850k–1.75m) or small (<850k). Case studies were also carried out on nine cities that had gone through a period of economic decline before emerging with growth in high-skilled jobs and GDP. There was a strong and positive correlation between variables that indicated the presence of a high proportion of young wealth creators aged between 25 and 34 and the city’s economic growth rate. The number of patents per 10,000 people was one indicator that a city’s population was focused on research, innovation and start-ups and included young wealth creators. Australia 2030 prosperity through innovation There has been a growing awareness in Australia, highlighted by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, that reliance on traditional industry sectors will no longer maintain national economic growth, productivity and living standards The 2017 landmark report, Australia 2030: Prosperity through Innovation, articulated a clear vision that, by 2030, “Australia will be counted within the top tier of innovation nations and take pride in our global reputation for excellence in science, research and commercialisation.” Strategic opportunities identified in the report included increasing institutional support for commercialisation by establishing a dedicated stream

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The City of Newcastle Newcastle, like all of colonial Australia, was born modern. The landmark innovations of the Industrial Revolution, Watt’s steam engine and Hargreaves’ spinning jenny, were both patented in the decade prior to the departure of the First Fleet in 1787. The city of Newcastle was formally established in 1804 and emerged with a strong economic base founded on coal, steel and manufacturing, while its world-class port shaped its international identity as a trade hub in resources. Two seismic events occurred, however, that redefined the future of Newcastle. In 1989, the city was hit by an earthquake with a Richter magnitude of 5.6 affecting more than 200,000 square kilometres and leaving a damage bill in excess of $4bn. This was followed by the closure of BHPs Newcastle Steelworks in 1999, resulting in significant economic hardship for individuals and communities across the city and region. The University of Newcastle The University of Newcastle (UON) was established in 1965 as a result of strong lobbying by the Hunter community. While a university pays respect to the vision of its founders, it must also adapt its strategy to the forces of change in order to be a transformative agent in the community. As the Chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, Pradeep Khosla, stated, “It’s good for every one of us to have a history, but to have a past that we cannot break away from is not good.” As summarised earlier, during the last decade universities in regions facing economic challenges have worked to co-design innovation ecosystems that have harnessed the key assets from all partners within that ecosystem, as highlighted in the figure above. Realisation of the value of those assets requires a clear strategic plan, execution of key initiatives with collaboration and precision, and a capacity to track performance through shared performance measures.

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The co-design of an innovation ecosystem

Key elements Universities Research excellence Specialist skills Equity of access Talent

Business/industry engagement Work integrated learning Co-design Innovation

Access to global knowledge and industry supply chains Talent, partners, networks

of funding for translational activities. While Australia traditionally focuses on the role of its "mega" and large cities as drivers of economic growth, Australia’s smaller cities and regions such as Geelong in Victoria and Wollongong and Newcastle in NSW have actively responded to the loss of traditional industry sectors.

New business and jobs Productivity A one speed economy

There have been many iterations of strategic plans across the five decades since the foundation of UON. Each plan has built on the successes of its predecessor and been framed against the challenges of the present. The following performance areas in the 2015–2020 UON NeW Futures Strategic Plan represent those of particular importance to the economic transition of the Hunter region. Reinvigoration of the City of Newcastle: UON developed a Ten-Year Estate and Capital Investment Strategy to build an iconic presence within the Newcastle CBD and reinvigorate the city centre. This required strategic and operational partnerships with the City of Newcastle and state and national governments. It resulted in the delivery of an award-winning, technology-enabled learning and teaching facility for up to 5,000 staff and students in the heart of the CBD. This was a key part of a city renewal plan implemented by the city and governments at all levels. Building industry partnerships, innovation and impact UON established interdisciplinary Global Impact Clusters (GICs) offering opportunities for partnership with relevant industry sectors. UON was ranked in the top eight of Australia’s universities

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for industry-related research income and (as the top university by the Federal Department of Industry) for "Innovation Connections" in terms of grants secured in collaboration with business. The Better Health Care GIC was built on the strengths of UON as a Top 8 university in Australia for health and medical research and of the Hunter Medical Research Institute. These organisations were also supporters of the biotechnology company, Viralytics, founded by a UON staff member and acquired by Merck for >$500m in 2018. These results build on decades of leadership designed to ensure that effective industry research partnerships underpin the strategic vision of the university and support the regional economy. UON also attracted investment from the NSW government to develop an integrated network of innovation hubs (I2N), established through collaboration with major industry, government and venture-capital organisations. The intent of I2N is to nurture start-up communities, attract investment and businesses to the Hunter and encourage innovation and commercialisation. Together with the Newcastle City Council, Hunter Digit, Newcastle Now and over 30 other partners, UON and the City of Newcastle were supported by the NSW government to build a new $20m Hunter Innovation Hub in Newcastle CBD. In addition, recognising the importance of the Defence industry to the region, UON launched a Defence, Security and Aerospace Innovation Hub alongside the RAAF base where the Joint Strike Fighter Project and defence industry partners were located. Finally, the UON Upper Hunter Hub was also launched, resulting in the facilitation of a partnership with Ethanol Technologies, which received $12m from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency to establish a demonstration facility to deliver a new technology converting multiple agricultural waste streams into biofuel and green chemical products. These represent the next phase of harnessing Newcastle’s global performance in health, energy and resources research to deliver innovation and its translation to enhance local industry performance.

Building equity of access to higher education Since its foundation, UON has supported equity of access to higher education for students no matter their background or location. The salary and employment premium resulting from a university education reflects the critical roles graduates play in shaping the future workforce in an Industry 4.0 era. UON was the first university in Australia to have more than 1,000 Indigenous students enrolled based on more than three decades of leadership and support from Indigenous elders. These students are enrolled across medicine, law, engineering, science, education, nursing and other professional programs and many have secured prestigious scholarships for further study at Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge universities. This is a demonstration of the maxim espoused by Hillary Clinton that “talent is everywhere, opportunity is not”. In summary, the journey of UON, the City of Newcastle and the Hunter region reflects the statement in the "Race to the Top" review of the UK Government’s Science and Innovation policy (2007) that “the paradox is that while innovation is a global phenomenon, the role of regions as the critical nexus for innovation-based economic growth has increased”. One of the critical factors for a regional university is to reconcile its global and regional ambitions. In 2014, UON stated that it would “stand as a global leader distinguished by equity and excellence to support the economic and social transition of its regions through engagement with partners to deliver innovation and impact”. In 2013, UON was ranked at #298 in the QS World University Rankings; by 2020, it was ranked at #197. The journey for this young university into the Top 200 occurred in parallel with the repositioning of the university to meet the economic and social challenges within its regions. The future of cities and their regions across Australia will depend on collaborations that harness global ambition and regional delivery to support equitable prosperity, environmental sustainability and better health for all.

Professor Caroline McMillen is the chief scientist for South Australia, having taken the role in October 2018 after serving as vice-chancellor of the University of Newcastle. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences, a fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales and a Bragg Member of the Royal Institution, Australia.

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REGIONS, ECOSYSTEMS, INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP How can we measure and improve innovation in regional areas? The executive director of Queensland University of Technology’s Entrepreneurship Program has been finding success applying methodology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

nnovation is a complex phenomenon, covering both disruptive and incremental change. Frequently, it comes about through scientific advancement and the adoption and diffusion of new ideas within firms and across sectors. While it is widely accepted that innovation is a component of economic change, the means to make it happen are less well understood. The OECD Oslo Manual (2018, p. 20) defines innovation as: “a new or improved product or process (or combination thereof) that differs significantly from the unit’s previous products or processes and that has been made available to potential users (product) or brought into use by the unit (process).” What this definition suggests is that, without entrepreneurship – or the process of commercialising innovation – all we have is an idea or invention. So, this definition draws attention to implementation of discoveries and highlights the importance of the diffusion of innovation. That said, innovation can be context-dependent or place-specific: ideas and commercialisation opportunities that are possible in one place might not work in another. Ideas need airing in supportive networks. Systems, policies and procedures are needed to ensure that not only are there bright people with ideas, but also clear paths to developing and commercialising those ideas. "Ecosystem" is the conceptual term used to

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

describe a system in which the benefits and resources produced by a cohesive, typically regional, community of entrepreneurs and their supporters help new high-growth ventures form, survive and expand. Some ecosystems, like Silicon Valley, can maximise their regional advantages – be they smart people, established industry clusters or social capital – to create value that leads to economic prosperity. Other regions have core ecosystem elements in place but need further organisation, policy prioritisation, investment or activity to fire the twin engines of innovation and entrepreneurship capacities – human capital, funding, infrastructure, demand, culture and incentives – to realise their potential. Queensland’s diverse economy has strong business foundations. That diversity is a result of a geography that spans tropical and sub-tropical environments. Numerous iconic businesses have innovation at their core. A century ago, QANTAS formed in Winton, Queensland and began flying passengers over vast distances. The Royal Flying Doctor Queensland division provides health care to people in remote areas . The Bank of Queensland provides regional, owner-managed banking; and Suncorp offers insurance services; firms such as Queen, Bundaberg Distillery, Teys and Golden Circle value-add and export local commodities. Primary production, commodities and resources drive Queensland’s wealth, while

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local, innovation-driven entrepreneurship ecosystems amplify regional comparative advantages and are key to future economic success. Building strong and self-sustaining regional innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems takes time. History, culture, leadership and investment each plays a role in either moving ecosystems forward or stalling their development. Continuous and collaborative efforts are required from a range of interconnected actors. It is these interconnections between the parts of the ecosystem that build resilience, as Brad Felds and Ian Hathaway explain in their 2020 book, The Startup Community Way. Daniel Isenberg emphasised the same point in his 2010 Harvard Business Review article, "The big idea: How to start an entrepreneurial revolution" At MIT, Professors Fiona Murray, Scott Stern and Bill Aulet run the Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program (REAP) on the basis that regional impact is created by maximising the interconnections between innovation and entrepreneurship capacities that are supported by foundational institutions and focused on regional comparative advantage. But they, like others in this space, argue that no one stakeholder is more important than another in creating the entrepreneurship ecosystem – not governments, not the private sector, not entrepreneurial support agencies, not universities. As Josh Lerner argues in Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2009), government efforts to transform regions into innovative hubs often fail to meet expectations. All stakeholders must work

together, while mindful that entrepreneurs are at the centre of the ecosystem. It is through continuous, appropriate collaborative effort that innovation comes to life through entrepreneurial action. Having participated in the MIT REAP program and studied ecosystem development, I now lead the Queensland Connects program, which aims to stimulate innovation-driven entrepreneurship by helping diverse regions exploit their locational strengths. Understanding that the destinies of industries and regions are deeply intertwined, I work with the state government and a team of regional leaders as they identify the strengths of their region and develop strategies to accelerate the emergence of a strong, innovation-driven entrepreneurship ecosystem. Innovation-driven entrepreneurship is about growth, ambition, (calculated) risk-taking and the aspiration to serve markets at scale, often through utilising technology. But the Queensland Connects program is not solely about developing new, young and technology-led ventures. Established firms are equally likely to pursue innovation through new ventures. Indeed, larger, established firms have a greater capacity to do this; they may simply need a degree of inspiration, support and knowhow to turn knowledge and information inputs into innovation outputs. Innovative organisations actively sense, internalise, and take entrepreneurial action with that new knowledge in relation to changes in their operational environment. And what more drastic change have individuals, firms and regions experienced than that wrought by COVID-19? The pandemic has exposed weaknesses in supply chains and regional capability, as well as activities that do not create value or social impact. Conversely, it has favoured those entities with strong cultures of collaboration and teamwork, as well as speed, agility, resilience and a commitment to technological innovation, and localism. Now is the time to push forward with efforts to strengthen regional ecosystems so the flow of knowledge, trust and activities is facilitated to underpin the attraction and creation of more resources over time that will see higher rates of innovation driven entrepreneurship contributing to resilient economic growth. But remember there is no quick fix and this is a long-term process of collaborative change in regions.

Professor Rowena Barrett is executive director of QUT Entrepreneurship. She has been a board member for the Australia New Zealand Academy of Management, and a member of the Business & Economics Panel for the New Zealand Performance Based Research Fund.

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THE REASON MOBILITY AS A SERVICE (MAAS) IS SUCH A CHALLENGE The Setting There is growing interest in ways to improve mobility services. This interest has emerged under the title of Mobility as a Service (MaaS), broadly defined as a type of service that, through a digital platform, enables users to plan, book, and pay for multiple types of mobility service. Simply put ‘A one-stop travel management platform digitally unifying service inquiry, purchase and delivery’. Powered by digital technology, mobility suppliers, and those who bring them together through some aggregation framework (typically acting as a broker) to deliver an extended set of mobility choices, MaaS is seen as an ecosystem that can, through appropriate incentive-based regulation, offer a way forward for government and other interested parties to achieve a wide range of sustainability objectives such as reducing transport emissions and traffic congestion through, in particular, reducing private car ownership which translates to less car use and less traffic congestion. MaaS has generated a huge amount of interest as a prospective way to garner a greater commitment to mobility activity that aligns with achieving sustainability objectives. At the same time, MaaS gives travellers greater choices through targeted information on multi-modal journey planning with the support of a digital platform. While this all sounds very appealing, we have yet to see a MaaS product that is a successful business model and which offers various multimodal bundles through a subscription plan, despite a number of applications such as Whim in Finland, UbiGo in Sweden, and Stadtwerke Augsburg in Germany. With rare exception, there is also no evidence on how MaaS in an urban setting has contributed to achieving broad societal objectives through reduced private car use and hence emission savings.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

By David A. Hensher

We highlight a number of issues that are linked to the ongoing challenge facing MaaS. Given that unpackaged service levels of each mode are exactly the same as those offered as packaged modes, we do not know whether the gain in utility by offering packaged services as the sum of unpackaged services is utility adding (or whether the loss in utility is also a possibility). If true, then what needs to be added in to increase expected utility? The considerations include financial and/or non-financial incentives, and content and functionality of a digital platform as a way of simplifying/reducing the effort required in making mobility decisions. For many people, they might be satisfied with what they already do, and exposing them to alternative mobility options through an App and packaging mobility services with incentives including multiservice incentives, may

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have no impact on their travel behaviour. This is the challenge and needs to be tested. Central to this challenge is identifying and quantifying what additional attributes and constraint changes are necessary to get an individual to move to a consideration stage (at least at this very early stage of persuasion in the diffusion of innovation) and then into an actionable testable mobility choice outcome. The Challenge Think about it; MaaS is essentially the same service levels of each mode separately and currently offered; and as a separate offer based on the same service levels, why would the offer of telling someone they can use particular modes at the same service levels through a digital platform (App) (if no relevant incentives – not necessarily financial) be of sufficient difference to change travel behaviour? Think of MaaS as adding another attribute (maybe more than one attribute) to an already unchanged set of attribute levels on unpackaged modes. This latter feature may explain why it appears to not be attractive enough for most people. Also, we know that many people are (sufficiently) familiar with travel options and know how to combine them without having to use an App. We should give the public more credit about knowing than is typically claimed in the MaaS deliberations. I call this the framing of MaaS. Let us use an example. Assume a person uses the car and the car trip is 39 minutes, parking cost is $20, tolls $10 but door to door. A multimodal trip without any discounts to what is on offer as separate modal services is a 10 minutes’ walk to the train, a 5 minute wait for the train, 50 minutes on the train, a $5 fare and a 10 minutes’ walk to the destination. What does MaaS do? We could tell you about this non-car trip if you did not already know! But knowing about an often inferior good (in terms of attributes that matter) is not enough to change travel behaviour, a reason why someone does not use it at present. So, what else needs to be on offer? For a start, we need to make the

private car less attractive (something many of us have been promoting for years), which seems to not be possible or increasingly very difficult without serious reform in road use charging, and/or make the modal components of the alternative more attractive. But this latter initiative can happen outside of MaaS (planners and service providers have been doing this for years); so, if the additional attribute(s) associated with MaaS that is (are) claimed to represent the appeal of MaaS is (are) not significant, MaaS may add no utility at all. So, what is this missing attribute(s)? That is the crucial question. This comes down to what I refer to as differential effort and seamlessness beyond what is already known and available being the missing ingredient. Is the effort of engaging in a multi-modal interrogation via a digital app a sufficient investment in return for an expected utility gain? The eco-system of MaaS appears to have many challenges to face and resolve before we can see a pathway to scalability, and even a business case that might have commercial legs.

David Hensher PhD, FASSA, is Professor of Management and Founding Director of the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies (ITLS) at The University of Sydney Business School.

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WHAT SETS APART SUCCESSFUL INNOVATION PARKS? For disruptive innovation, and considered collaboration, few physical spaces open as much opportunity as welldesigned innovation districts.

rom Boston’s 1,000-acre innovation district to Be’er Sheva Innovation District in Israel, innovation parks have been around for decades. Traditionally hubs for technology R&D, they attract a cluster of tech businesses at various stages of maturity to co-locate and share knowledge or skills. They are often also co-located with an academic institute – a source of a steady stream of talent as well as research capabilities. Silicon Valley, for example, benefits from its proximity to Stanford University and UC Berkeley. With this in mind, it’s exciting to see new urban models emerge. These innovation districts are revitalising urban areas, and building creative, walkable precincts. They create a new level of energy in a business park environment. In their essay on the rise of innovation districts in the US, Bruce Katz and Julie Wagner define innovation districts as “geographic areas where leading-edge anchor institutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, business incubators and accelerators”. They are also well-integrated into the surrounding community, with housing, retail, education and transport all close by. Diversity thrives beyond the confines of the innovation districts when they enable the exchange of ideas – not just between businesses in one industry but between very different people from different backgrounds. They are more than technology or science parks because they are purposely designed to attract a diverse mix of organisations and create "bump" opportunities. These are the moments when true innovation happens, when ideas turn into opportunities with tangible and commercial

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

possibility. And having worked in Silicon Valley for 18 years, I know that the rate of ideas generated from innovation districts can create a sense of momentum that is inspiring. As well as providing a solid foundation for business growth, they can also expand opportunities for education and jobs when they are part of a considered urban-planning strategy in areas ripe for regentrification. Despite all these benefits, some of Australia’s innovation districts seem to be stuck in second gear. I suspect there are two reasons behind this. First, an innovation district needs to have a compelling proposition. What makes it different and what about it will attract the right people into the fold? What is its focus, and what benefits will it provide? Without clear answers to these questions, an innovation district will struggle to take flight. Second, once this raison d'être can be articulated, success metrics should be put in place to ensure future sustainability. Examples could be the number of successful business launches or jobs generated. There could also be a focus on local community engagement, measurable by the number of events or programs that could be said to have enriched the lives of local residents. Or it could be about creating links to not-for-profit organisations, or other social-responsibility targets, or ensuring greater gender diversity among entrepreneurs. This is simply a commercial planning approach: defining the one-to-three-year plan, and the three-to-five-year plan. An element of the Australian psyche is a strong desire to avoid failure. But there is an element of risk for any start-up – something Silicon Valley and other such

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districts openly acknowledge. The idea that "it’s okay to fail, as long as you learn" has to be part of any innovation district’s culture. Some of the world’s most successful innovation districts share three distinctive features. A compelling anchor Any shopping centre operator will tell you how important the anchor tenant is to setting the tone and drawing the right mix of tenants and visitors. In an innovation district, this could be a university, a major tech company or another high-profile corporate with a collaborative culture. For example, St Louis’ Cortex Innovation District is adjacent to Washington University, Saint Louis University and Barnes Jewish Hospital. Sprawling across 200 acres , it has transformed what was a vacant industrial landscape into a commercial nursery contributing $US2.1 billion to regional business activity in 2018. St Louis is also home to the first Venture Café, a global not-for-profit that accelerates innovation by providing opportunities for people to connect, hone ideas and build relationships. Done well, this initiative can act as an anchor in its own right. An inviting, visible hub Innovation districts need a central point (like a Venture Café) – a communal heart where people can gather. This should be architecturally appealing, drawing people in daily for those ad hoc "bump" moments. In the UK, the Engine Shed hosts over 1,200 events every year in the heritage Brunel Engine Shed at Bristol Temple Meads station. It has become synonymous with Bristol’s tech start-up acceleration and is a partnership between the University of Bristol, Bristol City Council and the West of England Local Enterprise Partnership. Physical "hub" spaces allow fertile minds to meet formally or informally, to learn or propound ideas. They also enable community involvement. One of the reasons ORIX supports Venture Café in Macquarie Park, Sydney is the way it involves local residents. It’s a fantastic initiative: on any given Thursday, a diverse group of people with a shared interest in a topic will assemble and connect.

A mixed ecosystem Once these first two elements are locked in, an innovation district is well-placed to attract a wide group of people, from students to investors. In 2010, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg launched a $US100 million competition among universities to open an engineering-and-science centre on city-owned land on Roosevelt Island. The result was Cornell Tech – a partnership between Cornell University and TechnionIsrael Institute of Technology (TATA). The graduate school has since been credited with enticing Amazon to consider building a headquarters in Queens and Google to open a campus in the West Village. Closer to home, ORIX was drawn to Sydney’s Macquarie Park by its complementary pool of corporate and multinational headquarters alongside a leading university – and Australia’s only Venture Café. It has all the right ingredients to support a thriving start-up ecosystem. The fleet industry in Australia and New Zealand is relatively mature, which is why we believe new ideas and innovation have never been so important. We want to be part of innovation’s DNA and are willing to embrace the disruption that comes with that. We believe being part of an innovation district is a business enabler in every sense – for every type of business.

Reggie Cabal is the chief executive officer and managing director at ORIX Australia and New Zealand, one of the leading fleet management, novated leasing and rental companies in Australia.

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CANBERRA: AUSTRALIA’S INNOVATION CAPITAL Only by positioning innovation at the heart of economies can it be achieved in a meaningful, widespread way. Canberra, with its wealth of institutions and performance belying its size, is a strong example of how this can be done.

s countries around the world look to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, smart, forward-looking jurisdictions must take time to reflect on what the future of the global economy looks like and how they can rebuild to be in the best position for success. Though devastating in scale in both human and economic terms, the coronavirus is a chance for economic renewal not seen since the end of World War II. For many jurisdictions, it is an opportunity to reshape their economies for the 21st century, with innovation at the core. Many jurisdictions have been acting on the task of economic renewal for a long time. Sadly, many more have continued to rely on economies grounded in the past. The attitude of "if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it" is all too common. Such inaction has led to anaemic economic growth, growing inefficiency and stagnant wages. If continued, it will widen the gulf between the hand-sitting jurisdictions that are struggling to attract and retain talent to build their knowledge economies, and those jurisdictions that moved quickly to foster innovation and are now benefiting from a virtuous cycle of creativity, investment and growth. There are many jurisdictions around the world known for their success in innovation. In 2019, the World Economic Forum listed the global megacities of New York, Tokyo and London as the world’s most innovative jurisdictions. Elsewhere, places such as Singapore, Tel Aviv and Los Angeles have been outperforming their global peers for some time. But success in innovation is not just about adding up the number of "unicorn" companies (startups valued at over US$1 billion); nor is it a matter

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

of measuring overall economic growth. There are plenty of jurisdictions benefiting from strong growth today in sectors that simply won’t exist tomorrow. Success in innovation is about looking at how businesses across all sectors of an economy are performing against their global peers. It’s about encouraging people to think differently and take risks. And, importantly, it’s about creating a place where people want to live, work, raise a family and build a life. Thinking differently is what creates new ideas and new businesses. Being competitive in a global environment is what keeps companies strong. And being a place where people want to live, work and raise a family ensures a cycle of growth and reinvestment as those who succeed invest their time, expertise and capital into new ventures. In the Australian Capital Territory the question of how to create an innovative, globally competitive economy in a place where people want to live, work and raise a family has been at the heart of the government’s thinking for more than a decade – certainly long before the success of the ubiquitous FAANG stocks (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) made ‘agile’ and ‘innovative’ the go-to buzzwords of politicians. Canberra is a small city by global standards. We have a population of nearly 430,000 people and gross state product of around $42 billion. But when it comes to innovation, we regularly outperform our peers on a per-capita basis across a number of important metrics.

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Canberra had 1.9 patents registered per 10,000 people in 2018, compared to the Australian average of 1.1 or NSW, the next most prolific state or territory, at 1.4. Canberra also had the largest service-exports sector relative to population. In 2018– 19, our service exports of around $54 million per 10,000 people were more than 40 per cent higher than the national average. Numerous factors have been central to this success: a focus on attracting the best and brightest minds; creating an innovation ecosystem where companies have access to knowledge and expertise; ensuring new ventures have access to ready capital, including through government- backed investment; and taking a medium-to-long- term approach to developing Canberra’s economy that transcends the cycle of creation and destruction all too common with programs that become the object of squabbling between opposing ideologies. In relation to the latter, the near two-decade tenure of the current ACT government has created a level of stability and certainty in program delivery that is almost unparalleled anywhere in Australia. For a stark contrast, one only need look at the federal arena, where a decade of instability has left many sectors of the national economy in a constant state of uncertainty. Key to the ACT government’s approach to fostering innovation has been creating a city in which people want to live. Canberra is a knowledge economy and the ability to attract the best and brightest minds is paramount. Our best resources will not be found by digging a hole in the ground. They will be found in our universities, research labs and technology parks. In that respect, the idea of Canberra as a society and not just an economy has been a core part of our thinking. That means citizens having access to affordable housing that doesn’t necessitate a two-hour daily commute. It means access to worldclass schools and universities that rank among the best in the world. It means access to high quality, affordable medical care when and where you need it, as well as access to bushland, parkland and urban open space. These are the things people regard as prerequisites for a full and happy life, and they’re the things we have focused on delivering. On the commercial side, we have invested heavily in building an innovation ecosystem that provides

access to programs and support, and brings together people from all areas of business – including, importantly, founders and investors. Early on, we established the Canberra Innovation Network (CBRIN) as an independent body to focus solely on building this ecosystem. This has proven to be a huge success. In 1997, the Canberra Business Development Fund was established, followed by the Australian National University–MTAA Super Venture Capital Fund in 2004 and Significant Capital Ventures in 2016. Since 2008, we have addressed market failure at the pre-commercialisation stage by supporting Canberra’s start-ups and developing a pipeline of investable companies through the Innovation Connect program. More recently, the government invested $9.75 million over three years to implement the Priority Investment Program, which focuses on sector development by co-investing in stimulus and innovation infrastructure projects across key sectors. Its emphasis is on the local tertiary education and research sector and its specialisations and growth building assets, which are seen as the primary driver of long-term wealth creation and jobs in Canberra. In 2018–19, $5.2 million in funding went to five projects in the space, agri-technology, cybersecurity and renewable-energy sectors. In 2019–20, a further $2 million was directed towards three projects in the space, biosecurity and biodiversity sectors. Having the highest payroll-tax threshold in Australia – the result of a two-decade tax-reform plan that began in 2012 – has also been important in bolstering Canberra’s economic foundations. There are many actions forward-looking governments can take during this time of economic rebuilding to position their economies for strong growth over the coming decades. As was noted frequently at the height of the pandemic, business as usual will not be enough to generate the level of growth needed to return the global economy to its pre-virus state. Canberra has prioritised innovation for more than a decade, and during that time we have become Australia’s innovation capital. Now is the time for all levels of governments across the world to be thinking about how to position innovation at the heart of their economies, and everything that involves.

Andrew James Barr is Chief Minister of the Australian Capital Territory. He has been a Labor Party member in the ACT Legislative Assembly since April 2006.

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LIGHT RAIL’S REVIVAL Light rail is undergoing an exciting renaissance as oldfashioned, clunky trams are metamorphosised into sleek, modern vehicles. Canberra offers a case study into how to maximise the benefits of the return to the 19th century transport standard, integrated with 21st century urban-planning principles.

hroughout Europe, the United Arab Emirates, China, the Americas and now Australia, cities are building new, technologically advanced light-rail networks as part of the solution to anticipated congestion and transport challenges of the future. Public officials and engineers responsible for building light-rail networks often extol the virtues of light rail as a public transport option, in terms of defining a city’s character, boosting economies, connecting growing and changing populations to key destinations, and reducing emissions. Light rail has the capacity to address many of the transport challenges associated with modern cities. However, the benefits of light rail are most effectively realised if it is designed and delivered alongside other greater city-building initiatives. Canberra is already reaping the rewards along its first line as government and private business continue to invest heavily in surrounding infrastructure, making it one of the best examples of how light rail can benefit growing cities for generations to come. Canberra’s light rail has been a success on a number of levels. Within six months of commencing operations, passenger patronage was at levels not expected until 2021, prompting additional services and bumping the project’s cost-benefit ratio from 1.2 to 1.3 upon its completion. More than 15,000 Canberrans use light rail every day to travel to their places of work, study and recreation, relieving congestion and allowing other public transport services, such as buses, to be redirected to areas of greater need. And it goes far beyond patronage numbers, with Canberra’s light rail quickly becoming a part of the city’s character as light-rail icons make their way into local artworks and souvenirs.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Arguably one of the greatest benefits of light rail is its capacity to accommodate the demands of a growing city as population density increases. Light rail brings the opportunity to revitalise city precincts, stimulate residential development along rail corridors and boost local economies through increased business investment, all while containing urban sprawl. Average house prices along the light-rail corridor between Gungahlin and the CBD grew at a faster rate than those in other ACT suburbs, and additional development in these areas will support further population growth. Key hubs along the line are also seeing increased commercial interest as the permanency of a fixed-line light rail underpins confidence in the market. As cities grow and densify, another significant benefit light rail can offer is an attractive and accessible transport option for commuting workers, students and tourists. Good infrastructure is designed to maximise citizens’ wellbeing, and light rail is an excellent tool for connecting people across demographics and social barriers. Canberra’s light rail also serves to illustrate this opportunity, as the line connects the city’s fastest-growing residential area to the city centre, a similarly fast-growing jobs-and-recreation hub. With attractive, comfortable, safe and easily accessible vehicles for citizens of all ages and abilities, the ACT’s light-rail system is well-placed to connect an ageing population, increasing numbers of inner-city families, and people with disabilities throughout the city for decades to come. Undoubtedly, climate change will dramatically affect the way our cities are planned and how people move within them – possibly even more than population or demographic changes will. Choking in smoke while idling in stand-still traffic

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along arterial roads is hardly a pleasant experience, yet this is what may lie in store for city residents if emissions aren’t reduced and investments made in public transit. Light rail again offers an attractive, emissions-free alternative. Light-rail vehicles run off not fuel but electricity, which can be generated using renewable sources, as is the case in the ACT. Meanwhile, engineering breakthroughs such as regenerative braking can further maximise energy efficiency. Instead of getting in their cars and contributing to road congestion, Canberrans can cycle or walk to a light-rail stop, expect to board within five to six

Similarly, Norway’s light rail in Bergen was conceived not only as a transportation project but as one part of an enormous urban-development plan to connect the airport, outer-city suburbs and key development hubs. It’s been a smilar story in other European cities – Bordeaux, Angers and Bern. To harness the potential of light rail to address the challenges future cities will face, governments must balance urban-design considerations alongside technical solutions, and ensure transport operations are central to informing the design of the entire network. The future of light rail is bright. But, as

Credit: Bidgee, Wikipedia

minutes, and enjoy a climate-controlled journey into their place of work or study. Emissions targets are only one consideration when planning for light rail into the future. Engineering solutions for temperature control, urban heat island effect, biodiversity impacts and deteriorating soils, to name just a few challenges, are paramount in planning light-rail networks into the future, in the ACT and elsewhere. All of these benefits are intrinsic to light rail, but it is important to remember they have been realised in conjunction with other city-building initiatives, including revitalisation projects in these key hubs and housing development programs.

Canberra’s example shows, it is essential to understand the drivers and objectives for light rail before delivery to ensure its success. In the ACT, a clear statement of aspirations helped guide the planning and ultimate success of Stage One of light rail, and will continue to guide future extensions of the network across the city. City planners, engineers and members of parliament considering bringing light rail to their cities would do well to remember the value light rail can bring, but also how those benefits can be limited if not accompanied by a city-wide master plan or other infrastructure investments. If in doubt, perhaps they should look to Canberra.

Duncan Edghill is the deputy director general of Transport Canberra.

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WRITING ON THE WALL As Melbourne becomes as diverse as New York City, public and affordable housing is key to nurturing communities By Richard Wynne

rden Watson-Cropley. Yulius Antares Taime. Ni Na Nguyen. Badia Abdo. Four names. If you live in Melbourne, you may not know the people behind those names, but you’ve probably seen their faces. That’s because Arden, Yulius, Ni Na and Badia each feature on the largest mural in the southern hemisphere, painted on the side of a public-housing tower in Collingwood. The world has changed since that mural was painted by artist Matt Adnate in 2018. Since then, we’ve had the Black Summer bushfires, then COVID-19 and now the pandemic recession – and each of these cataclysms has tested the resilience of our environment, community and economy. All of which brings me back to that mural. For me, the Collingwood mural is about more than those four individuals. It’s about the 2,500 residents of the public-housing estate that their faces represent and, by extension, all the other faces of all the other people in all the families and communities that live in all the cities, suburbs and towns of Victoria. Victoria is very much like that mural – diverse, dynamic and individual. But we are strongest when we stick together. The good news is that the vast majority of Victorians have stuck together – looking out for and acting in the best interests of one another. The challenge we face now is to stay together – to build

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on our sense of community as we navigate the challenges that lie ahead. Because the testing times are not over. Over the next decade Victoria will face a convergence of environmental, social and economic changes, and we will need to work as a community to adapt to those changes. We need to plan for our community. We need to invest for our community. And we have to come together as a community to bring those plans and investments to life. We also need to face reality. Population growth has been a controversial topic at times over the past 15 years. Victoria has been growing at a rate of 140,000 people a year. Melbourne has been projected to become Australia’s largest city within a decade. And our state’s population has been projected to hit 10 million by 2051. In the short term, COVID-19 will halt immigration-based population growth, but we can be sure migrants will come again once the pandemic is over because they’ll want Victoria’s world-class way of life – and Victoria, in turn, needs their skills and energy. In other words, population growth will resume at a clip. Which means that by the middle of this century Melbourne’s population will be almost the same – and just as diverse – as the current population of New York City. We need to use the current population pause to accelerate our plans and investments for growth. We also need to prepare accelerations in: our

Photo: Rob Deutscher 288

environment with climate change; our demographics with our ageing and diverse population; and our economy with digital disruption and the creation of an Asian middle class of more than three billion people. To manage this convergence of accelerated change, we need to juggle priorities. In the short term, we need to ensure services and infrastructure are more affordable and accessible. That’s why our Government is investing record amounts in schools and hospitals, as well as in transformational projects like the Metro Tunnel, North East Link and the West Gate Tunnel. In the medium-to-long term, we need to ensure Victoria has a critical mass of healthy, skilled people to maintain our standard of living. That is the thinking behind Plan Melbourne – our Government’s 35-year blueprint for managing population growth, growing the economy, creating affordable and accessible housing, improving transport, responding to climate change and creating a city of 20-minute neighbourhoods. When I launched Plan Melbourne I said Victoria had to commit to a generation of action. And some of the most important actions need to be taken in my portfolio of Housing. According to the Housing Affordability Act, housing is affordable if the price of a median dwelling is no more than three times higher than the median annual household income.

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In Melbourne, the price of a median dwelling is more than 10 times above the median annual household income. That means the city’s housing is severely unaffordable. Our Government is working hard to improve supply and affordability. For instance, we have boosted supply by unlocking enough land for another 100,000 housing lots and announced plans for 12 new communities with a capacity for another 50,000 homes. In addition, I am working with the housing industry to devise new models for housing development, including build-to-rent, and funded 11 councils to develop affordable-housing strategies. Besides specific actions, though, we need to have an informed public discussion about the kind of communities we want to live and work in. For instance, only a fraction of rental properties in Melbourne are currently affordable to someone on the Newstart Allowance. Is that the kind of community we want? Are we prepared to live in a society where there is an underclass that is effectively homeless? And do we understand that, by allowing this kind of economic sectarianism to exist, we run the risk of stunting our community and economy? I live and work in Melbourne’s inner city.

My office is a short walk from that wonderful mural in Collingwood. And I’ve walked up and down the stairs of those public-housing towers. And I’ve been deeply impressed – and moved – by the people I’ve met in those housing towers. The Collingwood public-housing estate is a strong community – just like so many other strong communities across Victoria. And, right now, Victoria needs that community strength in all its diversity and vitality. With that in mind, let me come back to Arden, Yulius, Ni Na and Badia – the four Melburnians immortalised on that mural. When I see the mural, I think of all of the wonderful people I have met as they passed through that public-housing estate. People from every corner of the world who have come here to build a better future – and who have used public housing as a launching pad for themselves and their children. If you’re wondering what drives me, politically, it is the great Victorians like the residents in the Collingwood public-housing estate. I am working for the future they will help create – a future that is all about diversity and sustainability, and community and opportunity.

Richard Wynne MP is a member of the Labor Party, and the Minister for Planning, Minister for Housing, Minister for Multicultural Affairs in Victoria.

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PUBLIC–PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS THAT BENEFIT ALL Over the past 25 years the City of Melbourne has used public-private partnerships (PPPs) to deliver real value to the community . The nature of these partnerships has stayed true to the original principle of PPPs: that all parties should benefit from the partnership. By Rob Adams

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nfortunately, in recent times, PPPs have acquired a bad reputation as they’ve been misused by governments as a mechanism to delay payments and defer risks, costing the public more over the long term. Another problematic development is the private sector-led proposal, in which the private sector pitches proposals to government, avoiding any substantive competition in the process. There are consistent themes that make the City of Melbourne PPPs different: • All proposals are led from within council by an in-house team of experts. The city contributes to the partnership by using its existing assets. • The city shares in the risks but puts in place mechanisms to ensure this risk is managed and reasonable. This usually means the city retains equity in the process until the risk is minimised. • The process of finding a partner is always competitive, with quality design and public benefit high on the selection criteria. • The city acts as an intelligent client through its in-house team, and recognises that successful partnerships take time to deliver and implement, often bridging two terms of office by the councillors. • The city started small and built confidence internally and with the development industry.

•

Partnerships need to be aligned with the council’s goals, such as affordable housing, sustainability and repair of the city fabric. These goals were established in the City of Melbourne’s 1985 Strategy Plan, which sought to: –bring back people to live in the city, so adding density and mixed use; –favour pedestrians and public transport over cars, so improving connectivity while giving back more space to the people; –remove all surface-level carparks, so ensuring an excellent street experience with a high-quality public realm that favours walking; –build on the city’s physical attributes and local character, such as the laneways, bluestone and high-quality open spaces.

When the PPP program started in the late 1980s, the city had limited finances. While there were funds for the basics, the more ambitious projects needed partners in order to be realised. The first two projects were relatively conventional. Cafe L’Incontro A small open space on the corner of Little Collins and Swanston Streets was populated by more pigeons than people. The plan was to design – in-house – a café that would be

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elevated above the public space, providing a comfortable place to sit overlooking the recently pedestrianised Swanston Street. The cafe provided an active edge to the space, which was contained by an Akio Makigawa sculpture . The concept was put to the market in 1993/94 on the basis that the successful bidder would secure a lease over the site – in this case, 30 years – after which the development would revert to the city. Tyne Elgin Street Carpark The original site was a surface-level carpark that accommodated an old house and 110 parking spaces. The proposal was to go to market for an underground carpark with 215 short-stay spaces. The strata above the slab would be for residential development. A special requirement was that the final development should reinstate the two laneways that had been compromised by the demolition to make way for the existing carpark. The city achieved all its requirements, with the extra parking welcomed by retailers and the repaired neighbourhood appreciated by local residents. The city gained a quality carpark that has returned steady revenue for more than 20 years.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

The City Square This was a project similar to Tyne Elgin but on a grander scale that involved a land swap by the city. This allowed for the building of a hotel and residential development that provided active frontages and passive surveillance of the square, a new laneway, 400 underground short-stay parking spaces, a new, softer City Square and the refurbishment of the historic Regent Theatre. QV Melbourne With the success of the three aforementioned projects, the city became more ambitious. In 2000, following expressions of concern about the proposed development on the Queen Victoria Hospital site in Swanston Street, the city purchased the site from the Nauru government for $35 million. It then packaged a brief that required the developers to provide an underground supermarket to support the city’s rapidly increasing residential population, 2000 shortstay parking spaces to help the retailers and hospitality area of Chinatown, lanes and arcades with small tenancies and complete active frontage, and a childcare facility. It also required that the development should not be designed by a single architect but rather be a campus-style development

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with multiple hands involved. The result was the QV development, which helped reverse declining retail in the CBD. The city returned a modest profit of $3.5m from interest, earned by leaving its money in the development while retaining the land title until practical completion. QVM Precinct Renewal The most recent example, currently under construction, is the Munro site in Therry Street opposite the Queen Victoria Market. This forms part of a larger precinct and the QVM Precinct Renewal, but it is a crucial site. It will allow the city to remove surface-level carparking and shift parking underground, thus allowing for the creation of a circa 1.75-hectare Market Square. It also allows the city to support retail at the market and avoid the introduction of a supermarket and chain stores. The successful developer is providing 15 per cent affordable housing, building community facilities, including 120-space childcare, and providing lanes and open space. A safeguard built in for the city was that the developer was required to build the 500space carpark and the community facilities before gaining title. The best way to explain the public benefit is in the waterfall chart below.

JH Boyd School The Munro model has been repeated at the former JH Boyd School in Southbank, where the city purchased the site for $10.5m, built in a library for $7m and an open space for $4m, selling off a small parcel of land to a developer on the requirement that it provide 15 per cent affordable housing and 1000 square metres of community space, all at a 6-Star Green Star rating. The price paid by the developer paid off all the previous investments and left the city with a residual site value of $23m. Postcode 3000 Arguably the most successful PPP carried out by the city was Postcode 3000. The program saw the inner city increase its number of residential units from 650 in 1985 to nearly 50,000 today, so producing the single-biggest change to the central city since the gold rush. The secret to these kinds of projects is that councils need to retain the in-house expertise that allows them to conceive of projects and then have the skills to negotiate and manage the risk of delivery. The City of Melbourne has done this for 30 years, and its communities continue to benefit from these actions while its credibility within private enterprise remains high.

Net Financial Benefit $150 $118.80 $100

$50 $21.80 $0

($50)

$0.30 LAND PURCHASE COMMUNITY LESS PDG LAND LESS COMMUNITY AFFORDABLE ($86M) FACILITIES ($70M) PAYMENT $26.7M FACILITIES NEW HOUSING $7.8M ASSET $70M ($59.30)

($100)

($51.50)

RESIDUAL LAND ASSET REALISATION LAND VALUE OF VALUE $28M (A'Beck, Howard + THE NEW LANES ($23.50) Elizab.) $23.8M AND OPEN SPACE @MARKET VALUE $21.5M

VALUE OF OPEN SPACE - 12,500 SQM @ MARKET VALUE $97M

($86)

($129.30)

($150) ($156) ($200)

Rob Adams is an architect and urban designer, and Director of City Design at the City of Melbourne, Australia. He won multiple awards as the leader of the revitalisation of the Melbourne City Centre and surrounds, helping to create a vibrant city streetscape with innovative design features.

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AUSTRALIA NEEDS AN ELECTRIC VEHICLE STRATEGY The cities of the future will need to feature a majority of electric cars so that nations can meet their emissions reduction targets, and cut down on pollution. Only by planning adequately will Australia not be left behind.

ossil fuels for transport may have driven an explosion in prosperity, but the costs of burning oil and gas are clear. Carbon dioxide emissions are, unequivocally, the primary driver of accelerating global warming, while the many other pollutants produced by internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles are carcinogenic and acutely toxic. At a time when more people than ever around the world are congregating in cites, clean air is getting harder to come by. Fortunately, another century-old technology is readily available, and it needn’t poison our atmosphere. Electric vehicles (EVs) offer emissions-free mobility when charged from renewable-energy sources like wind and solar. They are clean, quiet, low maintenance and typically operate at around one quarter of the cost of an equivalent ICE vehicle. Lithium ion

Fast-charging infrastructure should be rolled out nationwide, including governmental focus on lessprofitable stretches of road between towns

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

battery technology is now so advanced that driving ranges of >500 km are entirely practical, while recharging can be completed in 20 minutes. So, where are all the EVs? Frustratingly, Australia is well behind other comparable nations in embracing EVs, despite having perhaps the most compelling set of circumstances: • We currently import all of our transport energy. This is a massive financial burden and national security risk. • Transport emissions represent 19 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions – and are increasing. • Our electricity generation and distribution networks are seeing massively reduced daytime demand due to an excess of renewable-energy generation from the sun. Electric vehicles provide a highly controllable load and may also serve as dispatchable generators. • All the minerals needed to manufacture batteries and EV components are abundant in Australia. These minerals represent a potentially a massive export industry supporting tens of thousands of jobs. • Key auto markets have committed to banning ICE vehicle sales within a decade, while most manufacturers are pivoting towards making only EVs. The market will force us to shift to EVs, like it or not.

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The way forward can be encapsulated in a simple mantra: electrify everything. All the energy required for wholly electrified transport could be generated within our borders securely and affordably. The current risk of our supply chains being cut is unacceptable. Fully one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions are the result of how we move ourselves and our goods around. In a scenario where our electricity grids are powered by renewable energy, EVs would represent the emissions-free path. Moreover, as the electricity-distribution network sees ever-increasing levels of rooftop solar added each year, the daytime-demand profile is plummeting – what’s known as the ‘belly’ of the duck curve. Workplace EV charging will see this energy utilised as it’s generated, simultaneously decreasing the demands placed on the grid in the evenings, when it is least able to cope. In addition, EVs may dispatch energy back into the grid during times of high demand. And owners will be paid for their exports accordingly. Australia has bountiful reserves of lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, copper and aluminium – metals essential for battery manufacture. From a supply chain-security perspective, it is imperative we develop our own energy capabilities, as well as export finished products to the world. We should be investing heavily in expanding these downstream industries. Finally, Australia will be compelled to shift to EVs eventually because the world’s largest righthand-drive automotive market – the United Kingdom – intends to ban the sale of new ICE vehicles by 2030. With a drastically reduced incentive for manufacturers to make ICE vehicles suitable for the Australian market, only EVs will survive here. However, we would do well to prepare for this moment well ahead of time. Australia should set ambitious emissions regulations and aim for 100 per cent of all new-vehicle sales to be EVs by 2030. Government and business fleets should be electrified, thereby bolstering the second-hand EV market. Fast-charging infrastructure should be rolled out nationwide, including governmental focus on less-profitable stretches of road between towns. Workplace-charging infrastructure should be subsidised, too. The future is electric. Let’s not fall further behind.

Dr. Chris Jones is the national secretary of the Australian Electric Vehicle Association.

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ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A MARKET PERSPECTIVE We interviewed Vikram Pawah, CEO of BMW Australia and New Zealand, to gain an insight into how car manufacturers see the Australian electric vehicle (EV) market today, and where it will go in the future. What are some key requirements for the Australian EV market to take off? Pawah: The knowledge gap first must be addressed. Car companies have a role to play through staff training on EVs as well as enlightening the public around the topic of electromobility, which covers both battery electric vehicles (BEV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV). It is much more than just investing in an individual drive technology. Sustainable mobility can succeed only if customers have access to the technology and can seamlessly integrate it into their lives. As more car companies start to introduce electric vehicles into their product lineups and the number of charging stations across Australia increases, driving a greener alternative will become more achievable. Given the huge raw materials available for battery production in Australia, it seems Australia is destined to become an EV leader in the not-too-distant future. How do pricing and affordability dynamics impact EVs in Australia? Pawah: Most Australians say that price is a key factor in their decision to purchase an electric vehicle. The Australian Government could be doing more to assist in this area. In markets with a high electric vehicle uptake, such as the US, China and Norway, the government offers incentives to buyers. This makes EVs a choice for customers who otherwise may not have considered them due to the pricing discrepancy. Of course, as the technology used in EVs becomes cheaper and easier to manufacture, prices will likely eventually fall into line with

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

traditional combustion vehicles. How much longer is Australia willing to wait? The car industry will continue to introduce these vehicles to the local line-up, but we also need backing from rule-makers to help make that paradigm shift and influence the mindset of the public about the vast benefits of electrified vehicles. Furthermore, [the aforementioned] countries have invested in a strong charging network with more than 20,000 charging stations currently available in the US and more than 48,000 new public charging stations expected to be introduced in urban and rural regions of China. In comparison, Australia currently has 2,000 charging stations nationwide. We believe that the expansion of the charging infrastructure plays a key role in customer acceptance and the ramp-up of electric mobility. What steps can car companies take to help effect change in Australia? Pawah: Globally, many car companies are politically active and support initiatives to expand the public-charging structure. Companies are engaged in industry-to-government dialogue around the world in order to make their cities more liveable through better air quality and less traffic noise. Beyond charging, I believe that appropriate regulatory incentive systems, such as eZones or charging tariffs, will also make electric driving more attractive. We expect that the share of electric driving will increase further as the promotion of EV use is expanded. As a result, electric driving will become more widespread. This conversation is happening here in Australia, too, via the relevant EV representative associations, and there are promising signs that the Government is listening more and more.

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DISASTER-DRIVEN INNOVATION The creation of a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) would serve to consolidate information beyond organisational boundaries, and allow for coordinated national responses to crises. By Brett Bundock

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istory has shown we connect in a crisis. From a trans-Tasman alliance forged on battlefields; to the unification of more than 200 nations tackling a global pandemic – nothing provokes the shared sentiment that ‘we’re all in this together’ like a disaster. When faced with extreme adversity, leaders gain clarity of purpose, slashing through red tape, political allegiances, legislative barriers and technology limitations to simply ‘get things done’. But history has also shown that once a crisis passes, the opportunity to lock-in leaner, smarter ways of operating, inevitably fades – along with the motivation to think and act differently. One of the best examples of disaster-driven innovation was born on 11 January 2011, when Brisbane was slowly being swallowed by flood waters. Within 24 hours of the city being inundated, local, state and federal groups joined forces; working together to build a near realtime map that informed citizens of the precise flood path. These digital pioneers achieved in 24 hours what would ordinarily take two years of lobbying to cut through red tape. They federated information into a single mapping application that provided everyone – from the Premier to mud-army front liners – with a connected picture of the crisis as it unfolded. The Brisbane Flood Map delivered a paradigm shift in cross-agency collaboration; a first-of-itskind blueprint for future disasters… but as the flood waters receded, so too did the impetus for change. It would be almost a decade later – in the summer of 2019/2020 – before the tragic implications of the absence of a national spatial data

infrastructure (NSDI) would be exposed. This time, as Australia burned and government and community groups rallied to prevent the advance of an unprecedented national fire emergency, invisible geographic boundaries and long-standing bureaucracy stood firm. The blueprint for cross-agency collaboration, drawn during the Brisbane Floods, was gone – and its potential value never realised. The COVID-19 pandemic compounded the issue at an unprecedented scale. The media challenged the government officials with the courage to front the cameras as to why there was no comprehensive national view of cases or the communities at risk. Every state agency housed critical information – and had their own systems to connect disparate data sources – but there was no framework in place to intuitively share critical insights past organisational boundaries. The technology required to weave intricate networks of intelligent applications, information hubs and smart workflows exists – and forms the fundamental fabric of an NSDI. It’s in every land management, law enforcement and defence agency, utility, air and sea port, local government, fire authority, university, land council, environmental and marine park authority – and the nation’s most respected research organisations. Supplementing governments’ own networks of disconnected spatial data repositories is a litany of commercial enterprises – spanning every sector from manufacturing and agriculture, to retail, banking and finance – each across their own pools of geographic data. It just needs to be sewn together.

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State of Our Innovation Nation If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s the creation of an NSDI needs to be put on the national agenda. The push for an NSDI is not new. The Australian Spatial Information Council (ANZLIC) have been championing the idea of a consistent framework to enabled location-based intelligence since the early 1990s. Back then, the concept of an NSDI was just that – a concept. Fodder for idealists, spatial industry professionals and technology zealots. Fast forward to 2020 and we find ourselves in a very different position. We have the technology, the data and the knowhow to make this happen. The digital bedrock is in place and we simply have to press the ‘on’ switch to light up government, community and commercial decision-makers with new insight. Insight that, according to ANZLIC, could improve our ability to digitally innovate to the tune of $315 billion over the next decade. Insight that could create jobs and boost national productivity and income by up to A$2.2tn. But the most compelling argument for an NSDI comes from these national crises and the very basic need to share knowledge – without delay – across organisations, geographic boundaries and political jurisdictions. Surely the health of Australians, the health of our economy and the future we are creating for the generations to come has to take priority over a steadfast commitment to protecting information silos that have no place in modern, entrepreneurial government.

In the past, we’ve understood critical, nation-building infrastructure to comprise of steel and asphalt. In the digital age, infrastructure takes on a new form – one comprising of data, connectivity and insight. An NSDI may not have the physical presence of the Snowy River Hydro or Sydney Harbour Bridge, but it will deliver an equally significant impact for generations to come. The good news is the digital bedrock and building blocks for an NSDI is in place. Connecting our spatial infrastructure is now more of a diplomatic activity than a physical one. We’re already seeing strong progress in pockets around the country. The New South Wales and Queensland governments are making significant inroads in establishing state-wide federated spatial systems and Dial Before You Dig will shortly shift to a next-gen referral service which enables information to be exchanged freely between members and network providers. The extraordinary efforts of these digital pioneers proves it doesn’t take a visionary of the caliber of Elon Musk to get this off the ground – all it takes is leaders with a shared goal of inventing better, who are prepared to take action. The biggest challenges of our time – the shifting pressures on our health systems, climate change, public safety and aging populations – can be addressed more effectively with a national spatial data infrastructure. We cannot afford to wait for the next crisis to strike before we move to connect our country. Now is the time for action.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison relied on maps to provide data-driven insights during the 2020 Australian Bushfire crisis Brett Bundock is the managing director, for the Boustead Geospatial Group.

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REVITALISING MANUFACTURING AUSTRALIA’S FUTURE IS NOT ITS PAST Roy Green RETHINKING RESOURCES Jeff Lang BREAKTHROUGH INNOVATION – OPPORTUNITY FROM CRISIS David Chuter COLLECTIVE IMPACT DRIVING INNOVATION Brooke Donnelly REALIGNING RECYCLING WITH MANUFACTURING Professor Veena Sahajwalla

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AUSTRALIA’S FUTURE IS NOT ITS PAST If the past is another country, then the future of Australia’s economy after the COVID-19 crisis will be a different universe. By Roy Green

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nd this crisis provides us with an opportunity to shape it for years, possibly generations, to come. But will we be able to grasp that opportunity? It’s not as though our recent past has been an unalloyed success. While we can claim almost 30 years of continuous economic growth, this record has been marred of late by a productivity slowdown, wage stagnation and increasing social inequality. Moreover, we have had to endure a decade-long debate over climate change in which evidence has mattered less than ideology. We have become bystanders to the existential impact of global warming, species destruction and environmental degradation, including the catastrophic bushfires of 2019–20 and coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. If there is a single factor linking the constituent parts of this experience, it is Australia’s overwhelming reliance on the export of unprocessed raw materials to drive growth and prosperity. However sophisticated the method of resource extraction, the truth is we are sustaining a first-world lifestyle with a third-world industrial structure. This was the message of the Harvard Atlas of Economic Complexity, which ranked Australia at the bottom of the OECD for "complexity", as measured by the diversity and research intensity of its exports. It is also the logical endpoint of the theory of ‘comparative advantage’, which asserts that we maximise gains from international trade by exploiting our abundant natural endowments in return for imported consumer goods from places that produce them more cheaply.

Even if this theory were true in the past, it no longer holds in a world where manufacturing is undergoing massive transformation in a "fourth industrial revolution", encompassing robotics and automation, artificial intelligence, data analytics and machine learning.

Australia has allowed its manufacturing sector to decline to dangerous levels For economies like Germany, Switzerland and Japan, manufacturing and related services underpin high productivity and high-skill jobs. Competitive advantage is achieved not through low-cost mass production but through "smart specialisation" in global markets and value chains. By contrast, Australia has allowed its manufacturing sector to decline to dangerous levels, now down to around six per cent of GDP from 30 per cent in the 1970s. Even many of the companies that managed to survive the removal of tariff protection in the 1980s and ’90s ultimately succumbed to the high dollar associated with the mining boom. Consequently, Australia’s manufacturing deficit is increasing year on year, particularly in R&D-intensive "elaborated transformed manufactures" (ETMs). While ETM imports have more than doubled to around $215 billion over the

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last 25 years, ETM exports have increased only marginally to $36 billion, with the widening deficit most acute in engineering products (see graph). Australia’s widening trade deficit in engineering products, 1995/96–2018/19

Source DFAT

Despite much talk of the post-mining boom transition to a more diverse, knowledge-based economy, current examples of Australian manufacturers with a global presence are few and far between. The problem lies not in any lack of talent but in the absence of a coherent and effective national industrial strategy. While the COVID-19 crisis has exposed and accentuated this problem, it also provides the opportunity for a fundamental redesign of our outdated industrial structure. During the "hibernation" phase of the crisis, the Coalition Government did what it could, with Labor’s support, to retain jobs, strengthen the social safety net and ensure production of urgently required medical equipment. However, in planning for the longer term, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has also made reference to the bridge that must be constructed to a “better, stronger economy”. Industry Minister Karen Andrews has argued that Australia must “compete on value, not cost”. And Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has raised the prospect of industry support that is “niche, targeted and purposeful”. In addition, as US economist Richard Baldwin recently noted, “governments will

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

have to undertake detailed thinking on production networks not undertaken since the 1940s . . . The containment policies will need to be intelligently crafted. And the longer the containment policies last, the more important it will be for them to be intelligent, flexible and well-informed”. This is a major economic challenge. And there is now every chance that, in meeting it, Australia may be able to achieve the political consensus that characterised the HawkeKeating reforms of the 1980s and ’90s. If we are doubly fortunate, this consensus could even extend to genuine climate action, which has been so obviously lacking up to now. To this end, the Prime Minister has established a taskforce, chaired by former Dow CEO Andrew Liveris and comprising both industry and union leaders, to identify the steps that should be taken to rebuild and reinvent Australia’s manufacturing capability. The following are some essential measures that might be considered. First, we must overcome the fragmentation and under-resourcing of institutional policy-making in Australia. A new National Industrial Strategy Commission, or similar body

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comparable with those in other advanced economies, could develop national priorities in consultation with industry sectors to grow ‘industries of the future’, based on new technologies and business models. The initial task of this Commission would be to undertake a "knowledge foresight" to identify areas of current and future competitive advantage for Australia, as well as gaps in domestic supply chains. Clearly, enhancing self-sufficiency is not incompatible with a commitment to a more complex globalised economy. Second, a more systematic approach is required to deepen collaboration between industry and research organisations, possibly around the CSIRO’s designated "national missions". This will require the Government to reverse the decline in public funding of research and innovation, now far below the OECD average and still falling as a share of GDP. In addition, the national missions will require an implementation strategy at the enterprise level, or they will simply remain abstractions. This might take the form of industry-led innovation hubs – again a successful model elsewhere – which would benefit from shifting resources from the R&D tax incentive to more direct targeted programs. Third, we should not overlook the contribution of entrepreneurial start-ups to economic renewal, including integration of the digital and

physical dimensions of manufacturing, which is a key feature of Industry 4.0. Governments everywhere facilitate start-ups, and scaling up, through support for innovation precincts in cities and regions. Fourth, the Government can make a big difference for small and medium enterprises with public procurement policy. Too often we see local tenders overlooked in favour of large international companies on a narrow "valuefor-money" basis, when these large companies themselves might owe their existence to another country’s procurement policy. Finally, industrial transformation will depend on the adequacy of our workforce and management skills. This will require measures to compensate for the COVID-19 hit to international student revenues that cross-subsidise university domestic teaching and research, as well as the earlier damage to Australia’s vocational education and training system from market contestability. The Government’s "whatever-it-takes" intervention to safeguard people’s lives and livelihoods has been clearly justified, but concern has been expressed that this will entail an unprecedented level of public debt. The history of wars and crises tells us that the only way to pay off such debt is to create a new economic growth engine. That new growth engine will be advanced manufacturing.

Roy Green is Emeritus Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, chair of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Hub and chair of the Port of Newcastle.

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RETHINKING RESOURCES Australia has excellent natural resources, and the knowledge required to manufacture them into the technology the world will need. Only by doing both will we reap the full value of the supply chain.

ustralia has reached an inflection point in its economic journey. It must decide whether to create the foundations for new, sustainable export value chains around its abundant natural mineral and energy resources, or stay complacent and keep selling off our resources for other countries’ economic growth. There is an opportunity for Australia to embrace the fourth industrial revolution (better known as Industry 4.0) by aligning the advanced manufacturing sector with renewable energy and sustainable resources management that embraces a new direction for humanity’s future. The implementation of a new "greentech" advanced manufacturing supply chains for Australian mineral resources will increase the value of current export commodities and deliver exponential economic growth. But if we sit on our hands, we will remain condemned to be a farm-, quarry- and services-based economy. For the past three decades, those calling for this critical debate have struggled to get their voices heard, despite surveys consistently showing that the public would support one. But in recent years, there has been a growing awareness within government and business, as well as in research and academic circles, of the need to have this constructive debate. COVID19 is reinforcing this awareness by highlighting issues around security of supply chains and our economic dependence on trading partners such as China. Partly because of COVID-19 and partly because Titomic, as an additive manufacturer, has always been keenly interested in this critical national debate, we prepared a road map for the economy titled the Australian Economic Recovery Plan, in which we reveal our vision for what our economy could look like post

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

pandemic. In a nutshell, as the report says, the plan would be “to turbocharge Australia’s economy out of this unprecedented health and economic crisis”. The 59-page report, which has been presented to the Federal Government, ranges across issues including our education system (especially tertiary and TAFE), downstream processing of raw materials to build value around our commodities, more industry-focused R&D, and the importance of strategic collaboration between government, industry, research institutions and academia. If we can get these things right, Australia can forge a new economic paradigm with two enormous benefits: secure jobs demanding high wages in sunrise industries and alleviating our dependence on the mining, agribusiness and services sectors. So, what does our vision entail? Titomic believes there is a pressing need to reset Australia’s sovereign-development goals to create sustainable industries on the back of our natural resources; to initiate and implement advanced manufacturing technologies: secure rare-earth mineral security and an ESG-driven public-private partnership: and introduce sovereign-trade protections for Australia and the other members of the Five Eyes alliance (US, UK, New Zealand and Canada). The fact is Australia has been short-changing itself by accepting low prices for its exported materials and squandering precious taxpayer funds on worthy but repetitive or poorly structured R&D projects that are not focused on delivering large-scale, nation-building endeavours. Titomic’s plan is aimed at recovering both missed opportunities, allowing Australia to become its own sovereign powerhouse and a global leader of a new world of advanced digital technologies and developments.

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More specifically, if we can develop a longterm strategy for rare earths and titanium metal production, Australia can break the supply chain stranglehold that Russia and China have over the Five Eyes countries while returning significant and long-term economic benefits to our economy. Companies such as Boeing, Airbus, BAE Systems and Thales (as major customers of the end product of titanium), will support this initiative, as they may also harbour concerns about the Russia-China duopoly. There is also the opportunity to develop genuine STEM-based skills and training programs to support specific technology-focused hubs across Australia. What we propose has four prongs: • Develop an Australian ESG advanced green technology innovation private/ public partnership; • Create a mineral resource management plan; • Nurture a green metal manufacturing Industry involving titanium production using hydrogen; green steel production for export; creating a waste repurpose value chain for viable recycling; and hydrogen storage and containment; and • Turbocharge industry’s adoption of STEM within a Digital Industry 4.0 environment. Some important steps have been taken already. Establishing the $500 million Australian Business Growth Fund, which will get a $100m Federal Government injection, and hopefully private-sector support, was an important initiative. Clearly, however, more needs to be done. For example, Australia does not have a longterm, well-defined growth strategy for SMEs, which make up 98.5 per cent of all Australian businesses. Many of these SMEs are routinely shut out of the conversations with government and academia. Although SMEs do get assistance with grants, funding and support programs, all too often their voice is missing in the big debates that provide the foundations for industry policy. Take the National COVID-19 Commission for example: a plethora of industry heavy-hitters, but zero representation of Australia’s SMEs. This must change, with ways

found for them to be individually and collectively heard. Also critical is providing companies that are incubating new ideas with the necessary patient-capital. We need to nurture a venture-capital market to have a far bigger funding role. Our superannuation industry sits on collective savings of nearly $3tr. While understanding its primary purpose is safeguarding people’s retirement incomes, this should not preclude investment in emerging companies. As a mid-tier economy, Australia has made its economic mark on the world. Our mining, agribusiness and education sectors are rightly lauded – although with the latter, we would argue, for reasons often inimical to Australia’s best interests. Australia now has a fleeting opportunity to develop an advanced, green manufacturing economy. If implemented, the shift will see Australia’s manufacturing sector become a global exemplar, demonstrating the benefits of adding value to our natural resources, including more complex, higher-value exports, generations of highly skilled jobs, and a shift towards renewable-energy technologies. It’s time to raise our horizons and recognise the rewards a flourishing Industry 4.0 will deliver.

Jeff Lang is the managing director of ASX-listed Titomic, an advanced manufacturing company specialising in industrial-scale metal additive manufacturing.

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BREAKTHROUGH INNOVATION – OPPORTUNITY FROM CRISIS Manufacturing is the portal through which the Australian economy can add value from its vast resources, as a horizontal enabler of key technological industries.

nything written during the crisis of COVID19 carries the risk of becoming outdated or irrelevant as the world adjusts to what may be a "new normal". “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” said Winston Churchill – advice I tried to apply in a three-decade career in automotive manufacturing. And to be sure, we must not waste the crisis that is this pandemic, nor the opportunities it presents. What is old is now new. What was unfashionable is now hip. Concepts and virtues such as leadership, collaboration, innovation, ingenuity, research and, dare I say it, even local manufacturing, are not just in vogue but important and necessary. Many businesses engaged in historically strong areas of the Australian economy simply cannot continue to operate as they have in the past. There has never been a more important time to understand the difference between what a business does and the business model it could successfully deploy – that is, how the business can stay competitive in an uncertain world. Ensuring that businesses are agile and able to find opportunity in times of uncertainty is essential. To do this in Australia, we will need a strong focus on small- and medium-sized

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businesses (SMEs), as they make up the bulk of most industry and service sectors. For any strategy to succeed, it needs to work for SMEs in terms of leadership development, collaboration, and investment in design, innovation, R&D, talent and competitiveness. This will require larger companies to help develop and promote smaller ones, as well as government programs that incentivise the right behaviours rather than propagate entitlement. We need to find more ways to focus on breakthrough innovation – as distinct from invention or incremental continuous improvement – that reshapes business models and creates new products and services that can be sold locally and internationally. History shows that businesses that invest in innovation through a crisis outperform their competition during the recovery. Key to both innovation and continuous improvement in Australia is the rapid adoption of digitalisation and associated business models enabled through the fourth industrial revolution, also termed Industry 4.0. This will be key to delivering much-needed step changes in productivity and competitiveness, while enabling superior value to be both captured and created.

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“Ensuring that businesses are agile and able to find opportunity in times of uncertainty is essential” So, what are other key ingredients? High on the list is purposeful R&D in science and technology, including frontier technologies. This will be central not only to rebuilding the economy but to fuelling grand challenges – or "races that we can win". We are blessed with an abundance of academic resources in Australia. We need to utilise these better and be clear on what activities are to be industry- and market-led versus research- and discovery-pushed. Though R&D is a critical element of innovation, it is not the only element. Just look at companies, such as Atlassian, which have built global software platforms and created new business models. Scale matters, too. But this is diminished by duplication of resources and effort, and by fragmentation of incentive programs. Also high on the list is effective collaboration – even in competition (as long as it isn’t collusion) – across all business sizes, and with the research and education sectors. Collaboration creates the opportunity to work with universities, suppliers, customers and even competitors to solve shared problems and create new business models. We need, therefore, to invest in manufacturing as both a vertical-industry sector and a horizontal enabler for most primary Australian industry sectors, in terms of key enabling technologies, supply-chain capability, research and innovation, accelerating digitalisation and the uptake of Industry 4.0 and associated new business models. We need to balance short-term and critical initiatives with longer-term strategic needs linked to a compelling, engaging vision for our future that builds on our strengths,

abundant raw materials and energy sources, and delivers growth both locally and globally. And we will need to test this through the lens of industry sovereign capability and needs, perhaps in collaboration with New Zealand. While much focus is rightly on the medical, pharmaceutical and health sector, we also need to reflect on opportunities for value creation, investment, jobs and wealth creation in bio, energy and fuels, minerals, food and agribusiness, construction, defence and space, as well is in digital platforms and cyber. We have world-beating capability and exemplars in all of these areas, and others. We need manufacturing and industry to be attractive to investors, businesses, researchers, government, current and future employees (think schoolchildren and the parents who influence their choices) and to the community. And we need this attraction to be both local and offshore to ensure our future relevance and economic prosperity. How do we do this in Australia? How do we bring all these ingredients and ideas together? A proven approach involves the creation of a national network of technology, innovation and collaboration hubs, at scale, with both multinationals and SMEs working in safe spaces with researchers. Such examples include the Manufacturing USA Institutes and the UK’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult Centres. Both spearheaded long-term national industrial and manufacturing strategies, and incentivised significant research and investment well beyond the initial government support. This is a breakthrough opportunity for Australia, and it is the type of "good different" thinking and planning we will need to avoid wasting this crisis. The good news is that we have a blueprint for how this can work in Australia. And we can build on existing resources. We just need to be bold and commit to this hub business model and investment. It is time to build sufficiency of capability and scale and to create both the future of work and the jobs of the future. This is the breakthrough opportunity that Australia must seize.

David Chuter is the CEO and Managing Director of the Innovative Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre (IMCRC), whose mission is to help transform Australian manufacturing through collaborative investment, research impact and innovation.

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COLLECTIVE IMPACT DRIVING INNOVATION Australia’s packaging industry is highly advanced and one of the bigger manufacturing sectors in the country. Having set an ambitious goal for sustainability, it is a model for other sectors intent on creating a circular economy.

ow should you respond when faced with what seems like an insurmountable obstacle? Specifically, a wicked and embedded environmental problem that has defeated minds far greater than yours? This much is certain: simply doing more of what has already been done is not going to cut it. Instead, you must innovate and create a new path forward. Peter Drucker defines innovation as “change that creates a new dimension of performance”. And a new dimension of performance requires much more than tweaking around the edges. It calls for a paradigm shift that will transform an entire system. Actors need to take a holistic view of the issue. They need to understand the attendant complexities, politics and commercial interests, and then weave these into a strategic approach that delivers sustained environmental, social and economic benefit. In 2017, the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation (APCO) was at a crossroads. Tasked by Australian governments and industry with delivering a circular economic approach to packaging in Australia, it had failed to find a way to turn theory into practice within the Australian packaging supply chain. It was at this time of crisis that a new governance structure, as well as a new board and management team, were brought in to implement a strategy for delivering on this ambitious objective. The new leadership undertook to reset APCO as an apolitical and independent organisation that would work collaboratively with a diverse range of stakeholders to address the long-standing problem of packaging. APCO is

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responsible for administering the Australian Packaging Covenant (the Covenant) on behalf of the Federal, State and Territory governments, and its industry signatories. The Covenant is part of a compulsory, co-regulatory product-stewardship framework established under the National Environment Protection Council Act 1994 and the National Environment Protection (Used Packaging Materials) Measure 2011 (the NEPM) to reduce the harmful impact of packaging on the Australian environment. APCO decided to employ the Collective Impact model, a proven strategic framework for delivering system change within complex, multi-stakeholder environments. Developed in 2011, the Collective Impact Framework (CIF) is a powerful and collaborative cross-sector approach to tackling complex social and environmental challenges in communities all over the world. The model recognises that behind these challenges is a diverse range of organisations working to deliver change, though often in isolation from one another. The CIF calls upon these different actors to collaborate formally towards achieving mutually beneficial outcomes. A Collective Impact model works across five key dimensions: 1. Common Agenda – All participants have a common agenda for change. This includes a shared understanding of what the problem is and a joint approach to solving it 2. Backbone Organisation – An appropriately staffed and skilled set-up to drive

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action and coordinate participants 3. Consistent Results Measurement – Collecting data and measuring results consistently across the board helps ensure accountability, alignment and progress 4. Mutually Reinforcing Activities – A plan of action that outlines and coordinates mutually reinforcing activities for each participant 5. Continuous Communication – Open and uninterrupted communication between the many players is necessary to build trust and maintain motivation. When APCO set out to implement the five elements of Collective Impact, we broke the work down into three key phases. Establishing the Backbone Organisation was step one, as this was necessary to reset APCO with the appropriate governance and leadership to operate as an effective backbone organisation. Step two was co-designing a Common Agenda. In 2018, APCO did this by uniting government, industry and key stakeholders behind a series of national targets: the 2025 National Packaging Targets (2025 targets). On November 8, 2019, all governments formally adopted the 2025 Targets as part of the National Waste Policy Action Plan. They include: • 100 per cent of packaging to be reusable,

recyclable or compostable; 70 per cent of plastic packaging being recycled or composted; • an average of 50 per cent recycled content included in packaging; and • phasing out problematic and unnecessary single-use plastic packaging. Finally, APCO addressed the issues of measuring results consistently, mutually reinforcing activities and continuous communication with the publication of Our Packaging Future. A roadmap for delivering the 2025 targets, this is a framework document backed by all the key stakeholders. In the march towards mission success, effective communication and the sharing of key results and program milestones are crucial, as they trigger government and industry to take action at prescribed intervention points. Conversely, these same stakeholders have the agility to change course if work isn’t progressing effectively or quickly enough. Innovation comes from building shared capability among stakeholders. The model of distributed power that evolves through the development of mutually reinforcing activities creates a community of practice – a movement towards change possessing a momentum far greater than any one organisation, government or individual could muster. •

Brooke Donnelly is the CEO of the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation. She is also an alumnus of the Cranlana Centre for Ethical Leadership and the Australian Institute of Company Directors and the co-founder of the Product Stewardship Alliance, a voluntary group working to accelerate Australia’s journey to a circular economy through product stewardship.

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REALIGNING RECYCLING WITH MANUFACTURING We need to achieve an alignment of recycling and manufacturing and to start seeing waste as a valuable resource for many of the materials that we use as a society.

dopting and scaling truly circular economies – where materials are kept in use for as long as possible to create greater sustainability – will really only occur through such an alignment. With COVID-19 disrupting global supply chains and sparking questions about sovereign manufacturing capabilities, now is the time to adopt new technologies and practices that can help us to better manage our materials as resources, to reduce waste, and to create new supply chains and jobs. This alignment of recycling and manufacturing is a key focus of my Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. We recently published two papers that explain the science and technology behind this concept. The SMaRT Centre created the phrase "mircorecycling science" to describe its novel approach to researching innovative technologies and approaches related to reforming various waste streams into value-added materials and products. This process, which is achieved through decentralised manufacturing, is seen as a way to help regional and rural communities. In the area of waste management, an ever-increasing population, technological advances, variable consumption trends and inefficiency in use of materials are forcing us to a near-crisis point. Australia’s governments have agreed to ban the export of glass, plastic, paper and rubber tyres from January 2021. We therefore need to start treating these waste items as the

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‘renewable resources’ that they are, feeding them back into manufacturing and diverting them from landfill, stockpiling and incinerators. A key challenge is that, at scale, existing, centralised recycling and waste treatment methods often simply turn things like PET bottles back into PET bottles. What we need is a recycling and manufacturing system that can innovate by reforming waste so that it can have more diverse and value-added end uses. Traditionally, recyclers have not seen themselves as manufacturers, and manufacturers have not seen themselves as recyclers – but we need them to. If we accept that we need plastic, for instance, and that we want to keep it out of landfill and incinerators – which destroy the material forever – then we need a system that treats plastic as a renewable material. One emerging development is the SMaRT Centre’s Microfactorie® technologies, which are modular-based and can reform waste into value-added materials for reuse and remanufacture. This decentralised model, which brings together recycling and manufacturing capabilities, is designed to transform problematic waste materials – such as glass, textiles and plastics – into new, value-added materials and products. Examples include green ceramics for use in the built environment, and filament for use by manufacturers as a feedstock and by other users who do 3D printing. Many of these innovations have occurred as a result of funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), which also enabled the formation of the ARC Green Manufacturing

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Hub, hosted by the SMaRT Centre. In 2020 a new ARC Microrecycling Hub hosted by UNSW will research battery and consumer wastes, and seek to progress the science and technology of microrecycling and bring about more innovations. I have had the privilege of being appointed Director for both of these ARC Hubs. Through our ongoing collaborations with manufacturing and waste recycling industries, we have developed these manufacturing and recycling solutions to address some urgent waste and recycling problems while at the same time boosting manufacturing capabilities, job creation and environmental benefits.

chains and enhance our sovereign capability. COVID-19 has unearthed the weaknesses in our existing plan for meeting certain sovereign challenges. There is the potential, though, to start a "green materials" movement whereby we use waste as a renewable resource in manufacturing as a way to supercharge our economies. As we move into a likely period of recession, this could help to lay the foundations for the next recovery or growth period. The SMaRT Centre is exploring options for moving from producing the aforementioned green ceramics at a lab scale to producing them at an industrial scale. This effort, which includes

We now have an incredible opportunity to solve for numerous existential problems at once: collectively, we can address waste and recycling issues, and reduce our carbon footprint, while also enhancing our manufacturing capability. This has the potential to create new supply

plans for commercialisation, has the potential to set new benchmarks in innovation, efficiency and sustainability for the built environment sector. The SMaRT Centre, using foundational, selective thermal transformation techniques developed as part of our microrecycling science, has

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also created an innovation that we call material microsurgery. This new technique extracts from electronic waste valuable core elements that can be used in a novel way: as a hybrid layer to improve the performance of the surface of steel. This modification enhances regular steel by giving it a high-performing "super-surface". We used the term "material microsurgery"for this technique because we were inspired by the processes that medical surgeons use in microsurgery, where they apply targeted and selective solutions to problems. We need our existing waste and recycling

systems to adopt new processes and technology and to align themselves with manufacturing. That is, this is to be more of a lateral than a vertical integration or alignment. In the face of our current waste, recycling and manufacturing challenges, doing onshore and more sophisticated processing of recycling as part of manufacturing can "change the game" for Australia, and for all countries around the world. The goal is to eliminate the word "waste" from our vernacular – because waste will become the renewable resource that we know it is.

Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Professor Veena Sahajwalla is an internationally recognised materials scientist, engineer and inventor. She is the founding Director of the Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and the head of the ARC Research Hub for Microrecycling of Battery and Consumer Wastes.

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A BRIGHTER SPARK IN A CHANGING CLIMATE EARTHING CARBON Ross Garnaut

URBAN WATER REFORM Corinne Cheeseman

CROSS-POLLINATING AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH Professors Jim Pratley and Michael Friend

PRESSURE POINTS Tony Wong

TACKLING AGRICULTURE’S INNOVATION DISCONNECT Mark Allison THE SCIENCE OF ADAPTION IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT The Hon Sussan Ley LEADING AUSTRALIA TOWARDS A CIRCULAR ECONOMY The Hon Trevor Evans MP RENEWABLE ENERGY EXPORTS: AN INDUSTRIAL GROWTH OPPORTUNITY Frank Jotzo

INNOVATION IN WATER: A UTILITIES PERSPECTIVE Tracey Slatter CRITICAL MATERIALS, CRITICAL INDUSTRY Dr Gavin Lind AUSTRALIA: A HYDROGEN LEADER Kate Vidgen REVOLUTIONISING RIVER MANAGEMENT Nick Schofield

TOWARDS ZERO EMISSIONS Peter Kasprzak CORRECTING THE PATH Tony Wood THE ROLE OF GAS Andrew McConville INNOVATION THROUGH ADVERSITY:

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EARTHING CARBON Plants, vegetation, and soils take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, convert it into energy and store it as biomass. Increasing biomass to reduce atmospheric levels of C02 is known as carbon sequestration. Australia can make an exceptional contribution to climate action by creating natural systems to store more carbon in soils, pastures, woodland forests and biodiverse plantations, selling the offset carbon to other nations to meet their Paris Agreement targets. By Ross Garnaut, drawn from Superpower: Australia’s Low-Carbon Opportunity

t is now clear to the international community – as it was not eleven or eight years ago – that changes in land use and agriculture will have a central role in avoiding high costs of climate change. If we move too slowly and overshoot the Paris targets, soil- and plant-based sequestration – including through the capture of carbon wastes from plant-based industrial processes and storing or using them in ways that keep them out of the atmosphere – will be the main avenue to achieve negative emissions. The transformation of food, agriculture and land use that is necessary for climate change mitigation is also needed for global development, to improve human health and to maintain a stable global ecology more generally. There will be one agricultural and land use transformation to serve these four great purposes. To make good use of this opportunity, Australia will need systematic incentives for reducing emissions in agriculture and land, and to provide sound reasons to believe that they are here to stay. And it will need to restore old national strengths that have been allowed to decline in recent years: our strengths in research

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and education on agricultural, pastoral, forestry and related industrial activities. Alongside our industrial opportunity in renewable energy, our strength in growing and using biomass will set Australia up as the superpower of the low-carbon world economy. Size, scope, opportunity Recent reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have elevated the importance of capture of carbon in the landscape. It is estimated that natural climate solutions can provide 37 per cent of cost-effective reduction in global carbon emissions for a two-thirds chance of holding warming below 2°C. These reports indicate that native forest restoration and reforestation could sequester up to 480 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide in terrestrial ecosystems – sufficient to meet the negative emissions needs of many 1.5°C scenarios. The unusually large endowment of land and woodlands relative to population gives Australia immense advantages in the production of biomass, as well as in the capture of carbon in the landscape.

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We still can’t speak definitively on the size of the opportunity. Australian research funding and effort over the past decade have not matched the economic and environmental importance of the subject. The general story is of immense potential for sequestration of carbon through changes in Australian landscapes, but of small and diminishing research effort to define the potential and the means of unlocking it. Two developments have contributed to this unsatisfactory situation: the absence of generally available incentives and a general reduction in research and development on agriculture, pastoral activities, forestry and climate change. Counting carbon In 2008, I concluded that climate mitigation in the land sector required comprehensive carbon accounting. The inclusion of land under the Kyoto Protocol framework was incomplete. With the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015, and the subsequent rulebook adopted at the end of 2018, all countries will be required to report emissions under the same United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) reporting framework, applying the latest guidance from the IIPCC, which includes a more comprehensive approach to land-based accounting. The Paris Agreement raises an expectation that the long-term mitigation goal will be achieved through a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks. What have come to be known as "natural climate solutions" have become much more prominent in international and especially the European and North American discussions. Research a decade ago did not permit definitive assessment of how much carbon could be captured in Australia in these ways. However, in 2011, I speculated that the value of land credits sold into the emissions trading scheme could equal, by 2030, the contribution now made by wool to the Australian farm economy. My treatment of carbon in the Australian landscape in 2008 and 2011 drew upon pioneering work by the CSIRO and the state departments of agriculture, as well as research at universities. A CSIRO publication in 2011, published after my second Review, highlighted the importance of the opportunity: "Our soils and forest store large quantities of carbon: somewhere between 100 and 200 times Australia’s current annual emissions. We can potentially increase these stores

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in our rural lands and perhaps store or mitigate enough greenhouse gases to offset up to 20 per cent or more of Australia’s emissions during the next 40 years. The decarbonisation of electricity and the electrification of industry and transport can remove about two-thirds of the reductions to net zero global emissions. The land use, agriculture and food transformation can deliver most of the rest. A recent research project from the US Academy of Sciences suggested potential for 10 gigatonnes per annum sequestration in global and one gigatonne per annum in US landscapes over the period to mid- century during which the world needs to achieve zero net emissions. Australia should have sequestration potential comparable to that of the United States. The low agricultural value of most Australian land reduces the opportunity cost of management for carbon sequestration. It is of national economic consequence that we undertake the research to define the scale of and the means of unlocking the opportunity. In the meantime, the judgement on scale presented in 2011 seems modest. The big difference now compared with 2011 is that we no longer have the prospect of an emissions trading system into which land-based carbon credits can be sold. Compared to other nations, Australia has two advantages in capturing carbon in the landscape. The first is our exceptionally large endowment of woodlands, forests and other land relative to population. The second is our exceptional expertise in land-based industries – from agricultural and forestry science, through agricultural and resource economics to public and private knowledge and institutional arrangements supporting commercial success. Advanced knowledge and innovation were necessary for transplanting European-style agriculture to a strange and unpropitious physical environment. Research, innovation and education supported by public institutions were important from the earliest times. In 2008, I brought into the mainstream discussion some early work by the CSIRO and state departments of agriculture on the immense mitigation potential of changes in land use. Nurturing vegetation on the dry, degraded mulga country where rainfall was spasmodic in Queensland and New South Wales could be transformative. Innovative uses of the properties of Australian

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eucalypts included farming of the mallee on the arid boundaries of crop cultivation for subterranean sequestration and for harvesting biomass. The 2011 Review took the land use mitigation story further. It advocated inclusion of offsets from agriculture into the emissions trading scheme through what became the Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI). These arrangements were carried into the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments’ Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF). The ERF was a clunky, truncated and less adequately funded version of the CFI. It required resources from general revenue, rather than from sales of emissions permits. Nevertheless, Abbott’s ERF kept alive the sale of offsets as a way of providing incentives for farm sequestration. The arrangements developed by the Clean Energy Regulator showed how an offsets scheme related to land use could work, and that there was strong private response to incentives. The Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) allowed farmers and land managers to earn Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs). Each ACCU represents one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent stored or avoided by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The ACCUs could be sold to clear obligations under the carbon-pricing rules. In July 2014, the carbon price was repealed. On October 31, 2014, the new Coalition government’s climate strategy, the Direct Action Plan, was passed, which established the Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF). The shift was made from a carbon price to government-purchased abatement, and an expanded CFI, moving eligible projects beyond the land sector to include energy and transport. In the ERF, $2.55 billion was made available for direct purchasing of abatement under the reverse auctions, of which $226 million remained in May 2019. The government’s Climate Solutions Fund was announced on February 25, 2019 to appropriate an additional $2 billion from 2020–21 onwards to fund auctions to 2030. The ERF involves a voluntary crediting and purchasing mechanism. To ensure these emissions reductions are not displaced significantly by a rise in emissions elsewhere in the economy, a safeguard mechanism requires Australia’s largest emitters to keep net emissions below baseline (historical) levels. The safeguard mechanism applies to around 140 businesses that have direct emissions of more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year. Projects that meet the requirements under the various methodologies can generate ACCUs for

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emissions reductions. Projects can sell their ACCUs on the voluntary market, or bid to sell them to the government in auctions run by the Clean Energy Regulator. Auctions are held twice a year. The ninth ERF auction was held on July 24–2, 2019. The average price per ACCU contracted has been $11.92 over the life of the scheme, with the average price at individual auctions ranging between $10.23 (April 2016) and $13.95 (April 2015). There is a way forward that does not violate the current government’s electoral commitments. The first step would be to make the whole of the funding for the Climate Solutions Funds available for use now as legitimate carbon credits are certified by the Clean Energy Regulator. This would see the new fund exhausted over a few years. The second step would be to require in the next parliamentary term, with the necessary electoral preparation, the beginning of phasing in of full offsetting of fugitive emissions by purchase of ACCUs. The full offsetting would be completed through the 2020s. Demand for credits from the farm sector would be further enhanced by the current requirement for all exceedance of baseline emissions within the Abbott safeguard mechanism to be accompanied by surrender to the Clean Energy Regulator of ACCUs. Alternatively, state governments through their mineral leasing or environmental powers could require offsetting of fugitive emissions by use of certified ACCUs – sourced from their own territory, as the local politics would favour expansion of opportunity for the local farm and station community. This is the approach proposed by the WA Environmental Protection Agency in 2019, in its Greenhouse Gas Assessment Guidelines. Further into the future, when Australia’s international climate change mitigation credentials have been restored, linking to the European Union emissions trading system would avoid truncation of the mitigation effort. Time would be needed to negotiate change in European and Australian rules on trade in carbon credits. There would be initial European scepticism about the legitimacy of a number of Australia’s rules on farm credits. Where warranted, adjustments could be made. At the same time, Australia would need to persuade European policy-makers of the value of soundly measured and administered carbon farming. Our efforts in persuasion would be supported by the recognition growing in the international community, including in recent IPCC reports noting the importance of natural climate solutions to the global mitigation effort.

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CROSS-POLLINATING AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH Professors Jim Pratley and Michael Friend of Charles Sturt University contend that, as disparate segments of the agriculture industry face common issues such as climate change and water security, Australia needs to invest in solving cross-sectoral problems that hit at the sustainability and volatility of the industry, thinking beyond productivity.

gricultural productivity in Australia has been underpinned by research, development and innovation (Figure 1). While early work focused on productivity gains, efforts now include the imperatives such as environmental sustainability, animal welfare, human health, market demands and traceability. In this piece, we will use examples from the grains industries, though there are parallels with other industries as well. There can be a 15 - 20-year lag time between the discovery and its comprehensive implementation in agriculture, meaning a reduction in investment in R&D and innovation results in long-term reduction in productivity. Figure 2 shows marked yearly increases in government investment in R&D between the '50s and '70s was accompanied by increased research intensity underpinning Figure 1. The value of productivity growth to Australian agriculture (from Daly et al. 2015)

70 60

productivity gains. Since then public investment has been growing at a much slower rate and research intensity declining. This highlights the need for new approaches, including greater industry investment in R&D and innovation to drive growth. The funding of R&D since the introduction of the PIRD Act of 1989 has been largely the province of the rural R&D Corporations, based on levies from producers in the particular industry. While this has been a successful model in many respects, the commodity focus has limited cross-industry R&D and innovation, as well as "blue sky" approaches. The model has resulted in significant gains within commodities (increased production and efficiencies), but arguably has resulted in missed opportunities that could have arisen by not focusing on individual commodities.

Gross value of agricultural production (2013 AUD billions)

50 40 30

Real GVP from productivity growth

20 10 0

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Real GVP without productivity growth 1953

1959

1965

1971

1977

1983

1989

1995

2001

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The research provider landscape has been shifting as public investment has slowed. Universities are increasing their research intensity in agriculture as state and Commonwealth public research agencies have been limited due to reduced growth in public funding. Universities now do about 30% of the agricultural research in Australia, which is illustrated in Figure 3. Much of the research in universities is dependent on postgraduate research, to which of course there will be a limit. Why does this matter? Agriculture in Australia is not simple. It is more volatile than any other Australian sector by a factor of two to three. Data suggests that R&D has not made substantial inroads on that risk. For example, Australian crop farmers face twice the level of volatility of the many crop-producing nations with which it competes for markets. While risk management is the responsibility of the managers of farm business, with climate change impacts R&D assumes new importance in addressing resilience through advances in plant biotechnology, improved spatial and temporal monitoring using sensor technology, and improved prediction capability. Greater investment in water sustainability and internet connectivity and other infrastructure is a necessary adjunct. There is a strong trend towards innovation hubs and start-ups. These represent great opportunities to bring in fresh thinking and test new ideas. Data shows many of these start-ups will not be successful, but many that are can be very successful – the Israeli agtech ecosystem is a good example of the opportunities. If Australia is to reap opportunities here, we need to not only encourage innovation that addresses problems in our systems, but also provide the mechanisms to allow these new businesses to grow into truly global businesses that address agricultural issues across the globe. We have some of the best minds in agrifood, but they need to be encouraged to think of the global opportunities for their innovations. We must not lose sight of the systems agenda and associated public good. Crosssectoral issues such as climate change, water enhancement, soil organic matter must be addressed. Lessons from the bushfire events of

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Figure 2. Real public investment and research intensity in Australian agricultural R&D (Sheng et al. 2011) 2019–20 suggest that there needs to be more understanding of the system benefits – biodiversity, Indigenous knowhow, landscape management. Not all imperatives will point directly to commercialised products, so our investment in R&D and innovation must ensure such systems issues are not forgotten. The portents for agriculture in Australia are very positive provided we maintain our tried and true R&D effort towards innovation. While there is a need to facilitate increasing private investment in R&D and innovation, we must also ensure continued investment in cross-sectoral issues that underpin the sustainability of our systems.

Figure 3. The source of agronomy papers from Australian research organisations annually for the period 1996–2015 (Pratley and Kirkegaard 2019, ACDA, unpublished)

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TACKLING AGRICULTURE’S INNOVATION DISCONNECT Australia’s agricultural productivity growth is flattening. By embracing innovation, we can reverse the trend.

By Mark Allison

ustralian agriculture is innately innovative, and profoundly sustainable. Over three centuries, Australian farms have proudly laid claim to some of the world’s most important agricultural innovations, borne from a desire to succeed in one of the harshest, most variable climates in the world. Ever since the "stump jump plough" in the 1800s, our farmers have been at the forefront of global innovation. And this holds true today. Australia’s farmers find new ways to do more with less, maintaining healthy, productive soils and livestock for evolving consumer needs. Growers produce crops from seasons that would have once yielded nothing, conserving every drop of water. They embrace technology, harvesting data as well as crops. Yet despite this rich history of value-creating innovation, Australian agricultural productivity growth – which is our key measure for assessing industry performance and profitability – is slowly flattening. Agriculture is facing declining terms of trade, rising input costs, volatile markets and more varied, hotter and drier weather. If we are to realise the National Farmers’ Federation goal of increasing farm gate output to $100 billion by 2030, it is essential Australian farmers innovate even more so than in the past – and do so sustainably. Key focus areas Farmers require technological and digital developments that will contribute to the bottom line while investing in their core asset – their farm and local environment. To achieve this goal, be it through agtech or other practice change, areas of focus must be: • Nutrition – how any farmer can boost

•

productivity, whether it’s through soil and crop nutrition, or in livestock with a delicate mix of protein, energy, roughage and minerals. This is particularly important during the prolonged dry conditions we have seen recently and seasonally wet conditions. Soil moisture conservation – improving the water use efficiency on farms, whether it’s in cropping, horticulture, irrigation, producing feed for livestock or feeding livestock. Pest management – farmers can optimise chemical use to combat weeds and pests for maximum impact on productivity with minimal impact on the environment. Genetics – this includes genetic gains across all breeds in livestock production, as well as in cropping, where new varieties provide greater drought, salinity or pest resistance, or defence against weeds and other pests.

Sustainable innovation Another key focus area for innovation must be sustainability. Agribusiness Australia’s 2020 State of the Industry Report says Australian agribusiness should “embed sustainability into all areas of agribusiness … creating a sustainable competitive advantage”. Well, I’d argue farmers have always done this. As custodians of their land, they protect native plants and biodiversity. It’s about investing in their core asset for not just this season, but the seasons after that. Environmental sustainability is good business. There’s a perception that to enhance sustainability, you must unwind innovation, when in fact the opposite is true. We can’t tackle climate change and food waste or reduce environmental impacts without innovation.

Mark Allison is managing director and CEO of Elders. He is the president of Agribusiness Australia.

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THE SCIENCE OF ADAPTATION IN A CHANGING ENVIRONMENT Only by following the science can Australia brace for, adapt, and mitigate the largest effects of climate change.

e have always lived in a changing environment. But the rate of change we face today, and the role science will play in helping us adapt to that change, are unprecedented. While science has long been at the forefront of addressing environmental challenges and predicting consequences, scientists will be among the first to concede what is often referred to as “the implementation gap”. This is the difference between research and implementation, between publishing a scientific paper and investing the time to build trust and communication across different disciplines to be a part of the outcome. As we adapt to our changing climate, trying to narrow that implementation gap is at the heart of moves to combine the latest science with tangible outcomes, the ancient knowledge of Traditional Owners with the intergenerational experience of our rural communities. This process will guide environmental management in the years ahead. As well as scientists, it involves land managers and policymakers committing to new ideas, and it needs research funders who accept that co-developing projects will require large teams, flexibility, time and resources. Through the National Environmental Science Program, we are already seeing some outstanding results from such an approach, and our new phase of research grants invests $149 million in attracting more scientists and more research across five dedicated research hubs. The Great Barrier Reef Restoration and

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Adaptation Program is at the same time breaking new scientific ground in helping the reef adapt to warming ocean temperatures. Back on land, and just as significantly, many people are getting on with the job of building levees to abate floods, clearing firebreaks and storing feed for lean times in the face of changing levels of water availability. Rural communities impacted by bushfires are looking at new ways to rebuild and be more protected in the future. State governments, land managers and wildlife volunteers are being guided by an expert panel of ecologists, conservation biologists and other scientists towards revegetating bushfire-ravaged habitats and planning the recovery of threatened species in the face of changing climates. Mitigation and adaptation are both critically important. As part of a coordinated international response, we need to reduce global emissions to mitigate the severity of climate change impacts. But even under the most optimistic scenarios for global action, further climate change is inevitable over the coming decades. We must adapt and become more resilient to the impacts we cannot avoid. The science of how we adapt to changes that are already taking place will play an important role in our future. The science of adaptation and resilience can help agriculture prepare for changes in water availability, for future floods and heatwaves. It can help communities and infrastructure managers in coastal areas prepare for sea-level rises and storms, assist communities in moderating

By The Hon Sussan Ley

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the impacts of bushfires and help habitat specialists identify new areas for vulnerable species. From an economic perspective, it will allow businesses to make investments in adaptation and infrastructure to manage climate risks on their terms. From a scientific perspective, this is all, of course, much easier said than done. But it is work that is gathering pace. A consortium consisting of AIMS, CSIRO, University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, James Cook University, Southern Cross University and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation will work closely with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to help preserve and restore the reef in the face of rising ocean temperatures. The Morrison Government is committing $100 million through the $443.3 million Great Barrier Reef Foundation Reef Trust Partnership, with a further $50 million in research and scientific contributions coming from the consortium partners. Ten per cent of the Reef Trust Partnership funding will be allocated to Traditional Owner-led restoration and adaptation activities. A two-year feasibility study identified 43 concepts suitable for further research and development, including: • ways to collect and freeze coral larvae for use in year-round coral seeding • seeding reefs with heat-resistant corals to help the reefs evolve and adapt to changing environments • developing technologies to increase the survival rate of coral larvae and produce and deploy large quantities of more resilient coral larvae • investigating methods to physically stabilise damaged reefs after cyclones and bleaching events to facilitate faster recovery. These are long-term research strategies and not guaranteed cures. But the decision to invest in such practical research and its possible application is an important one. Kakadu National Park provides an example of a similar approach that is already demonstrating outcomes. It involves environmental scientists, the world’s largest technology company and Traditional-Owner knowledge passed down through the millennia. The park’s biodiversity and the ability of Traditional Owners to hunt and harvest on flood plains were being strangled by an invasive grass

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introduced to Australia from Africa in 1880s. It thrives in areas that harbour the richest biodiversity and provide the best bush tucker – areas of native grasses, sedges and lilies that provide refuge for long-necked turtles and nesting sites for magpie geese. Left unchecked, para grass will spread and choke out most of Kakadu’s wetlands. With the support of the National Environmental Science Program (NESP), Traditional Owners and park managers worked with researchers to co-identify the key research questions central to tackling this problem. They formed a research team that drew on a diversity of knowledge. Traditional Owners brought Indigenous ecological knowledge of the seasonal changes in wetland conditions and appropriate targets for wetland monitoring; scientists brought knowledge on weed ecology, biodiversity surveys and cross-cultural monitoring; and park managers and Indigenous rangers brought expertise in practical weed control. The collaboration was expanded to involve Microsoft, which brought technical capacity to use artificial intelligence to automate the analysis of survey imagery collected by drones and developed dashboard reporting for rangers using hand-held devices. This diverse team co-designed a weed-removal and monitoring trial that in just one year has dramatically reduced the abundance of para grass in sites of the greatest concern for Traditional Owners. Areas that were once a dense monoculture of weed are now teeming with Magpie geese that are feeding on a diversity of native plants – thus providing a stunning outlook for hundreds of thousands of tourists. Traditional Owners can now access bush food and medicine at these sites, and they are delighted that “the supermarket is open again”. The project has also put cutting-edge technology and skills in the hands of Traditional Owners and park managers, who are using it to monitor the outcomes of their weed-management actions on biodiversity, country and culture. It is now expanding to remove para grass from other parts of Kakadu and Traditional Owners are using this success to inspire other Traditional Owners. Another NESP project concerned the endangered Gouldian finch. Elusive and rare, this colourful passerine bird is native to Australia. The challenge for NESP scientists was to identify habitat areas and track movements. They designed

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a DNA test that allowed them to determine, from water samples, if a Gouldian finch had been in an area. Professor Michael Douglas, Hub Leader of NESP in Northern Australia, explains that the success of these projects is setting a future framework for the role of science in adaptation. “NESP has reviewed successful transdisciplinary research projects and recommended that to really make [these] work, we need to focus on three principles: the right people, the right project and a clear pathway to action,” he says. “The right people means including the users of science as integral parts of the research team. From the outset, not just at the end. Finding solutions to complex problems nearly always requires a range of scientific disciplines as well as experts in facilitation and communication. It needs people who are willing to try something different. “The right project is one based on rigorous science, but which also has the right scale to be meaningful for users and whose results can be delivered in time to influence decisions. “We are now seeing the benefits of these new approaches, but we have to recognise that to do it well requires more from everyone involved. “Given the scale and urgency of the challenges now confronting our environment we can’t afford to do science that ends up sitting on a shelf, hoping that someone will discover and find a use for it.” The importance of science and adaptation in the years ahead will affect many of the traditional ways we think about and apply science, the ways we interact with it and indeed the ways we teach it. It will be more important than ever in the years ahead that we place a priority on STEM subjects and that we encourage more women into science as well as more people from a broad range of social demographics. The environment is the most precious thing we share. We need to understand the practical outcomes that will allow us to protect it while remaining a part of it.

The Hon Sussan Penelope Ley is an Australian Liberal Party politician serving as Minister for the Environment since 2019 as Member of Parliament for Farrer since 2001.

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Ban Ki-moon

“

We are using resources as if we had two planets, not one. There can be no 'plan B' because there is no 'planet B

State of Our Innovation Nation

LEADING AUSTRALIA TOWARDS A CIRCULAR ECONOMY Recycling materials not only recovers resources, but directly boosts the economy. By creating market incentives, Australia has a chance to align industry, government, and consumers, while creating jobs.

he global challenge of waste reduction brings with it some startling statistics. Here’s a sample. For the year 2016, the World Bank estimated that humankind generated just north of two billion tonnes of waste. Over the next 30 years, it forecasts, that figure will climb to about 3.4 billion. At least a third of this waste is mismanaged through open dumping or burning, contaminating waterways and ecosystems, and severely impacting wildlife in the process. More worrying still are the figures around food waste: 1.3 billion tonnes, about one third of all food produced on our planet each year, is wasted. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, food waste alone costs the global economy close to $940 billion annually – more than the GDP of the Netherlands. If food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China. In Australia, these worrying figures are often reinforced by the media coverage surrounding waste and sustainability. In recent years we have seen other countries in our region turn back container ships full of our plastic and paper waste, while some residents of NSW, Victoria, Queensland and the ACT have faced the shock of seeing their meticulously sorted recycling being dumped into landfill. As consumers of news and social media, many of us

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

have become accustomed to seeing our newsfeeds bombarded with images of plastic-choked waterways and landscapes of rubbish stretching beyond the horizon. All of this, in short, means that one could be forgiven for feeling discouraged about the state of sustainability, both at home and abroad. But it would be foolish for us to treat the talk of a recycling "crisis" as an excuse to wring our hands and walk away. Instead, governments and civil society ought to embrace this challenge as an opportunity to rethink waste and sustainability. Together, we can be smarter about waste reduction. Part of embracing this opportunity means changing the way we think, from the vantage point of both government and citizenry, about recycling. Traditionally, Australians have tended to conceive of recycling in purely ethical terms. For our and our parents’ generation, recycling has been seen as a moral good linked to our broader duty to be responsible custodians of our natural environment. But the harsh reality is that while good intentions such as these are admirable and well-placed, often they are not enough to deliver the outcomes we need to create a more circular economy on a national scale. This is why, as well as encouraging people to do the right thing, we need to apply the lessons of liberal economics to create good

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market incentives, to make sure, to the greatest extent practicable, that it is in everyone’s economic best interests to do the right thing by the environment. We need to start thinking of recycling as an economic opportunity, and not just as an ethical obligation. Put simply, this means we need to ensure that recycling is a win-win for both the economy and the environment. Already we know that for every 10,000 tonnes of waste sent to landfill, there are approximately 2.8 direct jobs created, compared to 9.2 direct jobs created for the same quantity of recycled waste. However, more needs to be done to create the right set of incentives for consumers and industry. On this front Australia is well ahead of the pack, and Australian governments at every level have already taken a number of positive early steps to move us towards a more circular economy. Consider, for example, the ambitious new targets for increasing recycled content in government infrastructure projects that were agreed to by state and federal environment ministers. By preferencing recycled products and encouraging industry to do the same, Australian governments at every level can drive up local demand for recycled content, helping to build a commercially viable waste-and-recycling sector, and, ultimately, ensuring a smooth and sustainable transition to a future in which Australia takes responsibility for its waste. At the same time as we are driving up local demand for recycled content, we have also moved swiftly to put in place a phased export ban on problematic waste streams like plastic, paper, glass and tyres, to ensure that Australia’s waste doesn’t become another nation’s problem. We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform how we manage waste in Australia. Through national leadership, investment by governments and the continued cooperation of industry, as well as by embracing and applying new technologies, Australia can remain at the forefront of waste management and help to build a more sustainable economy for future generations.

The Hon Trevor Evans MP is the Minister for Waste Reduction and Environmental Management, and has been the Federal Member for Brisbane since 2016. He is a member of the Liberal National Party of Queensland, and sits with the Liberal Party in federal parliament.

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RENEWABLE ENERGY EXPORTS: AN INDUSTRIAL GROWTH OPPORTUNITY The future spells a declining trajectory for fossil fuels. Australia’s coal exports, and later its gas exports, are set to fall. Luckily for Australia, the continent is endowed not only with abundant fossil fuels but with a practically unlimited potential to produce cheap, renewable energy, if we make the right investments and policy changes today.

his potential could become the basis for new and large energy industries that would serve to future-proof our economy, with investment volumes over coming decades potentially north of the trillion-dollar mark. To make it happen, Australian governments will need to invest in R&D, provide a supportive environment to attract private investment and signal a genuine commitment to decarbonisation and climate-change action. This would be in stark contrast to present federal-policy settings, which are defined by the political rhetoric of a "gas-led recovery" and the lack of a long-term climate-action commitment by Australia, while providing practically no support for renewable energies. Fossil fuel demand trajectories Australia has benefited hugely from fossil fuel production and exports. In dollar terms, the country is now the world’s largest exporter of coal and gas. But the world is on a long-term trajectory away from fossil fuels, no matter what Australian governments, businesses or the community at large might wish for. The question is not whether the decarbonisation of global-energy supply will occur, but rather how quickly and by what means. The fundamental driver is the quest to address

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

climate change. If the energy demand of a growing world economy were supplied largely by fossil fuels, as has been the case to date, there would be climatic changes of an extent entirely intolerable to the global community. Notwithstanding many short-term difficulties in national and international climate change policy, the global long-term goal, as defined by the Paris Agreement, is both broadly accepted and beginning to find expression in national commitments to achieving net-zero emissions, as have been put forward by the European Union (for 2050) and China (2060). The momentum behind ambitious climate targets – from deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to net zero – suggests fossil fuel use will be largely phased out over coming decades, other than in specific applications where the capture and storage of carbon dioxide are technically and economically viable. This shift could happen quickly for coal: for example, the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) projections for a "sustainable development" scenario show a two-thirds reduction in global coal production between 2019 and 2040. The reductions in fossil fuel production in the IEA’s "net zero by 2070" scenario are even steeper.

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World fossil fuel production, IEA World Energy Outlook 2020 ‘sustainable development’ scenario (index)

120 100

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Gas

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Gas

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2019

100

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WEO FF production mb/d

bcm

Mtce

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Gas

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83.4

3281

5233

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95.4

4089

5625

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84.3

3998

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64.4

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Zero-emissions technologies In earlier times, achieving such a fundamental turnaround in the world’s energy system would have been possible only through an intensive and sustained policy effort involving all major countries. But advances within zero-emissions technologies are game-changing. In the last eight years, the average cost of solar photovoltaic power has fallen by a factor of five, and wind power by a factor of two. Both energy sources are now hands-down cheaper than any conventional option for new energy supply installations in large parts of the world. The lion’s share of investment in new energy production, both globally and in Australia, is now in renewables. Advances in battery technology and other energy-storage options are making it possible to run electricity grids economically on 100 per

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cent renewables supply. Progress towards electric vehicles has been far more rapid than anticipated, and it is now likely that the global vehicle fleet will be largely converted to electric cars and trucks, and possibly hydrogen-powered heavy vehicles, over coming decades – a trend driven by the superior economics of electric mobility and carrying the benefits of reduced local air pollution and no greenhouse gas emissions. Renewables in industry and trade The demand for cleanly produced electricity will increase dramatically, including for industrial energy use. A cheap-enough supply of clean electricity can replace both coal and gas as a source of heat in industrial processes. It can also be the basis for "green" fuels, either in gaseous form, such as hydrogen, or in liquid form, such as ammonia. It can replace oil and gas as feedstocks in many industrial-production processes – fertiliser, for example. Zero-emissions electricity can be used to produce "green steel" in scrap recycling and even in primary iron and steel production through the processing of iron ore. Trade is bound to play a role in this, and it would be a large role if a low-carbon world economy were organised according to least cost production. Production of green fuels and energy-intensive products would be concentrated in those parts of the world that can produce clean energy most cheaply, while countries and regions with lesser clean-energy potential would be importers. For example, the countries with high population densities in the high latitudes of Europe and East Asia would likely remain importers of energy and energy-intensive commodities. Germany is set to play a leading role in establishing a hydrogen economy and, to that end, the German government has flagged its intention to import "green hydrogen" and fuels created from it. Global-energy trade patterns would then be in substantial part determined by renewable-energy advantage, rather than fossil fuel endowment. Australia’s opportunity Australia is extremely well placed to become a large player in a global renewables-based export industry. Australia’s interior and coastal areas, including the Pilbara, offer physical opportunities for renewables production that are second to none. There is an abundance of space (with land use, in many cases, to be determined in concert with Indigenous communities) and ready access to

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ports, existing or new. And Australia has a record of successfully establishing large-scale resource processing industries (most recently the LNG industry), together with a reputation for a stable political, regulatory and investment framework that sets it apart from some other countries that also have suitable physical characteristics. These potential future industries could be huge. It’s possible they could eclipse the value of current day fossil fuel production, especially if Australia were to become a large producer of ‘green steel’, processing some of the iron ore mined in Western Australia locally using renewable energy. Scenarios for Australian hydrogen exports show potential renewable electricity generation of two-to-five times Australia’s current total electricity generation.2 The electricity-supply capacity alone would require investment totalling hundreds of billions of dollars, with an even greater amount of investment needed for the industrial infrastructure to convert electricity into exportable fuels or products. All up, investment volumes above the trillion-dollar mark are possible. If a large, green-steel industry were established, total investments would be much larger still. Commercial investment in renewables-based exports, with investment volume in the tens of billions of dollars, is already planned for projects in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. This could be but a taste of what’s to come. What governments need to do Any such large investments in Australia will be made by private investors, not governments. But governments hold the keys that can unlock the gates to a new energy economy. The federal government, and relevant state governments, need to create the right conditions to attract largescale green-industry investments. That includes suitable regulatory frameworks and a welcoming attitude to international capital. At the same time, governments need to ensure that Australian society is a winner in all this. Arrangements for taxation and royalties need to be such that they attract private investment while financially benefiting the community as a whole. The federal government also has an important

role in properly funding R&D and supporting pilot projects. This can be done through the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), the government’s green bank. ARENA received new budget allocations in 2020 totalling about $1.4 billion over 10 years, which is less on an annual basis than in the first eight years of the Agency’s existence, yet the investment mandate is to be greatly expanded. The CEFC is also expected to invest in a much wider range of activities but without any increase in its pool of capital. Both agencies will need much greater funding to be truly effective catalysts of industrial change. For comparison, consider Germany’s commitment of €9bn (about $AU15bn) of government support just for the establishment of a hydrogen economy. Finally, and importantly, Australia needs to signal that it is on board with global action on climate change. Large funding decisions are increasingly influenced by climate-change considerations. Australian governments will be tempted to try to walk both sides of the road – by getting into new green industries while supporting the continuation, or even the expansion, of the coal and gas industry. A perception exists internationally that Australia would prefer to see rather less action on climate change in order to prolong the primacy of the fossil fuel industries. This could turn into a major obstacle to progress. What is needed is a clear recognition that fossil fuels are sunset industries, and acknowledgment that their decline will need to be managed alongside the rise of the zero-emissions industries of the future. To benefit from a global investment boom in clean energy, Australia needs to support, unequivocally, the shift to a decarbonised world economy, and to be seen to be pushing for it despite its fossil fuel roots. That means adopting a net-zero emissions target, devising and adopting a national strategy on how to slash Australia’s emissions while building up a clean-energy export industry, and supporting this strategy in practice through policy and public spending. Anything less risks the country missing out on a starring role in one of this century’s big economic booms.

Frank Jotzo is a professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy, and Director of the Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at Australian National University. He is an environmental economist, and his research focuses on policy for climate change and energy, in the context of economic reform and development.

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TOWARDS ZERO EMISSIONS: DECARBONISING TRANSPORT As Australia looks to hydrogen for its future, there is an opportunity to create a domestic market by moving towards electric and hydrogen-powered heavy vehicles for transport, which consume far more fuel and enable economies of scale. By Peter Kasprzak

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“T

he factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.” That was a prediction of Warren Bennis, a pioneer of leadership studies. It’s a humorous hyperbole. But after the initial chuckle, we may realise that with today’s drive towards automation and advanced manufacturing, the reality may not be far from the prophecy. The rate of change, fuelled by innovation, is accelerating faster than ever. Let’s imagine joining the ranks of a national think tank and asking, what will Australia look like a decade from now? Or by 2050? What will our society, economy, politics, technology, military and national security look like by then? Despite the economic challenges thrown at us by COVID-19, Australia – among the world leaders in nominal GDP – enters the post-pandemic recovery period in an enviable position. Principally, we owe our national wealth to an abundance of natural resources. We are the leading producer of iron ore, exporting almost three times more than second-placed Brazil, and

we’re number one for coal. Australia also recently overtook Qatar as the world's top exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Nonetheless, we need to grasp the fact that our reserves of these natural resources are finite. Although our deposits of coal should last for about another 120 years, and our natural gas for perhaps another 50, climate change concerns, geopolitical pressures, the need for compliance with international treaties, as well as ethical landing and investment practices, could conceivably put an end to fossil fuels exploration before 2050. If that happens, we would still have our iron ore deposits, which are predicted to last for another 50 years, but that hardly makes them a guarantee of our long-term prosperity. Where is the opportunity? Today, coal and gas exports are worth more than $100 billion annually to the Australian economy. Unfortunately, our new zero-emissions industry, green hydrogen, will not be able to fill a gap of that magnitude. In the optimistic scenarios outlined in Australia’s National Hydrogen Strategy, it will be worth less than $2 billion annually by 2030

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and less than $30 billion by 2050. That means we must keep looking for solutions elsewhere. How can we supercharge our renewable industries? Answer: by creating domestic markets in which there are clear and immediate opportunities. We propose a Zero Emission Highway, designed to enable emission-free long-distance travel by equipping Australia’s major transport routes with battery electric vehicles’ (BEVs) recharging and fuel cell electric Vehicles’ (FCEVs) hydrogen refuelling facilities. As the technology develops so rapidly, it is crucial to our successful transition to carbon-free transport that, rather than try to pick winners, we simultaneously support both battery- and fuel-cell-based transport. Although suitable for cars, the Zero Emission Highway is aimed at heavy transport, a major contributor to carbon emissions in Australia and worldwide. It is also designed to create massive demand for hydrogen: a private car might use 5 kg of hydrogen in a week; a truck can use 100 kg in two days. Western Australia’s Zero Emission Highway would focus on heavy transport, helping to lower the cost of hydrogen fuel, which could eventually represent a secure fuel supply, eliminating the need to import diesel. Phase 1 would run

along Highway 95 from Perth to Port Hedland, linking the state capital with the Pilbara region. Subsequent stages would lead to an expansion of the Zero Emission Highway across the state and beyond along Highway 1, the longest national highway in the world. Focusing the Zero Emission Highway on heavy transport rather than passenger vehicles sets up a high demand for hydrogen and, therefore, an economy of scale and subsequently lower costs. A hydrogen car can fill up on 4-6 kg of hydrogen, while a commercial truck would need about 20 times more. Earlier hydrogen highways in Norway and California relied on passenger cars to create demand. Australia is in a unique position to profit from a once-in-a-lifetime confluence of technological innovation and global market shifts, and thus the beginning of hydrogen-powered heavy haulage. As batteries have gained acceptance as the future for domestic vehicles, hydrogen has emerged as the ideal fuel for long-haul vehicles. Over two millennia ago, Plato taught Aristotle that necessity is the mother of invention. In other words, if you are lacking in brawn, you had better start using your brain, especially when others around you are doing just that.

Peter Kasprzak is the co-founder and CEO of Innovate Australia, and the convenor of the Hydrogen Society of Australia.

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CORRECTING THE PATH Australian industry can deliver a successful transition to zero greenhouse gas emissions over the next 30 years. Yet success will not happen by accident, nor via the path we are currently following.

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n the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic there will be more urgent tasks on the economic recovery agenda, as well as queues of vested interests and rent-seekers at the Treasurer’s door. Success will flow from a level of strategic focus and stable, credible policy on energy and climate change beyond what we have seen during the first 20 years of this century. According to Commonwealth Government figures published at the end of 2019, Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are projected to be 16 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, falling short of the Government’s target of 26–28 per cent. The electricity sector is projected to be 34 per cent below its 2005 level by 2030, and current trends suggest it could do better than that if support for renewables continues. The rest of the economy, however, is projected to produce rising emissions from now to 2030, to be only eight per cent below the 2005 level by then. The gap between the official emissions-reduction projection and the Government’s target might narrow if certain underlying assumptions prove to be conservative. But the target itself is widely considered to be inconsistent with the global objective of the Paris Agreement and likely to come under pressure in the next few years. Further, we have seen a wave of companies, financial institutions, industry associations, NGOs, federal Labor and all of Australia’s state and territory governments call for, and make their own commitments to, a target of net-zero emissions by 2050. We need to shift gear. An effective and efficient transition will depend on three factors: a combination of technological development and deployment; major investment; and a supportive and stable policy environment aligned with the core objective. While the generic requirements for all sectors

of the economy to reach zero emissions are the same, each sector faces unique challenges. These range from grid integration of renewable electricity, replacement of natural gas in its various roles including cooking, heating, power generation and chemical feedstock, to greater challenges in industrial processes such as steel, cement and aluminium manufacturing and agriculture. The good news is that possible technology-based solutions have been identified across all these sectors. The critical barrier is not the absence of breakthrough inventions but rather creating and maintaining an environment that supports the development and deployment of the most effective technologies. Innovation across the research, development, deployment and financing pipeline will be a key to success. Australia is well placed with its universities, CSIRO, Cooperative Research Centres, financial institutions and more targeted agencies, such as the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA). However, these entities do not generally work in a coherent, coordinated way towards any form of common objective. Insufficient finance is also likely to be a barrier to delivering the investment necessary for a successful transition. Investment in technology at any stage and in any field requires an alignment of risk and reward. This alignment does not currently exist in the areas essential to addressing climate change. Early movers on technology face risks not faced by followers in terms of uncertainty and capturing the value of their innovation. In addition, the risk of a carbon price, explicit or implicit, is difficult for green technology or project developers to manage. These risks mean that government policy is the third necessary element for a successful transition. In general, the best role for government is to reduce or eliminate barriers to economically

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efficient decisions by investors. Unclear energy/ climate-change policy, direct government intervention in the electricity market and early-mover technology risks are the biggest such barriers. They should be removed. At a federal level, we already have the seeds for successful government policy. First, there is a commitment to zero emissions, even though the timeframe for meeting this objective is contested. Second, there is bipartisan recognition that investment in technologies aligned with a zero-emissions economy is both desirable and necessary. The green shoots of the transition are growing and should be cultivated: • State and territory governments are acting, and good state policies are better than no policies. These policies and the low cost of solar and wind power will continue to drive down electricity-sector emissions – and rapidly if grid integration problems are overcome. • Electric vehicles will be cheaper to buy and run than those with internal combustion engines. Policies and regulation around smart metering and time-based electricity tariffs are needed to ensure their impact on demand and supply can

be managed without the problems we have seen with rooftop solar adoption in some locations. • Investment in low-emission substitutes and processes in sectors such as gas, steel, aluminium and cement will be slow without government policy drivers. Technology support should come from ARENA and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Ideally this could be driven more strongly by comprehensive, strategic recommendations emerging from the Reference Panel developing Australia’s Technology Investment Roadmap. Sadly, the current state of political debate suggests we are unlikely anytime soon to see a credible, federal climate change policy framework to underpin a successful transition. Neither of the major political parties has yet seen the imperative to develop a compelling narrative and supporting policy. This will change, driven by the reality of climate change and steadily mounting pressure from both international and domestic sources. In the meantime, progress will be lumpy, differently paced in different sectors, and cost more than it should. But there will be progress, there will be innovation, and there will be investment.

Tony Wood is the Energy Program director at the Grattan Institute, a role he has held since 2011. Prior to that, he was a senior executive at Origin Energy for 14 years.

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THE ROLE OF GAS As one of the world’s biggest exporters of liquid natural gas (LNG), Australia is one of the most technically proficient nations at the task, with countless technological innovations under its belt. Now, the industry is aiming to reduce the emissions it generates, and apply its expertise to exporting hydrogen. By Andrew McConville

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he oil and gas industry – in Australia and internationally – is a leader in innovation, using technology, data and scientific expertise to supply safe, sustainable, reliable and affordable energy to homes and businesses right around the world. The constant drive to improve our operational efficiency, minimise our environmental footprint and ensure we keep pace with the changing needs of our customers is underpinned by the efforts of true innovators. The traditional image of hard hats, drilling rigs and pipelines continues to describe our heartland operations, but more than ever before those day-to-day activities are evolving as technology and innovation drive rapid change. This is true across the hundreds of different types of jobs in the oil and gas industry – from geologists and engineers, to environment and safety leaders, data specialists, caterers and cleaners. Oil and gas companies have succeeded because they have solved complex challenges. Easy-to-extract resources are depleting, and increasingly innovation lies at the heart of developing new “unconventional” resources. Australia is a leading example of that with the expansion of coal seam gas operations in Queensland and prospectively in New South Wales, offshore drilling in deeper waters, and potential shale gas developments in the Northern Territory and elsewhere. But to remain successful, the industry is constantly evolving

as we expand our innovation focus beyond exploration and production processes. Much of the innovation taking place in our industry is designed to achieve both environmental and commercial benefits. Natural gas is playing a role in facilitating the transition to a lower-carbon economy, working alongside and supporting renewable energy sources and investing in technologies such as carbon capture and storage, hydrogen and batteries. The oil and gas industry is at the forefront of global efforts to prevent carbon dioxide (CO2) from entering the atmosphere by capturing the carbon emitted during gas production and processing. In Western Australia, Chevron is operating the world’s largest commercial-scale CO2 injection project, representing the largest greenhouse gas abatement project undertaken by industry. The project, which has captured global attention, plans to inject between 3.4 and 4 million tonnes of reservoir CO2 each year. This will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the Gorgon Project by approximately 40 percent. In the heart of its traditional operations in the Cooper Basin, Santos is exploring the opportunity for large scale commercial carbon capture and storage, with potential injection capacity of 20 million tonnes of CO2 per year for 50 years, providing safe and permanent sequestration for a billion tonnes of CO2. The Santos project is an example of how innovation is bringing new purpose to legacy infrastructure.

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Much of the innovation in our oil and gas industry is about reducing our energy use – both improving our environmental performance through lower emissions and boosting our commercial performance by retaining more resources to sell. An example is ConocoPhillips Australia, as operator of the Darwin LNG project, investing in an innovative battery project projected to reduce the facility’s carbon emissions from power generation by 20 per cent. The battery will enable the existing turbines to run at maximum efficiency and remove the need to run an additional turbine, saving thousands of tonnes of fuel gas and reducing maintenance costs. The initiative means Darwin LNG will become the world’s first LNG plant to install a battery to reduce emissions, providing a template for other LNG facilities. Another area where oil and gas innovators are driving new opportunity is hydrogen. Australia’s natural gas industry is ideally placed to support the development of a new hydrogen industry in Australia. Our LNG export success story means our industry has the technology, the expertise and the commercial and trade relationships to make hydrogen exports a reality. Natural gas has long been used as a fuel source for hydrogen made through the process of steam methane reforming (SMR), with any greenhouse gas emissions generated during SMR managed through market offset or technical abatement to offer a carbon-neutral product. This process is known as “blue hydrogen”. Australia’s Woodside is focusing on both “blue” and “green” hydrogen. Green hydrogen is produced from water using renewable power. Operating in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, Woodside have access to solar power to create hydrogen from a renewable source. As with LNG, it then needs to be chilled and transported in large quantities via ship. The countries leading in the way in hydrogen adaptation – such as Japan and South Korea – are already importing natural gas from Australia.

Another area where oil and gas innovators are driving new opportunity is hydrogen Away from emissions reduction, another example of innovators at work in our industry is the Exmouth Integrated Artificial Reef in Western Australia. The collaborative project between Subcon, BHP, Recfishwest, National Energy Resources Australia and Curtin University was installed in the waters of the Exmouth Gulf in July 2018 and is the largest purpose-built reef in the Southern Hemisphere and the first of its kind in Australia. The reef is partially made up of repurposed offshore structures from a BHP operated oil and gas field that has ceased production, forming the foundation of 27,000 cubic metres of new marine habitat. King Reef, as it has become known, is positioned on a previously sandy barren seafloor, and has already seen 46 different species of fish call it home, with underwater footage showing a thriving and growing reef. For the Exmouth community, the new reef creates an abundance of recreational fishing, tourism and employment opportunities. These are just some examples of positive outcomes from ongoing innovation in oil and gas, one of Australia’s traditional industries. Driven by global trends and local challenges, that innovation must continue. The industry employs 80,000 Australians – directly and indirectly. In addition, we support a vast supply chain of businesses in manufacturing, services and construction. This is in addition to the hundreds of thousands of jobs in electricity generation, manufacturing, transport and other industries which rely on our outputs. With so many Australians relying on our progress, we can’t afford to stand still.

Andrew McConville is the Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, a position he has occupied since April 2019.

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INNOVATION THROUGH ADVERSITY: URBAN WATER REFORM In the past 30 years, the Australian water sector has been through the most significant water reforms in our history, driven by the need to mitigate and adapt to a shifting climate and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of water management.

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ater services are so essential to everyday life that it is easy to forget the effort required to supply high-quality drinking water at the turn of a tap and reliable wastewater services at the ﬂush of a toilet. The key feature of water resources in Australia is the variability of rainfall and runoff, both around the country and over time. Large investments in water and wastewater assets valued at over $100 billion and the efforts of people, organisations and governments have been a feature of the development of the urban water sector since early European settlement and have helped to provide secure water services to our cities and towns in the context of such variability. They have also made Australia a leader in the development of reticulated wastewater systems and treatment technologies to protect public health, urban amenity and the environment. Australia’s urban water systems evolved from the late 19th century, developing a strong engineering culture with a focus on technical performance. By the 1980s, prices were based mainly on the rateable value of properties served; cross-subsidies were rife; water businesses regulated their own prices and, in some cases, environmental performance; metering of consumption was not universal; and most capital works were undertaken by deploying day labour. A consensus began to emerge in states and territories that this situation was not sustainable,

and a process of reform began, driven partly by growing community concerns about environmental impacts and growing challenges involving capital investments. These problems, combined with broader recognition by governments and the community of the need to manage water resources efficiently and sustainably, drove the development and implementation of the first major coordinated national reform efforts. In 1994, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) water-reform agenda was part of a broader era of micro-economic reform known as the National Competition Policy (NCP) reforms. The NCP reforms aimed to harness competitive forces to increase efficiency and community welfare in response to concerns about Australia’s overall economic performance and productivity. As a result, institutional separation of policy setting, service delivery and regulatory enforcement, in addition to pricing and market-oriented water resource allocation reforms, were achieved. Under the new model, governments were to articulate clear, measurable and coherent policy objectives and provide water-service providers with the autonomy and incentive to deliver. In return, service providers were to be transparent and accountable by clearly demonstrating performance to customers, government, regulators, shareholders and the community.

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In recognition of continuing water-related challenges, particularly the Millennium Drought (2001–09), the National Water Initiative (2004) set out a more detailed and ambitious reform agenda aimed at optimising the economic, social and environmental outcomes associated with water in urban and rural areas. Implementation of those reforms has transformed the urban water sector. The energy–water nexus The Millennium Drought crisis spawned a significant surge in urban water infrastructure investment, which grew from a record $2.4bn in major cities alone in 2004–05 to more than $14bn in 2008 at the height of the drought. An increase in energy use for urban water supplies was one problem. But when this increase in energy was added to a rise in electricity costs, the energy bill for urban water increased significantly. Ultimately, these costs were incorporated into water prices and passed on to consumers. In many places, it was no longer true to say that water is a small element of the cost of living compared with other utilities, such as gas and electricity. To compound the challenge, Australia has a goal to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 80 per cent below 2000 levels by 2050 (Australian Government Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, 2012). This meant that if the water sector was to contribute proportionately, then energy use for urban water would need to be reduced by more than 90 per cent from the projected 2030 levels. This drove a major focus on the water and energy sectors navigating the interrelated challenges of climate change, growing demand and resource security. Utilities have been actively exploring how to match renewable energy sources, from solar to biogas generation, to their various energy requirements. Today, water utilities in Australia: • generate about 20 per cent of their energy needs from their own renewable sources, made up of cogeneration, hydroelectricity and solar, with cogeneration accounting for approximately 15 per cent of energy production • generate more than 60 per cent of their own electricity through co-digestion facilities at wastewater treatment plants • produce about 9 per cent of electricity

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• • •

output in the National Electricity Market through hydroelectric plants fully offset desalination plants by renewable, wind and solar energy generate approximately 34MW of biogas electricity are developing capabilities in the hydrogen industry.

How this works in practice SA Water is seeking to integrate renewable energy technologies across their operations. They are investing more than $300 million to install 154MW of solar photovoltaic generation at around 35 sites, along with 34MWh of energy storage devices, by the end of 2020. Yarra Valley Water’s ReWaste waste-to-energy facility in Wollert has been in operation for more than two years, producing enough energy each year to power up to 1,500 homes. The plant generates 90 per cent less greenhouse gas than using fossil fuels from the grid and saves 8,500 tonnes of carbon per year. Unitywater is using biosolids energy generation at existing sewage treatment plants, alongside smart energy-efficiency initiatives, to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, save $2.5 million in costs and keep customer bills as low as possible. Jacobs has worked with Yarra Valley Water in Melbourne to map out a potential path forward for the role of wastewater treatment plants in accelerating the development of Australia’s hydrogen industry. "Sustainable hydrogen" – produced using recycled water and renewable energy sources – is one of the many avenues that may support Melbourne Water on their journey to decarbonisation. Melbourne Water’s mini-hydro and methane gas systems, including nine mini-hydros across Melbourne’s water supply system, generate 61,000MWh of electricity each year – enough to power 9,000 households. Indigenous engagement Indigenous needs for water should be incorporated into water planning and management. Yet, for many decades Indigenous water values were rarely addressed in water planning. The history of water resource development – particularly the priority of chronological possession of land and water rights – has made it difficult for Indigenous people to retain

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customary connection and attain legal rights to water bodies in recent native-title processes. As a result, there have been significant barriers for Indigenous people to access water through allocations and thereby satisfy their water and related natural-resource management objectives. The economic, social, amenity and environmental values of water planning and decision-making are widely understood, often seen in practice and well documented. However, cultural connection and Indigenous knowledge within these core values, either as a standalone value or subtly and intrinsically woven throughout, are typically poorly represented. A lack of understanding about how Indigenous Australians value water has led to a lack of diversity and fairness in decision-making. Further, with Indigenous communities in northern Australia facing development of land and water resources that are sacred to cultural beliefs, it is no longer acceptable to ignore the perspectives of Traditional Owners when it comes to water rights. We have seen how the community has developed a deeper understanding of the connection to country. This is creating a heightened understanding of Indigenous cultural obligations to look after and interact with country in a sustainable way that validates our science. There has been a greater understanding recently behind the needs and aspirations of Indigenous people, the engagement strategies employed to elicit Indigenous knowledge, assess Indigenous values and incorporate the results into the development of water plans and frameworks. As a result, many state and territory governments have taken a stronger approach to engagement and are now developing water-policy instruments to better accommodate Indigenous people’s cultural, environmental and economic needs in water-management planning. For example, in Victoria, the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning now has a fully dedicated and resourced Aboriginal water program and unit. In NSW, the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment has a

dedicated Aboriginal Communities Water and Sewerage Program to improve water supply and sewerage services in eligible Aboriginal communities. Properly valuing water, and reallocating it when necessary, is crucial to avoiding catastrophic costs and recovery after droughts, and to ensuring a sustainable water future for all Australians. Looking forward To continue to drive future innovation and reforms in the Australian urban water sector, strong leadership is required from government, the community and the water sector itself. Also needed is a diversity of supply and demand options for future water security, where the best science has been utilised and the community participates in decisions. Increased investment is also a must for adaptive planning in the face of further extreme climatic events. Building stronger partnerships with other sectors, such as urban planning, energy and transport, as well as between industry and government will enable more integrated water management and urban liveability outcomes. Importantly, incorporating community input into water-governance arrangements and enhancing the level of communication with community representatives will provide the community with greater confidence in the sustainable management of water resources, as we all strive for a more sustainable water future. Urban water and wastewater services underpin public health and wellbeing, contribute to social development and are a vital enabler of strong economic activity and growth across Australia. Sustainable management of urban water and wastewater systems helps protect the environmental health and biodiversity of water catchments, rivers and the marine environment, as well as the social and economic values that ﬂow from the nation’s natural assets.

Corinne Cheeseman is the CEO of the Australian Water Association, Australia’s largest water network, which includes 700 corporate and 5000 individual members, across utilities, government agencies, engineering, urban design and planning, science, research, academia, energy, resources, manufacturing, mining and agriculture.

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PRESSURE POINTS Rather than adopt traditional urban servicing approaches, we have an opportunity to direct investment into well-placed, efficient and resilient infrastructure.

ver the years, Australia has led a global evolution in best practice urban water management, culminating in the introduction of integrated, water-sensitive urban design. In less predictable and "limits to growth" scenarios, water must be managed in a more integrated and adaptive way. Reorienting the existing infrastructures, institutions and capacities towards this new integrated approach is the key challenge for developed cities. Cities are Australia’s economic powerhouses, generating over 80 per cent of our GDP and home to more than 80 per cent of our people. But our current infrastructure approaches make us vulnerable to the combined challenges of population growth, urban intensification and climate extremes. Ageing infrastructure, increasingly brittle built environments and traditional technologies and practices that historically served cities well cannot address these complex modern challenges. There is widespread agreement in Australia that conventional water-management approaches are inadequate to meet the diverse and complex needs of cities. The urban water infrastructure and governance system remains focused around incremental improvement of 20th century solutions and experience, pursuing conventional water-management approaches that remain fragmented and technologically-based in response to 21st century water challenges. Traditional urban servicing supports population growth by increasing supply, and typically involves expensive, large-scale infrastructure with long implementation lead times, making it difficult to respond nimbly to crises or changes to demographic and development patterns. It embeds inefficiencies and tends to shift problems between service providers who operate in isolation. The result is piecemeal planning, rigid systems and inefficient outcomes that cannot be sustained in the increasingly complex, uncertain and rapidly changing context of cities – with large direct and indirect costs. Instead, we need more diverse water sources and new infrastructure solutions. Our cities are

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water-supply catchments with a diversity of water sources, including stormwater and recycled greywater and blackwater that can be harnessed and treated to a standard that is fit-for-purpose. Access to these multiple sources with the goal of supplementing the traditional water source is supported by new infrastructure solutions that serve multiple functions related to drought proofing, flood management and protection of the ecological values of the natural environment. They must be integrated, smart and able to protect Australians from extreme weather events, which have multi-billion dollar impacts from infrastructure damage and productivity losses. There is increasing evidence that green infrastructure can deliver a net positive economic benefit to urban communities. Our cities can provide ecosystem services. Establishing a network of blue-green corridors provides the supplementary drainage system for safe flood conveyance while fostering highly connected spaces for improving and/or returning biodiversity to our cityscapes. These green infrastructures protect and improve ecological values of urban environments and adjoining waterways by raising the quality of stormwater runoff. And this enhanced quality enables stormwater to be a significant additional source of supply, particularly for non-potable uses. The national evolution of urban water management towards integrated urban water management is now entrenched, through (i) the integration of water services (water supply, sewerage, drainage and flood management and environmental protection); and (ii) the integration of water infrastructure planning and design with water-sensitive urban planning and design. We know that we need to invest in new infrastructure to accommodate our growing population. But rather than adopt traditional urban-servicing approaches, we have an opportunity to direct this investment into wellplaced, efficient and resilient infrastructure. As well as delivering liveable cities and sustainable water, energy and food resources, these new

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infrastructure solutions can improve productivity. Better functioning towns and cities have the potential to increase our economy by $29 billion. Contemporary thinking in infrastructure delivery emphasises hybrid systems, which augment traditional infrastructure with new flexible, decentralised infrastructure and nature-based solutions. They are supported by new investment and management models. They can incorporate combinations of: 1. hybrid social-technical solutions, which are infrastructure solutions co-created and managed by diverse organisational stakeholders, and include the community 2. hybrid centralised-decentralised water infrastructure that combines critical existing centralised infrastructure with new local infrastructure solutions 3. hHybrid grey-green infrastructure incorporating conventional engineering infrastructure with nature-based solutions 4. hybrid public-private co-investment and co-management/operation, at a time when governments face increasing resource constraints 5. hybrid local government-state government governance and administration, enabling vertical government integration with multiple benefits across scales and sectors. These hybrid solutions reflect local social, economic and environmental conditions. They can be customised, modular and implemented to complement existing trunk infrastructure as and when needed. This allows them to service population growth as it occurs, including out-of-sequence urban development patterns; defer or avoid investments for major resource development and trunk infrastructure augmentation; deliver water services as well as amenity and ecological services; and rapidly respond in changing situations. They also allow us to continually embrace opportunities provided by emerging technologies. For example, digital technologies and smart control allow hybrid systems to respond faster to changes, increasing infrastructure resilience and service efficiency. Smart infrastructure, enabled through digital technologies, or the Internet of Things (IoT), is important for integrated system planning, operation

and performance, because it enables more accurate, current and systemwide information. And they present the opportunity to look beyond water to meet the challenge of ensuring liveable, resilient and prosperous cities. Water serves as a powerful entry point to catalyse transformative opportunities for improving services and performance through large-scale integration across multiple sectors. Smart technologies and new energy opportunities are currently disrupting traditionally siloed urban infrastructure services, leading to an emerging industry at the water–energy–food–waste nexus. This industry urgently needs new systems-based solutions to deliver long-term economic and community benefit. It can be best enabled by taking a circular economy/industry/ecology approach to urban planning. This is particularly relevant when coupled with urban planning for mixed-use urban planning and developments (residential/commercial/industrial), including the water resource interaction between urban activities and peri-urban high-value agriculture production development. Conclusion Australia’s urban water sector is a recognised global leader in innovative water solutions. Demand management, wastewater recycling and stormwater harvesting are now critical responses to buffer the effects of climate extremes on Australia’s cities and their economies, following the experiences of the Millennium Drought and the floods that followed. Pockets of urban innovation, addressing particular challenges and opportunities, exist nationally and internationally. Yet nowhere has achieved the cross-sectoral and cross-scale integration of infrastructure services needed to ensure the long-term competitiveness, productivity and sustainability of cities. Infrastructure investment to accommodate population growth in Australian cities provides the catalyst for a transformative pivot towards creating hybrid infrastructure across the water–energy– food–waste nexus. Creating the enabling environment for transformations such as this on a broader scale must become our collective mission.

Professor Tony Wong was the chief executive of the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities in Australia, and currently leads its think tank. He pioneered the water-sensitive cities approach and has advanced new understandings of the relationship between the societal and biophysical dimensions of water security and city waterscapes.

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INNOVATION IN WATER: A UTILITIES PERSPECTIVE The utilities companies responsible for delivering resources, like water, have an outsized role to play when it comes to transformative change. Victoria’s Barwon Water undertook a strategic shift three years ago, kicking off a 13-year strategy to be a more sustainable, community-focused organisation.

wish to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land and waters on which Barwon Water works, the Wadawurrung and the Easter Maar. I pay tribute and my respect to their elders past, present and emerging, and thank them for caring for the land for thousands of years and generously sharing their knowledge and culture so we too can learn. Organisations do not live vacuum-sealed from society or the environments and communities in which they work. The culture of an organisation can either perpetuate the problems we face or seek to address them. Addressing them does not require an organisation to act politically. Simply by striving to shrug off complacency and seeking to deliver the highest and best value for customers, and by listening, learning and innovating, organisations can have a profound and positive effect – well beyond their bailiwick. Delivering something more than ordinary asks us to look beyond what we have done or what others have done to what is most needed. We need to ask not only what could we do, but also what we ought to do. At times that means we need to embrace the ambiguity of not having the answers at our fingertips. When I first spoke to our board chair about the managing director role at Barwon Water, she explained that she was not just looking for someone who could continue to deliver high quality, affordable, secure water and sewage services. She saw that we needed to be more than a utility, to model and be a catalyst for positive change and achievement. She wanted a leader who would leverage the organisation’s expertise, infrastructure

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and resources as a platform to help our region meet the challenges of our time and transition to the new economy – an economy based on sustainability and care and one that learns from the millennia of Traditional Owner wisdom. This was antithetical to everything I knew and had assumed about utilities. I felt myself denying that this was possible. I was fascinated and unable to resist the temptation of what this could mean. When our board and executive were developing our strategy in early 2017, we knew that for it to have the chance of achieving some level of transformation it had to have ambition, some prescience in seeking to tackle issues that transcend political cycles, as well as a realistic timeframe. We asked the fundamental question of why we needed to be at all. We decided we existed to help our region prosper – culturally, socially, environmentally and economically. Our people are deeply connected and committed to the communities in which they and their families and friends work and live, so tapping into their deep connection gave us all greater meaning to our work each day. Our Strategy 2030 expresses how Barwon Water strives to be: zero emissions, zero waste, entrepreneurial, strategically partnering and high performing. We designed the strategy document in water colour to symbolise the new life we were bringing to our quintessential product – water. A lot had to change. Here is some of what we did and what we have learned three years into our 13-year strategy.

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Our Employees In the first few months of my joining Barwon Water we asked a cross section of our staff to describe our culture. They used words like stale, boring, comfortable, secure, untapped potential, riskaverse. When I asked what words they would use to describe a high- performing culture; they said, agile, dynamic, innovative, engaged, community-minded, diverse, personal growth, vibrant. We don’t need a degree in leadership to understand what a positive, high performing culture is – we know it intrinsically. We understand the fertile conditions for innovation and the oppression of its absence. But delivering that culture requires relentless commitment and perseverance. It asks us to examine ourselves, our assumptions, beliefs, behaviours, norms, processes, technologies and capabilities – the dynamics and mechanics of the organisation. Most fundamentally, the purpose of our work must align with the personal values we each bring. We built a new structure, leadership model, KPIs and behaviours to be accountable for. We recognised we were not the only or best source of expertise; that through engaging and partnering with our customers, traditional owners and community we would achieve more. We set up small, separate teams to focus on continuous improvement and innovation. There was plenty of enthusiasm and much scepticism. One of our early learnings was that we had inadvertently alienated some of our field workers who couldn’t see how the goals of our lofty strategy were relevant to what they do every day. We had to rethink how we communicated the strategy – making it clearer that the goals were fundamentally about doing our core business better, not about pursuing tangents. Early quick wins helped, like acquiring a subsidiary company, now known as Barwon Asset Solutions (BAS), to deliver not only our maintenance services but also to offer these services, commercially, to other organisations. This example of “entrepreneurship” helped ground the grandiose term from our strategy into something our people could experience and see the fruits of. Within two years BAS’s turnover grew by 67 per cent and delivered savings to Barwon Water simply by challenging legacy operating models. We also realised that while our staff really got the why of our strategy, many struggled with the how. A combination of skill uplift, aligning everything we do to the strategy, and some early 1

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successes helped each of our people see that stuff can be done and, even more importantly, that “they” can each do it. After two years, over 80 per cent of our staff said they knew how they contribute to the achievement of our strategy. One of our managers described how we have collectively shifted from an unconscious sense of self-defeat to a conscious “how we might be” – and now we hustle for success. Fostering the leadership and behaviours required to create change, the in-house, wholeof-organisation leadership program is building deep and shared leadership across the organisation. Employees saw so much positive change in their managers from the program that they demanded it be delivered to all staff – after-all, they said, “we are all leaders”. To innovate, you have to build – physically and psychologically – a safe platform to jump from. Our ambitious multi-year “Beyond Zero” Safety Strategy pushes us to think beyond compliance and embed a safety mindset into everything we do. An employee “pulse check” during the first three months of Barwon Water’s response to the coronavirus pandemic (COVID19), which included having over 270 staff working from home within 10 days, found a staggering 96 per cent said they felt supported by Barwon Water. Our Customers A few years ago most of our staff did not see themselves as providing a customer service. After a lot of effort, we are now seeing a steady improvement in how our customers view us and how all our staff understand their customer role. One of the hard lessons is that even in an area of strength we can have failures. In November 2019, a survey undertaken by the sector’s regulator listed Barwon Water as the most trusted water corporation in Victoria.1 A few months later, we had made a couple of missteps in our handling of some issues and the trust rating fell – to a level still higher than our past average score, but a setback, nonetheless. It showed us that continued vigilance is required in managing customer relationships right across the business. Another learning is that customers should not have to pay more for innovation. We have set stretch targets for internal savings so that we continue to have one of the lowest average residential customer bills in Australia compared to similar water utilities.

Essential Services Commission, Water Customers Survey Report, November 2019

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Our Innovations Renewable Organic Network In a conversation with some of our large manufacturing customers we learned that one of their biggest challenges was the rising and fluctuating cost of energy and security of waste disposal. At the same time, we were examining generating renewable energy at a nearby wastewater treatment plant, but we were unable to get the numbers to stack up with current processes and volumes. In partnership with these manufacturing businesses we turned our sewage model on its head. Whereas they had been paying to treat their waste before disposing it to our sewage, they now deliver their high-strength organic waste, untreated, directly to our sewer. Barwon Water converts this organic trade waste to renewable dispatchable energy to run our treatment plant and return renewable energy – in the form of hot water – to the manufacturing business to substitute for their gas/water heating costs. The model, called the Renewable Organic Network, has many benefits: creating a circular economy, generating a positive brand for the businesses’ products, creating jobs and driving economic growth in a way that is revenuepositive for all partners. We faced significant hurdles before arriving at this model. Initially, it needed a $50 million subsidy to be viable – funding that was not to be found. So we had to rework and rescale it many times over until we found a way to make it commercially feasible. We are now developing a similar model for the broader Geelong region. One Planet Living We have thought differently about deriving value from assets that are no longer needed. For example, instead of selling a 5ha vacant landholding in Torquay, the site of an unused water-storage basin, we are transforming it into a 52-lot sustainable housing development. The 7.5-star One Planet Living development aims to showcase the commercial viability of leading-edge sustainable development. Households will have solar and battery storage and electric car charging points. In combination with a 250kW solar array built next door, the estate will generate more than 90 per cent of the energy it consumes. The estate incorporates best practice water management, with permeable driveways, native

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vegetated swales, rainwater harvesting, smart water meters and a raingarden that doubles as nature play space. We have worked with the land’s traditional owners, the Wadawurrung, to incorporate street names and wayfinding information that explains the traditional use of the native plants incorporated in streetscapes. Houses will also be designed for accessibility for the aged, people living with a disability or pushing a pram. Wadawurrung land While over past years we worked with Traditional Owners largely for compliance reasons, we now view our relationship with them as one of partnership and learning. We have transferred a 54ha parcel of land near Ballan to the Wadawurrung traditional owners. The site will support a range of cultural activities, including allowing for the repatriation of ancestral remains on Wadawurrung Country. The land is the only land they now “own” in our region. We are also working with the Wadawurrung to create a place for cultural and community enjoyment on 66ha of land on the banks of the Barwon River in Geelong. In partnership with the Wadawurrung, we hope to establish a cultural and community precinct on this site named Porronggitj Karrong (place of the Brolga), which will be an opportunity to investigate, rediscover, trial, rehabilitate and introduce traditional land and water management practices. Water for Our Future As a water utility, we see planning for future water security as core business. In the past, we would have undertaken a desktop exercise utilising the great knowledge and technical experience of our employees. We would have defended our decisions in the face of criticism. With a hotter and drier climate, it’s time to think differently about how we use water and where it comes from. Our Water for Our Future program aims to codesign our water future with our community, and that starts with listening and learning from them about what they value about water. They are leading the thinking on innovations that will better protect the rivers and environment of traditional water sources. Where to next? These small examples of doing our work

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differently and better motivate us. We are also grateful for the community water providers– many others are innovating and being “more than a utility”. We are learning significantly from them and from our own achievements and mistakes. Here are some of the key principles we have learned so far: • Have a cohesive sense of purpose, not about what you do but why you do it. Have this sense of purpose leverage from, but go further than, your traditional remit. • Strive to be more than just great at your business. Lean in to see how to do business in a way that makes the world better too. • There must be alignment in your authorising environment. We were fortunate to have enabling government-policy settings and a board that demanded we aspire and urged us on at any sign of complacency. • There will always be those who see and/or say that what you are doing is not necessary (too risky, not our job, not enough resources). Listen, but don’t be dissuaded. • Focus on safety, risk and compliance as a means to innovation, not a constraint. • Start any innovation journey with openended questions that have no bearing on the innovation itself. For example, don’t start by asking people about what solutions they like but about what they value and what problems concern them. This will help generate possibilities not previously considered. • Never see a setback as a problem but an opportunity to think differently and rebuild. Don’t give up. The final solution will be better because the previous version was reworked – sometimes completely reworked. • Support staff as people first and only then as leaders and achievers. • Invite and encourage shared leadership from all your staff, customers and

community – the answers usually lie among them. • Be clear on the prescribed behaviours and culture, but allow people the space to translate these in ways that are authentic to them. • Australia’s Traditional Owners understand this land and water better than anyone. Listen and learn with them. We are not aiming to be perfect. What we do strive for is to be both good and great. Good in our commitment to safety, ethics, integrity, care, fairness, risk management and in being open and transparent both about what we do well and where we have failed. Great in “having a crack” and being prepared to fail (even mocked) and get up in the morning and try again. The opportunity presents to be part of a broader revolution – where technology and human optimism see us rectify, redirect and rebuild a better world, one organisation at a time.

Tracey Slatter is the managing director for Barwon Water, Victoria’s largest regional urban water corporation. Prior to that, her roles included CEO at the City of Port Phillip, head of Claims at the Transport Accident Commission, and CEO at Colac Otway Shire.

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CRITICAL MATERIALS, CRITICAL INDUSTRY Following the mining investment boom, the sector is now undergoing a productivity boom, though its true value is yet to be fully captured downstream.

ithium. Titanium. Rutile. Tungsten. Critical materials to keep the economy running, and Australian companies manufacturing. Iron. Coal. Gold. Copper. Aluminium. All are needed to build new renewable energy generating capacity in Australia. As the technology and storage capability of batteries improve, there will be a greater demand for the materials to build more and more of them. In Australia, the mining industry has an operational workforce of 240,000 people. When you consider the full value chain, including mining equipment and servicing, one in 10 Australians is employed in the sector, or aligned to the mining sector. Following the mining boom of the 2000s, and the vast investments that came with it, mining is now undergoing a productivity boom, with some of the most advanced projects in the world being built in Australia. Consider the Kudaideri Iron Ore project, run by Rio Tinto: the iron ore laboratory will be the safest, most productive, highest quality iron ore facility in the world once Scott Automation has completed the build in 2021. Robotics, data analysis, and automation are set to make mining safer, more productive, and more efficient, ensuring Australia is at the forefront of the world. Importantly, we are gaining the ability to make process efficiencies in real-time, with operations run from remote centres, receiving the data and making decisions as to what happens next. How will mining continue to innovate, with productivity gains that make investment in Australia

the obvious choice? There is a recognition that with increased adoption of technology, there is a better focus on how you can work in teams that do not share a physical location. Problem solving, change management, and project management are being integrated into the science and engineering disciplines on site. The new roles within the industry are exciting and vibrant. While mining has a predominantly male workforce, 12–18% are female. There is opportunity for STEM-focused roles for graduates, which is critically important for students in an ever-tightening STEM job market. Importantly, innovation in the sector has improved worker safety. There are unique mental health, health, and safety issues that come from working in mines. We try to counter the sense of isolation from family that comes with a FIFO role with the Mates in Mining program, which provides suicide prevention, intervention skills and suicide awareness to the industry. What Australia needs to do now is capture more of the value chain of its materials. The country has lost the capability to do downstream processing, with aluminium the one exception. Thankfully, new projects including a lithium processing plant in WA are set to reverse this trend. Australia has some of the world's richest reserves of lithium, which is used in battery technology that backs up solar and wind generation. It will create new jobs, and new potential manufacturing industries, in Australia.

By Dr. Gavin Lind

Gavin Lind is the general manager, Workforce + Innovation, Minerals Council of Australia.

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AUSTRALIA: A HYDROGEN LEADER Though the path ahead is littered with obstacles, Australia has an opportunity to alchemise hydrogen’s flexibility as an energy vector into cleaner living and export gold. By Kate Vidgen

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s the world tackles the challenge of decarbonisation, Australia is uniquely placed to become a global clean-energy leader. With an abundance of natural resources such as wind and sunshine, Australia already has a mature investment market for core forms of renewable energy. Then there are technologies, such as green hydrogen, which by international standards are emerging. Australia, with its heritage in mining and other industries, proximity to off-takers in South Korea and Japan, and the aforementioned abundance of wind and solar energy, is perhaps uniquely placed to develop a comparative advantage that can support domestic and export hydrogen markets. The Australian Government has recognised this opportunity, with a national strategy that envisages becoming a top three exporter to Asian markets, just as Australia has been for decades in other forms of energy. Hydrogen’s flexibility as an energy vector is key. It can be a source of transport fuel, particularly for point-to-point vehicles such as heavy haulage, rail and bus fleets. In the longer term, hydrogen is also likely to be a key input into aviation and shipping fuels, sectors that are recognised as hard to abate. It can also be used to generate heat, delivered through existing gas networks, and as a chemical feedstock. Crucially, hydrogen technologies, including electrolysers and stationary fuel cell applications, can also potentially contribute to grid stability by participating in demand response and ancillary services markets.

As the most abundant element on Earth, hydrogen is in ready supply, which prompts the question of why the green-hydrogen industry remains nascent. Hydrogen is already used in industrial processes, but the method of extraction is carbon-intensive: 70 million tonnes of hydrogen production each year generates the equivalent of 830 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. Green hydrogen is produced by splitting hydrogen from water, using a renewable energy-powered electrolyser in a potentially zero-emissions process. Though electrolysers are scalable, there are a number of fundamental challenges impeding large-scale investment. Governments and corporates around the world are focused on progressing opportunities. Australia’s National Hydrogen Strategy projects meaningful, exponential growth in demand for hydrogen from about 2035. For now, that leaves a 15-year period of potentially limited demand, which is why it is currently challenging for equity investors and financiers to adopt a "build it and they will come"approach. New markets generally require some form of support to create momentum. For hydrogen, that means government participation through offtake agreements or other forms of underwriting. Given there are at least seven industrialised nations with hydrogen strategies, it is a competitive landscape. There is, however, a successful Australian precedent to reference: government support underpinned the development of Western Australia’s LNG market

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(notably the North West Shelf) via domestic demand, providing confidence in the formative stages as the export market developed over time. The nature of the offtakes is also a potential challenge. In new industries, infrastructure is generally underwritten by long-term offtakes to enable amortisation of infrastructure capital – initially, 20 years, in the case of LNG, before a more mature market formed. Hydrogen is different, and how it is being used has an impact. For example, vehicle fleets typically have a relatively short life of seven to 10 years, which leads to significant residual value risk. Governments may be able to play a role in bridging different investment horizons between supply and demand. Finally, there are perception issues about the ability to use hydrogen safely. While hydrogen has been used in various applications for more than a century, it is perceived to carry safety risks given its wide flammability range and low ignition temperature. Some very positive work has been done in Australia and globally on risk management and standards, but it will be important for specialist expertise and training for newer applications to be developed in conjunction with any rapid scale-up of the industry. These challenges will require public and private sectors to work together to evolve this nascent industry into a more mature one. And while the challenges are fundamental, many countries are undeterred and investor confidence in the long-term opportunity is shaped by the global trend to decarbonisation, accelerated by the need for activity to drive a postCOVID-19 economic recovery. Clean technologies, including hydrogen, are a cornerstone of post-pandemic economic recovery in many countries, with "Build Back Better" a commonly used tagline. In 2020, the European Union set objectives to instal 6GW of electrolyser capacity from 2020–2024 and at least 40GW from 2025–2030. In contrast, IEA statistics indicate only 68MW of new capacity has been installed between 2014 and 2019. COVID-19 has also prompted many countries

to review their approaches to sovereign capabilities, including energy security and independence. For Australia, domestically produced hydrogen can play a role in crucial industries such as mining, forestry and agriculture by displacing imported diesel. This would have the added benefit of decarbonisation of supply chains for our existing exports, something that buyers of Australian products will increasingly scrutinise. While Australia has an existing tradeable market for carbon credits, it is recognised that a significantly larger carbon offset/credit market will be required to drive deep decarbonisation targets. Hydrogen has the potential to generate significant carbon offsets as the focus on reducing carbon intensity across all sectors drives an accelerating market. For Australia, green hydrogen hubs may be the key to leveraging existing strengths to realise leadership potential in the nearer term. Utilising domestic demand to create expertise and scale could be the foundation for future export capability. Australia’s heavy industries are already supported by extensive infrastructure that can be further developed to support green hydrogen production and use. An example is the Australian Renewable Energy Hub (AREH). Strategically located in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, once developed it is expected to have a total capacity of 26GW from onsite wind and solar to produce green hydrogen and green ammonia, as well as supply low-cost renewable energy to support Pilbara mining and mineral processing operations. The project has the potential to catalyse transformational development across the Pilbara by lowering energy costs and greening supply chains. While AREH is expected to become operational in 2027, it can provide a model for other hub projects that could come online sooner.

Kate Vidgen is an executive director at Macquarie Group, the global head of Oil and Gas Principal for Macquarie Capital.

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REVOLUTIONISING RIVER MANAGEMENT The world sees Australia as a leader in water management, with the iconic Murray-Darling Basin a standout example of its prowess. By Nick Schofield

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ustralia is recognised as a leading water-policy innovator and sophisticated river-basin manager. We are best known for our management of the iconic Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), which covers one seventh of the Australian continent, is home to two million people, is the centre of our irrigation industries and supports over 30,000 wetlands, sixteen declared internationally important under the Ramsar Convention. The Basin covers five jurisdictions (four states and one territory), with the Australian Government playing an important role through its responsibilities defined in the Water Act 2008. Hence, the MDB is also an exemplar in inter-jurisdictional water management. Over many decades the ecological health of the MDB declined due to over-allocation of water resources, pollution arising from land conversion for agriculture and urban development, and climate change altering rainfall patterns and enhancing extreme weather events. The ecological decline has been seen in increasing river salinisation and sedimentation, algal blooms (the world’s longest being recorded in 1991-2), loss of riparian vegetation, including river redgums, declining

biodiversity and increased closure of the mouth of the Murray River. The key innovation steps in addressing the simultaneous issues of ecological decline, increasing competition for scarce water resources and emerging climate change were: capping consumptive water use (1995) and later setting a basin-wide Sustainable Diversion Limit (SDL) (2012); establishing a water market to facilitate water trading (1990s on); designing a Basin Plan for integrated water management, including environmental watering (2012); reduction of consumptive water entitlements (2012); and implementation of sub-basin water resource plans (2019 on). As an aside, Australia has been successful in managing river salinisation through building 18 salt interception schemes. The central plank to this major river basin innovation was building a ‘cap and trade’ system that is unique globally. The 1995 cap to surface water diversions was a critical first step to preventing further over-allocation. Setting up a water market then allowed the trading of water among users in the Basin, with the market setting the price of water at any given time. The key objective of

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State of Our Innovation Nation the cap was to retain sufficient water in the river for its environmental needs. The key objectives of the market were to facilitate the migration of consumptive water to higher value uses and to build resilience during drought by allowing entitlement owners to sell precious allocated water into the market for others to use, while retaining an income from selling water. The 1995 cap on surface water use was found in subsequent studies to be insufficient for two reasons: first, the amount left over for environmental water use was insufficient to maintain a healthy river system; and second, increased groundwater use was being substituted for the loss of access to additional surface water. The next round of innovation sought to address these problems, firstly by scientifically determining how much water is needed to maintain a healthy aquatic environment in the MDB. This led to the concept of quantifying the SDL – the total amount of water that could, over a given period of time, be sustainably extracted for consumptive purposes. The SDL, when calculated, was below the 1995 Basin Cap, which then required a permanent reduction in water allocations to water entitlement holders to meet the new SDL. The second step was to treat surface and groundwater as one water resource, which in practice meant setting SDLs for both surface water and groundwater independently but in a way that could be aggregated. While one overall SDL was set for the Basin, each surface water sub-catchment and each groundwater unit had their individual SDLs scientifically determined. These results were published in the comprehensive Basin Plan in 2012, which required each sub-catchment to develop its own water resource plan that demonstrated adjustments to their local SDLs by 2019. To help irrigators adapt to lower water entitlements, the Australian Government provided funds to improve the water efficiency of the irrigation sector. This included upgrading systems of delivering water to farms, such as lining canals, using piped water where cost-effective and expanding telemetry control systems. There was also funding provided to irrigators willing to upgrade their on-farm water application, on the basis that a proportion of the water savings would be made available to the environment, while the remainder of

the savings could be used to expand the irrigation enterprise. This irrigation modernisation process has put Australia at the forefront of efficient irrigation practices, which are now being adopted in countries like Vietnam with AWP support. Through this innovation period, Basin water users have modified their behaviours significantly. Driven by water-market dynamics, there has been a significant move to higher value uses of water. For example, the almond industry has grown substantially. The water market has also increased resilience in the irrigation industry, with production revenue not falling during severe droughts by nearly as much as would have been the case without a market mechanism, and most irrigators remaining in business despite not always farming. To enable the wise use of releasing more water for the environment, the Australian Government established the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder (CEWH), which has the responsibility of managing the environmental water gained through lowering the cap to the Basin SDL. In practice, the CEWH has created its water holding through purchasing water directly in the water market with government funds, and through the accession of water savings made by irrigators who utilise government funds to improve their on-farm water-use efficiency by deploying more efficient technologies. Through well-organised stakeholder consultation processes, the CEWH delivers environmental water to maximise ecological outcomes across the Basin. It is fair to say that this Australian innovation in the MDB, using a scientific underpinning and market-based instruments, has not pleased everyone. In any major policy adjustment, there will always be winners and losers, and trade-offs have to be made. Some stakeholder groups have felt under-represented. Others point to the relatively small gains made to the environment. Water theft and extreme drought have caused issues. Implementation through the MurrayDarling Basin Authority, and individual jurisdictions, has, however, attempted to balance social, environmental and economic outcomes. As with any innovation, listening, learning and adapting is an ongoing means to future refinements and improvements.

Nick Schofield is the Chief Executive of the Australian Water Partnership, with over 35 years’ experience in the water and natural resource management sector.

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KNOWLEDGE IS POWER THE STEM WORKFORCE OF THE FUTURE Kylie Walker UNIVERSITIES: THE FOUNDATION FOR FUTURE INDUSTRIES Dr Michael Molinari STEM LEARNING MUST BE EMBRACED BEYOND CLASSROOMS Graham Durant WE’RE READY Luke Sheehy MISUNDERSTANDING VOCATIONAL EDUCATION DIMINISHES INNOVATION EFFORT Craig Robertson PROBLEM-SOLVING FIRST Rufus Black INTERVENTION NEEDED TO STEM BRAIN DRAIN Sumeet Walia RESOURCING COMMUNITIES Corey Tutt UNIVERSITIES, GOVERNMENT MUST COMBINE TO CLIMB THE RANKS OF INNOVATION Professor John Dewar AO EDUCATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY Ian H. Frazer AC YOUNG SCIENTISTS GET TO SHINE Elizabeth Gracie THE POWER OF PLAY Claus Kristensen 350

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THE STEM WORKFORCE OF THE FUTURE We must equip young people with the skills to become the innovation leaders of tomorrow and empower them to thrive in our technology-led society. By Kylie Walker

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s our species faces the triple crises of health, economy and climate, innovation in science and technology is more essential than ever to building resilience, sustainability and prosperity. Australia’s leaders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are at the forefront of the race to find innovative responses to these unprecedented challenges. These efforts are exemplified in the contributions of Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE) fellows and awardees. ATSE’s 2020 Innovation Excellence Awards highlighted the extraordinary contributions of recipients such as Dr Alison Todd and Dr Elisa Mokany, who have created molecular lego for personalised medical diagnosis while founding a successful company – SpeeDx – to roll out the technology. Or the University of Melbourne’s Dr Gang (Kevin) Li, who has developed a new technique to capture greenhouse gases and thereby reduce emissions from coal mines and natural gas production. If we do not consciously foster our nation’s human capital and infrastructure to support science and technology, the capacity of this precious resource to generate solutions will diminish. We must place the creation and application of new knowledge at the centre of a strategy to build and maintain Australia’s social, economic and environmental resilience. So how do we build this future resource? What kinds of skills do we need? In 2015, the Australian Council of Learned Academies was asked to consider technologies

that were most promising for Australia to pursue, as part of a series of reports around the theme of securing Australia’s future. What emerged went far beyond this brief. The team produced a report that for the first time provided a way of thinking about how Australia’s future is intimately entwined with technology. It shows that government, industry and business all require a creative, flexible and technologically skilled workforce to adopt, adapt and create new technologies. It shows that without new technologies, the societal, economic and environmental fruits of research cannot be realised. These ideas were reinforced by the Australia 2030 report by Innovation and Science Australia in 2017, which predicted that by 2030 jobs in Australia will require a greater mix of interpersonal, creative, problem-solving, entrepreneurial and digital skills. ATSE and the Australian Academy of Science joined forces in 2019 to create Preparing for Australia’s Digital Future, a roadmap for the country as well as a call to action. Its clear message is that in order to future-proof Australia’s workforce and respond to the changing nature of work driven by technological disruption, our education system must deliver the right mix of skills. The roadmap complements ATSE’s ongoing work to scope out the infrastructure, research and skills development required to put Australia at the forefront of technologically advanced transportation, health and waste management systems.

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There is work to be done. The Australian Chief Scientist’s 2020 STEM skills report showed some progress in the 10 years to 2016 towards growing a more diverse and inclusive STEM workforce, in which people from all walks of life, generations and genders are supported to tackle big issues creatively. But there are still far more men than women in Australian science, technology and engineering, across all sectors and at all levels. And there is now a higher rate of unemployment among young people with a STEM qualification than those aged 30 and above.

Australia is bracing for an estimated 21,000 full-time equivalent job losses in the university sector This news comes at a time when Australia is bracing for an estimated 21,000 full-time equivalent job losses in the university sector as a result of financial stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Alarmingly, early data consistently show that women in STEM are being, and will continue to be, disproportionately affected, putting at risk hard-won gains and threatening the diversity – and therefore the creativity and flexibility – of Australia’s STEM-qualified workforce. Business investment in research is also at risk, and this is likely to accelerate a trend – already identified by Australia’s Innovation System Monitor – that will lead to a decline in innovation, research and development capacity. As a nation, we must confront these challenges head-on: • With state and federal policy that supports education in clever technology, science, maths and engineering education from entry to Year 12, including through specialist programs such as ATSE’s Science and Technology Education Leveraging Relevance (STELR), which skills up secondary students throughout Australia in the real-world application of technology and engineering with the

goal of addressing wicked problems like climate change. • With policy that incentivises people to study STEM subjects at university, and a mechanism to enable skills and build networks in business and communication so as to prepare STEM graduates to take their important research, thinking and technological skills into the broader workforce. This could be through, for example, ATSE’s work aimed at developing the skills STEM graduates need to drive a powerful innovation culture through our Industry Mentoring Network in STEM (IMNIS) program, and through targeted and sophisticated industry internship pathways. • With tax and other mechanisms to incentivise collaboration and cross-fertilisation between the tertiary sector and Australian businesses. • With stable government and private investment in critical and major research infrastructure and agencies. This is the time to build the workforce and infrastructure for Australia’s big missions – our modern moonshots. Just as, in times of war, governments choose to shovel investment into scientific research and technological development, this unprecedented period of economic/societal/ population-health shock ought to act as a clarion call to decision-makers to take bold and visionary steps towards securing Australia’s future. Amid the upheaval of the pandemic, opportunity is arising to invest now in the intellectual goldmines of the next decade and beyond. Creating safe pathways to re-skilling in STEM; offering bridging mechanisms to keep talented researchers doing what they do best; incentivising private-sector investment in collaborative research . . . these are the approaches that could yield profound and lasting results – and not just for individual companies, universities or people, but for the nation. Imagine a future in which Australia is prosperous, skilled and flexible enough not just to respond to major challenges as they arise, but to anticipate and forestall them. Imagine a future in which Australia celebrates and supports inclusive, imaginative and exciting innovation.

Kylie Walker is the CEO of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering.

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UNIVERSITIES: THE FOUNDATION FOR FUTURE INDUSTRIES Only by aligning research, investors, and university funding will Australia be able to follow the successes of the UK and US in commercialising breakthroughs from our strong research sector. By Dr Michael Molinari

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he world is changing, perhaps faster than it ever has before. And yet the pace of change today is the slowest it will be in our lifetimes. Technology is the overwhelming driver of this change. Speaking about the 21st century, Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, has said that “technology is going to revolutionise almost every sector . . . Economic and political power will be determined less by a country’s size than by its technological superiority”. Though these words were not spoken with Australia in mind, they are certainly apt. We have long relied on the spoils of our large and sparsely populated landmass to sustain our major export industries of mining and agriculture, and to support economic growth through migration. In a changing world, Australia will not be able to maintain the prosperity of the last 50 years without improving our capabilities in technology and innovation, and in so doing lay the foundations for the future industries that will drive job creation and economic growth over the medium-to-long term. Australia’s world-leading university sector must be central to these efforts. In the debate over international student numbers and government funding, it’s easy to forget that Australia’s universities do more than train graduates and generate export dollars. They are home to world-leading researchers who play a fundamental role in creating the nation’s new technologies

and the intellectual property that will underpin our future successful companies – the next Cochlear or ResMed. More than $10bn is invested into both pure and applied research at Australian universities every year. This investment has built globally competitive institutions and world-leading research capabilities. Only the US and UK had more academic institutions in the top 100 in the recent QS rankings. This investment should have sponsored a thriving deep-technology ecosystem. Yet we have not managed to replicate the successes of the US and the UK in bringing new technology from the university bench to commercial success at scale. Why not? It is easy to blame funding. More money would help, yes, but there are also tough reforms needed to drive change. The issue is not in pinpointing what the technologies are – pick up any recent innovation report. We know they will be in clean energy and green manufacturing, AI and quantum computing, electroceuticals and biotechnology – all areas where Australia has strong research capabilities. Nor is it in a shortage of inquiries into our innovation system. We have received well- considered and practical recommendations from numerous officially commissioned reports, which have consistently pointed to the need to define clear priorities and adopt an integrated investment

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strategy to ensure that Australia remains globally competitive. Yet, too often, implementation has been piecemeal as vested interests have resisted wholesale change. A national innovation system needs to be integrated all the way from mechanisms for government funding of research at the front end, through to the attraction of growth capital for new technology companies. As funds become scarcer, they must be better directed. The current crisis arising from the COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to get it right. The following three actions can help to optimise the return that we get from our investment in the university sector: 1. We must better align the mechanisms of university funding with likely successful outcomes. We should be unafraid to prioritise investment into areas aligned with national priorities and to reward commercial as well as academic success. This includes funding translational research to ensure that the results of pure science work are accessible to industry partners. 2. We would do well to enhance the incentives for individual researchers to look beyond the university and engage with industry partners. Contributing to new spinout companies should be viewed as an important part of the role of the

academic and recognised through financial reward and opportunities for career advancement. 3. We must continue pursuing closer links between universities and experienced investors willing to fund early-stage spinout companies. There is a clear opportunity for government to assist further with appropriate and cost-effective changes to the taxation and regulatory regimes for early investment vehicles. For a good example of what is possible, we can look to the UK. It has created a thriving deep-tech ecosystem through measures including the creation of UK Research and Innovation and Innovate UK to align research and innovation priorities, tax incentives to attract new capital to the sector through the Enterprise Investment Scheme, and the creation of British Patient Capital to provide funding support for the venture industry. As a result, in 2019 the UK saw £1.24bn (A$2.4bn) invested in 334 university spinout companies and the emergence of a growing number of deep-tech unicorns. In contrast, it is estimated that in Australia we saw less than $100m invested across fewer than 30 companies. Building future industries takes ambition, imagination, patient investment and a concerted effort across government, industry, universities and the financial sector. We should seize this moment to do so.

Dr. Michael Molinari is the managing director at IP Group Australia, which partners with universities to help create, build and support intellectual-property based companies.

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STEM LEARNING MUST BE EMBRACED BEYOND CLASSROOMS As the director for Questacon, the National Science and Technology Centre, Graham Durant sees that STEM education needs to be approached holistically to promote lifelong learning. By Graham Durant

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hough STEM is a term well-understood among educators, the simplicity of the acronym belies the complexity within. Science exists to serve society, to make the world a better, more understandable place. Scientists generate new knowledge, and identify, measure, monitor and work towards solving problems. Technologists develop the equipment and new materials to apply science for the benefit of mankind. Engineers invent, design and build systems, structures and machines to meet functional objectives. Mathematicians study the quantity, structure and patterns of space and change. Together these professions are lumped together as STEM disciplines – and STEM education is very much in the spotlight at the moment. When one tosses computing, cyber-science, medicine, art and design into the mix, one has a broader scope than that of STEM alone: STEM-plus. The development of STEM-plus skills is vital for the workforce of the future. An understanding of STEM disciplines is important for developing functional literacy in citizens who need to discriminate between science and the non-science/nonsense that pervades our world today. A thoughtful understanding of the STEM disciplines enables citizens to make rational decisions about what medicines to use, what products to buy, what issues to support, what ecosystems to protect and even what politicians to vote for. A broad understanding of science and engineering makes the natural and built worlds more

wonderful and enjoyable for everyone throughout their daily lives as they are able to experience things with a different insight. Education systems have the challenge of developing a functional understanding of the disciplines that make up STEM-plus. They have to support the development of a supply chain of future scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians, as well as the IT experts, health professionals and the rest, all of whom need creativity and imagination, as well as skills in collaboration and communication to complement their subject knowledge. Teachers have the difficult challenge of preparing students to pass exams as well as inspiring them to embark on a long learning journey towards mastery of a discipline. Since every learner is an individual with different aptitudes, abilities, potential and opportunities, this is a difficult task. Teachers, families, friends and even chance encounters influence and support each individual’s learning journey. Since people spend only a small proportion of their lives in school, and of that time only a small proportion is spent studying the STEM disciplines, it is clear that one has to look beyond the school system to fully develop the understanding, knowledge and skills needed for our children to flourish in the future. Schools are vital and, in most cases, excellent. But in any one year, public-school students are in class for only six hours a day, five days a week, for 40 weeks a year. In the early years, for a considerable number of

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State of Our Innovation Nation students, the relatively small number of hours of instruction in science or mathematics may be provided by a teacher without a science or mathematics background. And yet these are the critical years to start building a foundation of knowledge from which a student can branch out later in life. There are many excellent schoolteachers teaching STEM disciplines, but school curricula remain crowded and contested. There is not a lot of time for students to investigate, experiment and explore. There are limited options for free-choice learning. In the rapidly changing STEM-plus disciplines there are insufficient opportunities for teachers to gain scientific or mathematical knowledge and broaden their understanding beyond that which they brought with them as they embarked on their teacher training. Deep understanding of subject matter and confidence need to sit alongside learning pedagogies. A focus on risk and safety combined with under-trained teachers, a lack of technical support and poorly equipped laboratories mean that science demonstrations are as likely to be viewed on the internet as they are to be undertaken in the classrooms. Experiments are often set up with a single objective rather than being the basis for open-ended exploration. Hands-off science is not a way to prepare students for their future. It is not a way to develop deep understanding. It is not the way to inspire. It is not the way to develop creativity and imagination. Young people need to be involved in doing science. They need to have the freedom to follow their own lines of inquiry with teachers as guides. They need time to master the disciplines step by step. It has to be acknowledged that individuals learn and are motivated in different ways. There are many students who respond very well to hands-off science. They can be inspired by ideas of science, by teachers and mentors, by role models, by the books they read and the games they play, by the issues and questions that get raised through discussion in the classroom or through various educational resources and experiences. Looking beyond the classrooms to support learners is important. As director of Questacon and a former academic, I have spent a lot of time thinking about learning. It is clear to me that we need to do much more to integrate in-school learning with out-of-school activities. Questacon was established as a hands-on

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science centre to allow open-ended engagement with, and exploration of, scientific phenomena. Encouraging students and teachers as well as creating opportunities for families to explore and learn together have always been the mission of Questacon as Australia’s National Science and Technology Centre. It operates in Canberra alongside the other national institutions creating inspirational learning experiences for young people with a focus on their future and the future of the country. It reaches out to engage rural and regional students and communities to support learning in different contexts. Questacon is just one organisation within Australia’s informal or out-of-school learning sector. It is this sector that has much to offer in support of students and teachers, and as support for life-long learning. If schools have the role of building foundational knowledge then it is the out-of-school sector that can introduce the curiosity, wonder, imagination and love of learning throughout life. The successful integration of out-of-school and in-school learning will deliver rich dividends for students, teachers and society. The out-of-school sector includes science centres, museums, botanic gardens, observatories, environmental education centres, zoos and aquaria. It includes broadcast media, the Internet, books, magazines, cinemas, theatres and festivals. It includes the educational support opportunities from industry, business and academia. It includes citizen science projects, excursions, institutional open days, various experiences in the natural world, scientists’ blogs, maker clubs, computer clubs and so much more. How do busy teachers, hard-pressed students and families find out about what is on offer? How do we best connect the myriad of outof-school institutions and opportunities to build a stronger national platform to support STEM learning? We have to find a way to encourage the exploration of the opportunities on offer by schools, teachers, students and their families, and we have to build a strong, informal learning community from a diverse and widely distributed group of institutions. Fortunately, there are positive signs of such brokerage and increasing connectivity happening in Australia. Examples include STARPortal, national and state-wide networks and the strengthening communities of practice around STEM engagement. Further sharing of evidence of what works will help transform the performance of both formal and

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informal educational sectors and help support the journey of young people and educators. Much of the focus of this thought-piece has been around the S of STEM. What about the T, E and M – technology, engineering and mathematics? Are there similar out-of-school opportunities to support learning? The answer is, of course, yes – if you know where to find them. In our busy and noisy world we do need that brokerage of need and opportunity. We must package resources better to help busy teachers and guide students towards organisations and websites rich in opportunity and inspiration. Above all, we need to connect the myriad of out-of-school opportunities with student and teacher needs. But let us not forget the adults and families. People spend most of their lives out of school. How do adults meaningfully engage with the STEM-plus disciplines once their school and university days are over? Parents and grandparents are major influencers when students are considering study and career options. The STEM-plus disciplines today are very different from those a generation ago. What programs exist to support parents to help them better help their children? Adults who may not have studied much science and mathematics at school may find themselves at a disadvantage when it comes to helping with their children’s homework or in providing advice about career directions. Families who play, learn and explore together are building stronger foundations for prolonged engagement with learning. Families who make things together are building stronger foundations for creativity, imagination and the development of the technologists and engineers of the future. An elite-level athlete will have his or her talent recognised at an early age in school or in the community. Their skills and abilities are progressively developed and supported through school competitions and local sporting clubs. Eventually they may move up to regional and national training programs. It takes many years of hard work and commitment with parental and community support to develop sporting talent. There are pathways towards excellence from an early age. Where are the equivalent pathways for young people through the STEM-plus disciplines?

How can we identify talent at an early age and encourage it at every stage through many years of learning? There are some pathway programs, but do we have enough? Do we recognise STEM talent early on and can it be effectively nurtured through schools into and beyond tertiary education and with community support? Identifying potential early may reduce barriers to inclusion and increase diversity in STEM participation as a means of unlocking the full potential of both individuals and communities, delivering far better outcomes for society in terms of innovation, productivity and excellence. Schools alone are insufficient. And although well-motivated, well-taught and well-supported students rise to the top, there are many left behind. Many potentially creative, talented and skilled students do not fit the mould of students able to pass exams. What alternative pathways can we imagine to help young people realise their full potential, to help them find their passion and help them prepare to contribute effectively in our STEM-necessary world of the future? A really important dimension lies in helping young people "find their tribes", facilitating connections with like-minded people who relate to one another while creating their own journeys through STEM in a social context. The real value of effective STEM-plus learning is not just in the supply chain for future workers, as important as that is. It is about building a smarter, more skilled and more appreciative society. It is about enriching lives and opportunities. Wellequipped schools and brilliant teachers are really important, but they are not enough. We need to build strong learning communities that connect the foundational teaching in school with the best inspirational opportunities out of school. We need interlocking pathways that scaffold, strengthen and extend the interest of individuals. We need to unlock the full potential for out-of-school and life-long learning. Then Australia will be able to forge ahead in the global race for talent. We will be developing a society that values learning through life. We will be developing a richer and more harmonious society that is confident in the application of science and occupied by citizens who can think rationally, know what evidence to value and know whom to trust.

Graham Durant is the director of Questacon, Australia’s National Science and Technology Centre, hosted in Canberra.

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WE’RE READY The Australian Technology Network of Universities (ATN) is ahead of the curve for innovation, having adapted quickly for remote learning and microcredentials, and creating industry–academia linkages.

eports of the demise of traditional universities are greatly exaggerated. Australian Technology Network (ATN) universities were ready when Dan Tehan, Australia’s Education Minister, called on universities to reskill the workforce given our current crisis. Throughout 2019, ATN’s four universities (UTS, RMIT, Curtin, and UniSA) developed 31 six-month, online short courses across seven disciplines. We did this in just a few short weeks. For us, this was core business and continued our serious body of work collaborating with industry. Also, in late June 2020, UTS announced a new collaboration with Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company. UTS will provide new micro-credential-based, retraining options for 1,000 workers to keep them in the business in new and emerging areas. In normal times, these workers may have been let go. So, when I read recently that traditional universities might go the way of Kodak or Borders bookstores, I grimaced. At ATN, a network of Australia’s big-tech universities, we are keenly aware of policy chatter. Some is helpful; some is hysterical. It is true that our technical, industry-engaged, disrupter universities like mine are unused to hearing we must innovate to survive. We are the innovators. Usually, our work prompts others in our sector to change to keep up. Before the pandemic, our economic and social structures were changing at a pace unparalleled in our lifetime. This was already happening before COVID-19 shut down our cities. There was genuine concern that our economy lacked productivity and market diversification, posing enormous challenges for policymakers and education providers.

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Yet even amid this bleakness, green shoots were clearly visible. New industries were emerging. Micro businesses and start-ups were developing new products and services. These shoots were growing rapidly. How do I know this? Because ATN universities are right there. Next to the upcoming generation of new entrepreneurs. Our campuses host huge numbers of start-ups. Our researchers and academics are working hard to mentor this next generation of industry leaders. We connect them with important players in big business who provide the necessary capital to make these businesses grow and, critically, create new jobs. ATN universities, with strong links and a culture of collaborating with the outside world, are helping to underpin this new economy. We are proud to support and nurture the next generation of business leaders. We are meeting the desperate need for skills.

By Luke Sheehy

There is no doubt our universities are being tested. However, with the right amount of energy, effort and investment from government, we will rise to the challenges ahead Edtech has seriously challenged conventional pedagogy and models of education delivery,

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particularly in the past decade. The future of education is more learner-centric, specialised and mobile. Workers want a new, shorter, technology-based option, rather than returning to campus for a two-year Master’s degree. Demand for a flexible and accessible tertiary education will become even more pronounced beyond the immediate crisis. This is because a likely outcome of the pandemic will be the accelerated integration of automation and artificial intelligence into the economy. We know this because our researchers tell us every day. As technology reshapes the very nature of work, the demand for skills will increase. And increase significantly. We know that in Australia in 2022, a foundational qualification (namely, an apprenticeship, or TAFE certificate, diploma or

since 2014. However, he considers that with the expected uptick in demand for education due to COVID-19, the emerging online, shorter courses will feature strongly.2 Public institutions will be critical in underwriting our businesses and emerging enterprises, which are presently suffering under mandated hibernation. With funding certainty (as covered by many of my colleagues and also the subject of another contribution), I am proud that progressive, business-orientated universities are driving solutions to the disruption. Much of the technology transforming how we work and live originated on university campuses. The pandemic and pre-existing disruption have revealed that universities are prime movers in our economy. Our partnerships with

higher education degree) will be a prerequisite for over 90 per cent of all jobs. Similarly, most high-paid, secure jobs will require a foundational qualification. This upskilling also applies to those already in the workforce. AlphaBeta’s recent Future Skills report1 concludes that by 2040, the average Australian will spend an additional three hours per week in education and training. Critically, AlphaBeta opines that this upskilling will complement automation and artificial intelligence. Andrew Norton, a national treasure in Australia’s higher education system, has often noted that the demand for traditional university postgraduate courses has been in decline

government and industry will help shape the future. Rather than being icons of the past, we are ready to step up even more. ATN universities, like many others, are reconceptualising how we meet the needs of future students and stakeholders. As a result, we launched ‘ATN Design Your Life’. This initiative builds on Stamford University’s micro-credential to support workers as they navigate a plan to ensure their skills stay relevant in a shifting labour market. There is no doubt our universities are being tested. However, with the right amount of energy, effort and investment from government, we will rise to the challenges ahead.

Luke Sheehy is the executive director for ATN Universities. He has previously been a senior policy adviser to the Minister for Tertiary Education and Shadow Minister for Education and Training.

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MISUNDERSTANDING VOCATIONAL EDUCATION DIMINISHES INNOVATION EFFORT Rote, competency-based learning will always be playing catch-up to the present, and desperately behind the future innovation skills Australia needs to build to drive prosperity. Craig Robertson, calls for a refocus of how training is delivered in Australia.

he near drowning on the Ohio River in 1831 of the French aristocrat and social scientist, Alexis de Tocqueville tells something about America’s success in innovation and why Australia struggles. Around midnight on November 26 his vessel struck a sand bar and sank suddenly, drowning some, although Tocqueville survived. He was on his discovery tour of the great American experiment with democracy and equality. Concerned at the shoddy shipbuilding that was a large part of the cause of deaths, he asked the ship owners why. They told him that the steady supply of new craft made it unprofitable to worry about the present. A healthy Protestant belief in a better tomorrow added to this innovation spirit and the dream of something better around the bend. This tells a story about vocational education and innovation policy in Australia. Structural deficiencies on the one hand, and on the other, back casted skills development, which is anathema to innovation. There have been chances for reset, but they have failed. The Cutler review gave the intellectual

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underpinning for education and training input to innovation. A highly-skilled workforce is essential not only for the generation and application of new knowledge, but also to use and adopt the knowledge produced elsewhere. Cutler was commissioned by the Rudd Government to examine the role of innovation as the next source of productivity surge. Industry cheered as it had been staring down extended periods of flat productivity, especially multi-factor productivity. While much was expected of the report in the important areas of human capital it deferred to COAG processes and the Bradley review of higher education for the necessary design to support innovation. The rest is history, as they say. Taming the rapid growth of university bachelor places from the demand driven funding system implemented at the behest of Bradley has focused the mind of federal governments since, and the mess in vocational education and training resulting from marketisation strategies had all governments cleaning it up. On elevation to Prime Minister, Malcolm

By Craig Robertson

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Turnbull turned to the ideas boom through the National Innovation and Science Agenda. Again, it identified talent and skills as the building block of innovation but failed to mention vocational education and training, riling many in the sector considering those functions had been in the responsible portfolio less than six months prior. At least the sector was mentioned in Australia 2030, the priorities identified by Innovation and Science Australia, the body established by Turnbull to guide the nation’s approach to innovation. In the vital area of skills and talent it said "Australia’s vocational education and training system can be made responsive to the new priorities presented by innovation." Recognition at least, but a rank disregard for the role it could play, confirmed by the Government simply noting the recommendation in its response. As insiders will know, "noting" is a signal of disinterest at best. These are opportunities lost almost entirely from misunderstanding of the basics of innovation. Much written about innovation in Australia starts with its research structures and funding, then laments the poor state of STEM education and lands on R&D tax concessions to encourage industry on the innovation journey. Australia’s annual innovation report is hardly encouraging. In 2017 it reported: Australia’s Vocational, Education and Training (VET) sector was recognised as an underused resource, with challenges identified in ensuring VET training packages remained relevant to industry needs. Innovation types

Sub-components

Product

Goods Services Knowledge capturing goods and services

Process

Production Distribution ICT

Organisational

Administration Management

Marketing

Marketing Sales Support

Table 3.2 OECD OSLO Manual 2018 3

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Innovation is far more than the linear journey starting with science. Helinä Melkas and Vesa Harmaakorpi, in their book Practice-Based Innovation: Insights, Applications and Policy Implications - offer other forms of economic order and origins of innovation. The focus on science and clusters as the source of innovation clouds the potential for practice-based innovation. They work from a practice-based approach to innovation operating at the interaction between the two sub-systems of innovation – acquisition and assimilation of knowledge and transformation and exploitation of knowledge. Lundvall uses the term practice-based innovation policy, or DUI – doing, using, interacting – as the other end of the continuum to science and technology-based innovation, or STI. While this field of enquiry is young, intuitively it rings true and is validated by the OECD view on innovation. The OECD’s OSLO Manual for measuring innovation takes a DUI position in describing four types of innovation within the firm. These components are the natural home of vocational education; however, structural failure holds it back. The purpose of VET in Australia is described variously, but inevitably comes down in most public pronouncements to preparing people for work. The Government’s response to Australia 2030 tells the story – the VET sector has a critical role to play by assisting Australians to acquire new skills, enabling them to respond as the jobs market evolves throughout their working lives. The sector’s focus on competency outcomes is the limiting factor. The competency model has been in place for over 30 years in Australia and has its roots in a behaviourist approach to education. Outcomes are defined by occupation by industry and assessed as demonstrated tasks. They can only describe known tasks within current technologies and business and production models.. As qualifications take time to be develop and agreed for national application through elaborate centralised structures the tasks are often out of date. The outcomes-based education is defended as the source of flexibility – training design can respond to the needs of the client. This collapses in the wake of diminishing public funding within a contestable market. It is all too easy for providers to aim for the ‘outcome’ and cut delivery corners. Inputs central to quality, such as curriculum and teaching, are often sacrificed.

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Ultimately, the collateral damage is knowledge and knowledge transfer. VET qualifications simply list knowledge "as unproblematised concepts that have been decontextualised from disciplinary systems of meaning" according to Leesa Wheelahan, a long-term critic of the competency model in Australia. Qualification and curriculum policies are structural elements of the sector and should be seen as major levers for transforming vocational education. Intransigencies and the misunderstanding of the role it should be playing in innovation, are holding back Australia. DUI brings experts from all fields together at the firm level in joint problem-solving. The skilled practitioners equipped by the VET sector play just as important a role as the scientist and the manager. Australian has benefited from good vocational education to date, but it’s at risk of redundancy in an innovation rich and digitally driven world. Even on the cusp of economic rebound from COVID the sector is identified as a key lever for recovery, but there’s no focus on the nature and purpose of the vocational education effort. The attitude towards vocational education needs changing, as does its qualifications, if it is to deliver on innovation through transformation and exploitation of knowledge. The last word is best left with Cutler. The other great cultural divide is between the realm of the conceptual, the intellectual, and the artisan and craftsman. The role of crafts and trades in innovation has been massively neglected, particularly in the important areas of continuing incremental innovation in the workplace. Often major breakthroughs come from seemingly little ideas or insights arising from hands-on engagement, and from learning by doing. There is a tendency to forget that much of the scientific progress since the Renaissance has depended on the innovative development of new tools and instrumentation. We can only hope that public policy will reflects this input and government, industry and the sector itself transforms structures and

attitudes to enliven a spirit of innovation in Australia much like Tocqueville observed all those years ago in America.

Craig Robertson is the CEO of Tafe Directors Australia, a position he has held since April 2017. Before this tenure he worked for over 30 years within the Australian Government numerous positions with responsibilities in national policy and program delivery relating to vocational training and employment services.

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PROBLEM-SOLVING FIRST Teaching and embracing design thinking will benefit Australia’s innovation output, by equipping students with the tools they need to solve problems.

By Rufus Black

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igher education has a pivotal role to play when it comes to increasing Australia’s innovation rate. And if we’re to play it well, then there are some new skills we need to develop in our students and certain dangerous false dichotomies we need to avoid. The core new capability we need to develop is an outstanding competency in problem-solving. Now, most areas of a university will tell you they teach problem-solving. And they do – of a particular kind usually specific to their discipline. What I am talking about is a general capability to, one, recognise a problem; two, see an opportunity to improve how we do things; and three, generate and deliver solutions in a disciplined way. There is a range of approaches to this kind of solution generation, but probably the one with the greatest traction in the academy today is Design Thinking (DT). DT is a kind of thinking that emerged at the interface of universities, industry and, more recently, the social sector. That is partly what makes it powerful. It has very broad application and can be learnt by anyone regardless of their academic discipline. It has been used well in schools and other settings. It is a democratic bridge to the often esoteric world of innovation. Just looking at the five stages of its process offers important insights into a higher-education approach to innovation. DT starts with a phase called "Empathise". It is a deep engagement in the full human, social, environmental and technical context of the problem or opportunity. From the start, it values multiple kinds of knowledge and perspectives as fundamental to the innovation process. The second stage is to "Define" the problem from the users’ perspectives. In higher education we are very often supply-driven in our approach to innovation. We can tend to focus on what it is we can offer rather than on delivering what others really need. Sometimes we are answering questions no one is really asking. This stage

stops that from happening. An element in this stage that needs particular attention is ‘value identification’ – asking, “What is solving this problem worth to someone who is in a position to pay for the innovation?” It is often a matter of first identifying who that person or entity could theoretically be. It could be a consumer or company, but, equally, it could be government or a welfare agency looking for better social, health, educational or environmental outcomes for their investment. It is a critical part of the process because otherwise we spend a lot

of time finding a solution that is destined to fail, not because it’s a bad idea but because within real-world constraints no one will invest in it. Talking about money in this way can be seen in some university settings as morally compromising the nature of academic inquiry. That idea needs to be challenged. Rather, it should be seen as what it is: a way of understanding whether someone will commit the resources to solve the

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problem in the way you are imagining. Often, we don’t have to stop solving the problem; we just need to change the "how" to meet that resource constraint. Doing so often drives more innovative solutions. Next, DT moves to "Ideate" and then "Prototype", before "Test". The premium is not on working to a final answer in the lab or the library, but on creating a workable first solution and making all the gains of learning by doing. When we accomplish this in a university setting the educational gains of that sort of learning far outstrip what we learn from PowerPoints in lecture theatres. If as many students as possible were to acquire the skills to run this sort of process – if we treated innovation literacy just as we have language and maths literacy – it would have a huge, broad-based impact. Embracing that sort of process also sounds a warning about dangerous anti-innovation false dichotomies that are afoot in many places and which risk undermining an innovation

agenda. The first dangerous false dichotomy we need to avoid is between STEM fields being drivers of innovation and humanities and social sciences being largely irrelevant. When your innovation

process starts with the very human task of empathising and clearly requires social and environmental perspectives, you can’t divide the world that way. There should be no surprise in that, since a vast section of the innovation frontier concerns solving problems in which humans are integral. In the start-up tech sector of today you will readily find founders warning of the dangers of this divide as they seek out anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists to help them to better understand and meet people’s needs, and to make sure the technology adapts to the way people work and think rather than the other way around. Related to this danger is higher education underinvesting in design skills – the skills that sit at this intersection of the technical and the human. Often, they are framed too narrowly as an aesthetic capability when, in reality, the aesthetic is a revelation of the elegance of a human solution to a technical challenge. The second dangerous dichotomy is between the theoretical and the applied. In the rush to relevance we can over-focus on questions of application and leave insufficiently attended the deep engine of innovation – the new and fundamental insights into people and the natural world. The real art is not to flip-flop between the two but to focus on how we get a healthy innovation ecology that connects them up. When we look to develop that sort of innovation ecology, we often find there are disciplines missing or undervalued that would enable those connections between fundamental and applied insights. The third false dichotomy is between the disciplinary and inter-disciplinary. Working on the technical and knowledge frontier requires everdeeper specialist knowledge – and we need to nurture that profound expertise. Nevertheless, unless we can bring that deep expertise into contact with the insights of other disciplines, the value of what we discover may never be realised. It is here that good innovation processes bridge the divide. They help create a way for people with cross-disciplinary expertise to collaborate on solving a problem that matters to them all. That is powerful and valuable interdisciplinary work.

Rufus Black is the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Tasmania.

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INTERVENTION NEEDED TO STEM BRAIN-DRAIN With some 60 per cent of research work undertaken by early-mid career researchers (EMCRs), a cohort that faces disproportionate job insecurity, Australia needs to provide longer-term funding, with support provided from both universities and government to retain talented minds. By Sumeet Walia

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ustained innovation is the single key ingredient that will ensure our progress and evolution as a society. A country with Australia’s demographics cannot get by on imported innovation but rather has to build capacity onshore. And time and again we have shown that we are amazing at innovating. Early-mid career researchers (EMCRs) is a term often used to describe up-and-coming brilliant minds at the frontline. These are our postgraduate students, postdoctoral fellows and early-career academics. Collectively, this group makes up more than 60 per cent of the research workforce. It is a cohort that was already facing hurdles pre-COVID-19. The situation now is far worse and needs immediate and urgent attention if we are to protect our long-term interests. The pandemic is taking an unprecedented and disproportionate toll on our early-career workforce. Recruitment freezes, funding caps and the absence of contract extensions are coalescing into a perfect storm. Unlike in a lot of other sectors, the capacity and capability to innovate within ours takes years to build. This includes nurturing the next generation of leaders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. A report by the Rapid Research Information Forum in May 2020 found that women and early-career researchers are among those who will disproportionately experience negative impacts of the pandemic.

This is an opportunity for us to tackle this problem head-on, to fix systemic issues that have long plagued the sector, making it a such a maze for EMCRs to navigate that very few emerge to have a long career in the field they love. There is also a need to address the pipeline problems associated with encouraging and empowering our young generation to take up STEM as a career. While EMCRs are accustomed to living with some degree of uncertainty, the pandemic has turned up the heat. There is a need for various immediate and long-term measures. As a matter of urgency, the government needs to recognise the importance of EMCRs and intervene to stem the pandemic-induced bleeding. The university sector is among the hardesthit. Short-term measures are needed to protect and secure a promising pool of innovators and young minds who will inevitably find themselves out of opportunities to do what they do best. This would be a significant loss, the effects of which would resonate for years to come. That’s because it takes time to prepare a young, aspiring mind to carry out independent, ground-breaking research. In the longer term, issues with the STEM pipeline and equity and diversity, as well as secure employment opportunities, need to be addressed. By harnessing opportunities and removing obstacles, we would be embracing change and preparing the STEM workforce of the future.

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There is an urgent need, too, for commitments to "costed" extensions of project budgets for PhD students, postdocs and new investigators. This will secure delivery of research outcomes and jobs. Ensuring secure contracts, particularly for those linked to a grant, is the first step. Similarly, government-supported hardship funds that allow extension of doctorates will be of significant assistance. In an Australian context, expecting universities to do this all by themselves is unrealistic. The government needs to support the sector, which has generated disruptive innovation and significant economic benefit for years. Simply turning a blind eye and hoping things

will pick up once the world returns to normal would be a strategic blunder. The time to act is now; otherwise, a decade down the track we will be rueing a missed opportunity to have steered Australia into an innovation-driven economy. We should be preparing for the next crisis, about which there are two certainties: it will come, and innovation will help us get out of it. Do nothing and we risk squandering not only our COVID learnings but also the opportunity to reset and overhaul the system to make it empowering for our EMCRs. As the saying goes, you reap what you sow. Well, here’s our chance to sow the seeds of an innovative economy.

Sumeet Walia is Associate Professor, and Research Leader in Cross-disciplinary Engineering at RMIT. He is also the co-chair for the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Working Group for Science & Technology Australia.

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RESOURCING COMMUNITIES The child with the potential to be Australia’s next Nobel Laureate could be born today in a remote Indigenous community. If they do not have the same resources as kids in the cities, though they will not be able to reach their full potential, and Australia as a whole will be poorer for it. By Corey Tutt

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eadly Science aims to close that resource gap by donating books, and resources to remote Indigenous communities around Australia. So far, we have brought 14,000 books, 500 telescopes, chemistry kits, coding equipment and preserved animals to kids in over 100 communities across the country. Indigenous Australians were the first scientists in Australia, and among the first in the world, collecting knowledge for thousands of years. We had the world’s first fish traps, the world’s first astronomy, the world’s first forensic scientists. To this day, Aboriginal people are employed to track people who go missing in the bush. We need to change the conversation so these kids can see themselves in the picture. Deadly Science connects culture with science, and allows kids to see the pathway to possibility – seeing themselves as Deadly Scientists. The books include Australia's First Naturalists: Indigenous Peoples’ Contribution to Early Zoology, and Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, which details the complex agriculture systems of Indigenous Australians observed by early English explorers, shedding "hunter-gatherer" myths. It is about empowering young Aboriginal kids, and Australia as a whole, to be proud of its 65,000+ years of science.

Aboriginal people were the first scientists, with tens of thousands of years of trial and error. The gap is not in knowledge, it is in resources. When you engage young people with science experiments, tapping into their natural curiosity, surveys show an attendance boost in STEM classes of 25 per cent. The problems that Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander kids face in isolated communities are multifaceted: intergenerational trauma; a lack of opportunity, resources and access to fresh food; and the health and developmental issues that come alongside it. Kids go to school, and there are only 15 books there. It is horrible. People are unaware of the poverty that exists in Australia. We want to help kids through school, and be a support network to get them into university. I want to empower people to take control of their own destiny, we often get narratives placed on us that act as limitations, and we do not give ourselves credit at times for how bright we are. Deadly Science also raises money for smart gardens, which allow communities to grow their own food cost-effectively, through the selling of t-shirts A cabbage can cost $22 in a remote community. You cannot expect young people to learn and eat properly when sugar is cheaper than

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fresh food. We want to make food cheaper, and teach kids to grow it. I do not have an academic science background, but have worked in STEM for a number of years, it is a real achievement for someone like me. I have been an advocate for Aboriginal rights for all of my life, and it is good to get traction. It takes a village. The support I’ve had throughout has been phenomenal – from the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities. In the early days, there were a lot of people telling me how I should do things. But I quickly learned that what works best is talking to teachers and communities directly and asking what they need. There is a deep shame factor with older Australians regarding what has happened to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It is sometimes easier to ignore a problem or pretend it is not there, than to address it. From my perspective, there is a much greater acceptance of Aboriginal culture, and pride. This comes with modern technology – in the palm of your hand you have access to all

this information that is out there. If you want to find out about Aboriginal Astronomy, you can type that into Google and have access to it. As a society, we need to do a gravitational shift, Aboriginal people in STEM should not be the answer for everything and every problem. Some things are less simple than others – the answers are quite complicated. Going to the same people for answers, you will get the same results. We do not want that. We want systematic change. We want to make science more acceptable to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids in remote communities, creating new platforms, where they can have Zoom calls with scientists and teachers can share lessons plans. Next, we want to translate all of our lessons into language. It would be the first time in history – 270 years – that Western science and Aboriginal science, would be translated into lessons plans in language, creating a real two-way process. There are a couple of hundred different languages in Australia, but life is a marathon, not a sprint, and we will get it done.

Corey Tutt is a Kamilaroi man and the founder of Deadly Science. In 2019, he was the NSW Young Australian of the Year.

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UNIVERSITIES, GOVERNMENT MUST COMBINE TO FORTIFY THE RANKS OF INNOVATION It clear that we all need to innovate to transform the ways we operate. From global food production to mobility and transport, health services, urban planning, energy and waste, every industry needs to be innovative in order to confront the complex challenges facing the world. By Professor John Dewar AO

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y its very nature, innovation has many tentacles. The word itself is not readily understood, and can mean different things to different people. We might define innovation as developing ways to do something faster, or with fewer inputs, but still maintaining quality. We might say it involves developing entirely new methods or products. Or we might say it is connected in all manner of ways with the process of transitioning from a manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy. Whatever way you look at it, innovation involves a broad range of responses to those factors that are affecting the way we work, produce, distribute and consume. We can define it as an activity that requires a degree of creativity in confronting new problems, and which needs to meet one of two conditions: doing something better – or more efficiently – than we have in the past, or doing something that’s altogether new. What follows is a brief contemplation of the current state of innovation in Australia. It considers some of the ways in which we are already addressing the challenges outlined above, or are

establishing a basis to be more innovative in the future. At the end some policy responses that could improve our capacity for innovation across the nation are suggested. Areas that can be targeted for improvement include Australia’s innovation linkages, university and industry research collaboration, research talent in business enterprises, patents, and high-tech and ICT services exports. There is also evidence to suggest that the nation’s pivot to a digital economy has stalled, and that Australian businesses need to focus more on developing a high performance innovation culture. A 2015 report by the Office of the Chief Economist found only 16 per cent of Australian businesses have a high performance innovation culture compared to 44 per cent of the Global Innovation 1000 (the world’s largest corporate R&D spenders). More than a third (36 per cent) of Australian businesses had a “siloed” innovation culture, and 39 per cent had little or no innovation culture at all. Clearly there is room for improvement. The Australian Government has attempted to address these issues, especially through

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Innovation Science Australia (ISA), an independent statutory board of entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and educators established to advise government about innovation, research and science matters. ISA has published a national roadmap to strengthen Australia’s ability to innovate by 2030. Its plan makes 30 recommendations, each with an aim to generate and capture the benefits of innovation for all citizens. Recommendations address education (responding to the changing nature of work through skills development); industry (stimulating high-growth firms and raising productivity); government (becoming a catalyst for innovation and innovative service delivery through regulatory and funding responses); R&D (increasing translation and commercialisation of research); and culture and ambition (enhancing the national culture of innovation by launching National Missions in specific fields). Universities also play an important role in the innovation ecosystem, and it’s a role that transcends their established charter of research and teaching. Universities increasingly support and promote entrepreneurship as an important driver of economic growth through the creation and transfer of knowledge and technologies into society. As creators of talent, the role for universities is also to equip students and staff with the entrepreneurial skills and attitudes important for the development of innovation networks and economic growth. These competencies have broad application for new venture creation but also support development of underlying skills such as creativity, adaptability, flexibility and agile thinking that can be used to start a new business, or as a social entrepreneur or as part of employment in a company. Government agencies, universities or businesses cannot support innovation to its fullest extent by working on their own, however. I said earlier that innovation has many tentacles. This means that we need a networked or system response. How can government policy promote innovation, especially by supporting universities and industry partners to work together on the complex global challenges mentioned at the beginning? Government could encourage collaboration by increasing support and

Only 16 per cent of Australian businesses have a high performance innovation culture compared to 44 per cent of the Global Innovation 1000 investment for development of innovation ecosystems in targeted sectors or geographic areas. One area of existing strength that could benefit from support is industry-focused digital transformation initiatives. This could include funding for digital innovation hubs to help businesses identify problems, co-create solutions with universities or other education partners, support research translation, and provide workforce training. A template is provided by the emerging Bendigo Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, which, with appropriate support, could introduce 10,000 jobs to the regional city of Bendigo in the same way that Fraunhofer has successfully done in Germany. Australia’s current innovation ecosystem has been built on the strengths of our human capital and research capabilities, with support through government online services and a lack of barriers to start new businesses. Our nation is well placed to innovate – do things better and do things new – and could climb higher on the Global Innovation Index if there were more incentives for collaboration and commercialisation of research. We need support and direction to hasten our transition to a digital economy. It’s clear that our capacity to be innovative relies on how well government, universities and business can work together to stimulate, promote and support innovation across the country. We need policies to improve Australia’s innovation linkages, promote research talent in business enterprises, and support university and industry research collaboration and translation.

John Dewar AO is the Vice-Chancellor of La Trobe University.

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EDUCATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY Australia needs to nurture talent, recognise different skillsets across entrepreneurship and encourage its young people to take risks and be creative. By Ian H. Frazer AC

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t would be difficult to write about the state of Australia as an innovation nation in 2020 without reference to the profound impact of COVID-19 on our country and the global community. However, whatever the “new normal” may look like, and I suspect it will be significantly different from our past way of life, I believe that Australia, if it wishes to retain its current status as a leader among nations, will, over the next 10 years, need to contribute significantly through innovation to a global knowledge-based economy. Looking ahead 10 years, labour costs will gradually equalise across the planet. And while natural resources (food, energy, raw materials) will still be one of Australia’s saleable assets, their relative value to our economy will be reduced by wider access to these resources from elsewhere. Further, their value could at any time be threatened by geopolitical power plays. So, I believe we need to focus, going forward, on adding value to our society through intellectual activity. What should we do to ensure we can provide a significant share of globally useful and saleable innovation? Firstly, we need to recognise that, as with every country, our major strength lies in our people, and in how we develop their talents and value their skills. Fundamentally, this relates to education: not only the formal education that’s provided by the state and by others through the public and private systems, but to the totality of education that starts in the family and extends across the community. In both settings, our approach to education needs to include novel aspects to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, and to provide skills in profiling and managing the risks inherent in innovation. Quality education requires adequate funding and quality providers. Enhancing our pool of talented educators will, unfortunately,

be a generational issue requiring ongoing and specific investment. Quality educators, whether parents, teachers or academics, may be born with innate ability but they will still require training to produce positive outcomes in 21st century society. In addition, better social and financial incentives will serve as recognition that their

contribution to education is valued by society. Step one, therefore, is to elevate the status of our professional educators. Further, we need to ensure that, to the greatest extent possible, education is personalised to make the most of the abilities of the individual. To achieve this, a larger and more diverse pool of educators will be required. All innate abilities need to be valued. While innovation may be the ability that will plot Australia’s place on the world map, a wide range of other abilities

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will be necessary to make our country a great place to live and work. Ability in the provision of recreational activities, including the performing arts, sport and dining, will be as important in attracting and retaining developers of exportable innovation to Australia as availability of quality health care, education and social services. How should we further encourage innovative thinking, beyond ensuring that a quality education is provided, so that people recognise opportunities as they present? I believe that to achieve a significant pool of entrepreneurial talent we need to create an environment in which young and talented people are encouraged to take risks. We know that the human brain is most wired to take risks between the ages of 15 and 25, and we expend a lot of our educational energy in discouraging youth from the more dangerous sorts of risk-taking, from experimentation with drugs to misuse of motor vehicles. However, to improve our chances of

success as a nation, we need to provide an environment in which risk-taking in intellectual activity is encouraged. We used to expect this of our universities. However, we seem to have lost that part of a university education that enabled free thinking and group discussions on everything

from the way we run our society to the way we make breakthrough hypotheses in science. This has been replaced in large measure by group didactic instruction in how an older generation perceives things to be. Challenging the prevailing wisdom is no more encouraged in tertiary settings than it is in public life. The potential financial cost associated with giving youth a chance to experience a free-thinking environment through attendance at university has bred timidity and encouraged conformity. Conformity may be the smoother path to graduation but does nothing to encourage inventorship and entrepreneurialism, which may result in an incomplete university education but also a valuable start-up. Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine and literature, and similar national awards for creativity in science and technology, are generally given for ideas conceived by creative youth, though they are generally not awarded until the full extent of the innovation in thinking is realised by their peers many years later. Contrast this with creativity in the performing arts, which is recognised by the community as it happens. We need to encourage a culture within society that more effectively facilitates, encourages and appreciates attempts at innovation and creativity in science and technology, as well as appropriately rewarding success. This process should start during formal education. Science used to be a participation sport in the school classroom. Now, increasingly, it is becoming a spectator sport, in part because society is habitually invoking the need to avoid risk. It’s been said by many that ships are safe in harbour, but that’s not what ships are for. Similarly, youth can be provided with a safe environment and discouraged from taking risks, but the consequence is that we will, as a nation, become recipients of other people’s creativity instead of generating our own. We need to select those with a creative mindset, nurture and encourage that gift, and provide them with a supportive environment. Only then can we fully benefit from the innovative talent within our diverse and prosperous society, and thus build a future for our country. We will not remain the "lucky" country if we depend on luck.

Professor Ian Frazer AC is a professor at the University of Queensland, and the co-inventor of the technology enabling the HPV vaccines, currently used worldwide to help prevent cervical cancer.

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YOUNG SCIENTISTS GET TO SHINE The International Science Olympiads are one of the worlds longest-running science competitions for high school students in the world, with Australia has a strong record of success. By Elizabeth Gracie

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ince 1959, the International Science Olympiads (ISO) have provided a space for exceptional science students to compete against students from other nations in a range of scientific disciplines. The annual competitions provide secondary students with a thrilling opportunity to extend their skills in school science. Participating nations run stimulating enrichment and extension programs, including challenging exams, to select their teams, which then compete in the international Olympiad competitions. There are 12 international Olympiads open to students: maths, physics, chemistry, informatics, biology, philosophy, astronomy, geography, linguistics, junior science, earth science, and astronomy and astrophysics. The competitions are held in different cities each year and are open to high school students who are under the age of 20 and not enrolled at university. Australia’s participation in the International Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Earth and Environmental Science Olympiads is managed by Australian Science Innovations (ASI), a charitable not-for-profit association based in Canberra. Thousands of Australian students sit entry exams each year, of whom 70–80 are chosen to participate in ASI’s summer school enrichment programs. Of these, just 17 will be picked to compete internationally: five students in physics and four each in chemistry, biology, and earth and environmental sciences. Ben Kremer represented Australia at the International Chemistry Olympiad in Paris in

1990 and is now chair of Australian Science Innovations. “Australia has been participating for 34 years as of 2020. In that time, we have done well, punching well above our weight on the world stage,” said Kremer. “It really is due to a small number of dedicated teachers, some employed and the rest volunteers, who come back to teach the kids every year. It is an amazing program and organisation to be part of.” Kremer was successful in his selection exams for both the Physics and Chemistry Olympiads, and was chosen to attend the summer school at what was then Canberra College of Advanced Education (now the University of Canberra) for Physics and at Bond University for Chemistry. After further exams at the end of the summer schools he was selected for Chemistry. The Australian team did further training at Bond University over Easter, and then in Heidelberg, Germany, before beginning the competition proper in Paris in July 1990. “It was a much more difficult and interesting form of the science tests that were run at the time by universities or educational bodies,” Kremer said. “It is a big step up to compete internationally. It was incredibly exhilarating.” According to Kremer, a key takeaway from his experience in the ISO was how it showed Australian students can compete at an exceptional level on an international stage. “It made me realise”, he said, “that Australia has a reservoir of talented students, who can perform well, but need support.”

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Currently, students enrolled in ASI’s summer school enrichment programs can rely on the support of ASI’s program directors and staff. This was not always the case, however. “A big difference from when I competed to the [circumstances in which] students compete now is the extent of support available. When I did it, Australia competed only in chemistry and physics, and our involvement in each was run separately by volunteers in their spare time on a shoestring budget. Professor Richard Russell ran chemistry, and Dr. Rod Jory ran physics. There was no organising body like ASI to assist,” said Kremer. “As for content, the World Wide Web hadn’t been invented yet and high school students did not have access to the Internet. You could not easily look things up electronically from home or communicate with students or teachers. “There were no textbooks or guides written, while now there are several written by former students. The only thing you could do in my time was read a set of demonstration problems written by that year’s organising country and get copies of past international papers (with the working), then read the questions to find out what you needed to know. “All we had were textbooks that Australian organisers and volunteers thought would help, along with handwritten notes to get us by. “In that way, it was like most other learning, analogue not digital, in a disconnected world,” said Kremer. Now, there are resources available internationally, including past papers and discussion groups, as well as an ASI-organised “Olympiads Online” program, in which ASI’s program directors and volunteer tutors answer questions from students and instruct them. This is something Kremer believes has made a world of difference for today’s generation of science Olympians. “Students realise that they are not doing this alone – that the Australian Government and industry supports them,” he said. Successive federal governments have provided grants to ASI, which also receives donations from individuals. One Mandate Group, the publisher of this book, is donating proceeds to the Olympiads. “We have significant support from universities, individuals and private organisations,” said Kremer. Funding is now

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such that a significant proportion of the costs for competing students are covered, removing economic status as a barrier to participation. “We can help kids from disadvantaged or low socio-economic backgrounds to attend the summer schools and international competitions if they otherwise couldn’t afford it,” said Kremer. Essentially, Kremer stresses, whenever and how ever students require support, ASI will endeavour to provide it. The experience of participating in the ISO as a teenager is one that, even now, Kremer still experiences the effects of. “I’ve kept a number of friends, mostly students who I taught as a lecturer and tutor when I came back to volunteer at summer schools after I competed in Paris,” he said. “In 1995, I was also able to travel overseas with the students to tutor them as they competed.” Now Kremer is chair of the organisation that oversees Australia’s involvement in the four largest ISO competitions. In this role, he plans to address the low representation of female students in science through a program called Curious Minds, aimed at girls in Years 9 and 10 who are interested in STEM subjects. Participating girls are paired with mentors in Canberra twice a year to learn about STEM career paths, helping them break down that barrier to studying science that many women run into. According to Kremer, the Curious Minds program has been a tremendous success, with some 70 per cent of students reporting that it guided them into STEM. On top of that, 80 per cent said they now had more confidence about pursuing a career in a STEM discipline, and 90 per cent felt confident they could pursue such a career. All reported learning new skills from their mentors. It seems clear that the ISO doesn’t just help improve students’ academic skillset, but equips them with the belief that they can and will thrive in a STEM research or university setting.

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THE POWER OF PLAY Ten minutes of play per day can grow problem solving skills, stimulate learning, and impact the development of cognitive processes for kids. Our education system should reflect that. By Claus Kristensen

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ccording to World Economic Forum, 65% of the children going into primary school today will ultimately end up in completely new job types that do not presently exist. Though this conundrum in many ways can seem exciting, it does pose a need for us as educators, parents and policy makers, to look at ways to better prepare them for that future. The cliché of ‘change is here to stay’ is truer than ever and the world is changing faster than ever. This is driven not only by climate, politics, and other hot topics but just as much by innovation and technology that is changing the way we work and live. Artificial Intelligence technology is coming to a point where it can predict what I will buy before I know it myself, based on data that I am not even aware companies have and processing power that supersedes my brain many times. I don’t consider myself old and yet when I was a toddler we only had two black and white channels, browsing and shopping was done in physical stores and my wish list for Christmas was created by using a pen to circle cool toys in paper catalogues. The change till today is huge but it is nothing compared to the change my kids will see while growing up. I have deep respect for teachers and the school system and I do believe a lot of time and resource is invested into teaching and developing teaching methods, however the mindset and approach is still to a large extent, based on the past or maybe present at best. We have many of the same subjects taught in almost the same way, perhaps with just a slight digital interaction. Our children will be in competition with computers and artificial intelligence software so they need to focus on skills that will give them a competitive advantage that a computer will not overtake - skills like creative problem solving and critical thinking. They need not only to be able

to imagine and know how to solve known problems – they need to be able to solve unknown complex problems and put their imagination into reality. Alvin Toffler says it well in his 1970 bestseller Future Shock: “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn”. The normal formalised education is still essential, but it becomes only a ticket to play and instead intellectual flexibility will be what drives value.

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So, the most important skills for children to take on the future is to build their resilience and to build their ability to problem solve and act with agility in a changing environment. What new lessons or approaches are doing that in the school today? How are we building confidence in creativity and in going to new problems in an exploring and interested way? Unfortunately, research shows that the confidence in creativity skills is declining amongst children. The very interesting insight here is that play can be a very strong enabler to drive this learning. Play

teaches children to approach problems in different ways, to solve for the unexpected, to explore and it drives a healthy mind when it is meaningful and relevant play experiences. Many insights even suggest an intrinsic link amongst criminals stems from long-term impact of play deprivation in early childhood.

Quality play experiences can stimulate networks in the brain related to learning and therefore affect the development of cognitive processes from an early stage. Just 10 minutes a day of playing has a lasting impact! A review of the neuroscience and biological literature on learning from The LEGO Foundation indicate that play experiences with five characteristics of learning (Joy, Meaningful, Active Engagement, Iterative, Socially Interactive) facilitate the development of interconnected brain processes in growing children’s capacity to learn. Quality play experiences activate neural networks involved in brain processes such as cognitive flexibility, memory and others, and that prepares a child’s brain for further development. This makes Learning Through Play a very important element of both family engagement and educations focus on the school. The task on teaching our children these future-proof skillsets is not only up to teachers and educational systems. It is just as much up to the parents and even a wider societal responsibility. In most countries, and definitely Australia, parents see the value of play, but often rely on social activities and other similar situations (or the kids themselves) to drive the play activities. We have one of the highest toy spends per child in the world but do parents actually take the time to play with the kids, challenge and drive their learning through play? One positive thing out of COVID is that families seem to have spent more valuable time together playing and I hope that the experience from that will be longer lasting than the development time of a vaccine. I am sure that if parents knew the impact on their kids’ future of just spending a few minutes everyday to drive quality play experiences with their kids, they would not hesitate one bit in making it their highest priority. We have an exciting future ahead of us with plenty of opportunities. An increased focus on new ways of learning from both parents and educational systems is the way to enable our children to seize these opportunities. We need to think differently about how we drive learning, and quality play experiences are a very simple thing that can drive significant impact.

Claus Kristensen is vice president and general manager, Australia & New Zealand at LEGO Group.

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RESPECT THE SCIENCE PUTTING THE SCIENCE FIRST Arthur Sinodinos SCIENCE HAS THE ANSWERS Professor Brendan Crabb AC THE MISSING LINK Thomas Maschmeyer AN ASTRONOMICAL ADVANTAGE Professor Peter Quinn PEOPLE FIRST: FUTURE-PROOFING AUSTRALIA’S STEM WORKFORCE Dr Marguerite Evans-Galea COURAGE AND COMMERCIALISATION Dr Larry Marshall CONNECTION, COLLABORATION, COMPETITION Dr Cathy Foley AI RESHAPING INDUSTRY Jon Whittle MANUFACTURING AUSTRALIA’S FUTURE Marcus Zipper FUELLING OUR HYDROGEN FUTURE Dr Patrick Hartley

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PUTTING SCIENCE FIRST Science matters to every aspect of our lives. And yet it is under attack like never before in our lifetime. Climate change is just the latest battleground. By Arthur Sinodinos

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he great American science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson once said, “Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers – poets, actors, journalists – they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don’t fight science and they don’t fight technology.” It was recently reported that climate change will be taught as part of the high-school syllabus. Climate sceptics immediately jumped in to suggest that both sides of the argument be presented to students. On the face of it, that sounds fair, except that climate matters are a matter of science rather than a matter of opinion. The antagonism towards science goes further than climate science. Green groups cherry-pick the science, too. They are antagonistic towards genetically modified foods, which do not fit their organic worldview. Anti-vaccination groups prefer half-baked theories and pseudo-medicine to rigorous, evidence-based medicine. Beyond science, expertise, more broadly, is questioned. Some prefer to put their faith in the "wisdom of crowds." This aversion to science is being fuelled by the spread of fake news and preferred facts. Confirmation bias is ripe. We look for facts and opinions to back up our point of view or favourite conspiracy theory. These conspiracies often turn on the role of people or institutions we do not like allegedly subverting the popular will.

Mistrust of experts is facilitated by the rise of powerful search engines. Access to Google has made us all pseudo-researchers. We can scour the web for information and opinions to back up our preconceptions. How many people self-diagnose using Dr Google? Scientists cannot afford to leave it to others to fight their battles, whether in the halls of power or the public square. This is a hard ask of many scientists. Scientists have traditionally been reticent to engage in an adversarial way in the public space. Scientists prefer to let their work do the talking. We do not celebrate scientists in the same way or to the same extent that we do athletes and entertainers. Few scientists are household names even though the fruits of science are all around us and make life possible on Earth. Appropriately, scientists are also very careful to avoid the kind of emphatic statements and ’soundbites’ so beloved of the media. The scientific method relies on constant querying, testing and retesting of hypotheses to disprove a proposition. Beautiful theories are slain by ugly facts.

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Some climate scientists argue that it is better not to engage in debate and simply ignore sceptics. Others argue, from a more rigorous point of view, that understanding why someone may be a climate sceptic is the key to potentially talking them around. I sought to engage climate sceptic Malcolm Roberts of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in dialogue when I was science minister. I brought his researchers together with senior scientists at the CSIRO for what I hoped would be a rigorous, evidence-based process. There were multiple sessions, but agreement was not possible. In retrospect, I’m not surprised. Another approach is to appeal to other views held by these sceptics – for example, those who support the use of nuclear energy in the interests of national sovereignty and self-sufficiency. We cannot wring our hands, ignore the doubters, and/or go to war. This is unduly defeatist. Information and transparency are the best disinfectant. We should build on existing science advocacy efforts. We do have Science Meets Parliament Week and other networking events. We have a Chief Scientist who speaks at public fora, engages in science education and appears before parliamentary committees, but no one person can carry the sector. Recently, the ABC’s Q+A program featured an all-scientist panel, but this is a comparative rarity. A few years ago, medical researchers organised to fight an attempt by the Gillard Government to cut funding for medical research. The fightback was novel and effective, but no one is encouraging scientists to take to the streets in a continual crusade for science. Scientists have to adopt the mindset of advocates. Used to being objective and evidence-based, they would be understandably uncomfortable with pure "spin". But today the facts need help and contextualisation. They otherwise risk being crowded out by assertion, self-interest and wilful ignorance. Evidence-based advocacy is not spin. It is essential to construct a narrative of what science is doing and who benefits. This must be practical

This aversion to science is being fuelled by the spread of fake news and preferred facts. Confirmation bias is ripe. and focused on people’s needs, expressed in clear, layman’s terms. Stakeholders who share the interests of scientists and are invested in the outcomes of science should be mobilised in support. They can be marshalled in a coalition of the willing to support the scientific case in public and with politicians, business and other influential members of society. Scientists reaching out to business can be beneficial on both economic and advocacy grounds. Effective collaboration between knowledge creators and industry is vital to maximising the prospects of successful commercialisation of domestic inventions and applications. Collaborating businesses develop a tangible stake in a healthy scientific scene in Australia. The government has taken measures to incentivise such collaboration, including changes to research block grant funding arrangements. The innovation ecosystem is growing, but it takes time to effect the necessary cultural change in the scientific and business communities. The American experience is a useful benchmark. Scientists should engage with politicians on all sides to establish constructive, long-term relationships. While the government of the day is always relevant, the opposition and independent members and senators should not be neglected. The opposition will one day be in power and crossbenchers can exert the balance of power in either chamber on occasion. Networking with new politicians is a useful investment that can pay off when these people are promoted into positions of power and influence.

Arthur Sinodinos AO is an Australian diplomat and former Liberal Party politician who has been Ambassador to the United States since February 2020.

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SCIENCE HAS THE ANSWERS It’s taken a pandemic for the world to value science. We need to respect, finance and venerate the scientists who impact our lives and advance our civilisation.

By Professor Brendan Crabb AC

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cience pervades our very existence. It advances our knowledge, drives innovation and is the basis of our economy. We often take it for granted, but it touches every aspect of our daily lives, including health, agriculture, industry, communications and technology. It has lifted communities out of poverty, improved longevity and saved countless millions of lives. Over the past century, on the health front that I know best, there has been an exponential growth in scientific advancement, from fluoride treatment of drinking water, to the development of vaccines for infectious diseases such as smallpox, polio, measles, hepatitis A and B, to new drugs for treating cancers and many other acute and chronic conditions. There have been new medical devices such as bionics, diagnostic tests for a range of diseases and imaging for a range of diagnoses. Perhaps most important of all, there has been a greater understanding of human behaviours and how to influence them, such that populations integrate innovations and knowledge into their lives to improve their health – like wearing helmets and seatbelts, not smoking, handwashing and placing sleeping babies on their back to reduce the incidence of sudden infant death syndrome. The list of achievements is huge, and science was central to each and every success. Yet the majority of people don’t fully appreciate the impact that science has on their daily life, and perhaps don’t appreciate it at all, and could not name a famous scientist. Despite all these advances and amazing achievements, scientists still struggle to receive the recognition and respect they deserve, and

the financial support for the work they do. The competitive funding systems in place in many countries, while endeavouring to foster scientific excellence, also mean that scientists often live from grant to grant, not knowing if they will be able to continue to fund their research and to develop their careers. It is not unusual to hear of researchers abandoning their chosen profession because of the lack of financial security in favour of a role with a more secure income. While the scientific community itself excels in sharing its research findings within its own community, it is still poor in communicating its work to the public via mainstream and social media. There is still a long way to go to achieve the "rockstar recognition" that is afforded champions of sport, entertainment or even politics. Hopefully, this is changing. Not since the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 has so much focus been placed on medical research and scientists’ efforts to respond to and contain the COVID-19 (SARS-COV-2) global pandemic. COVID-19 has propelled scientists into the public eye, fronting media on a daily basis and supporting government in their strategic response with advice guided by evidence. It has taken a global pandemic for people truly to see and respect the contribution science and scientists make. As scientists, we stand firm in the knowledge that the scientific method is extraordinarily powerful. That the process of observation, questioning, hypothesising, testing and re-testing to come up with evidence to support a conclusion is a pillar of human progress and civilisation. In the end, science and evidence are hard to argue against. But people try.

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Even in the face of overwhelming evidence generated by the scientific method, there will always be those who question the validity of scientific discovery and don’t respect the evidence. We will always have a few – more than a few, perhaps – who support conspiracy theories, who have their own agendas or use crises such as COVID-19 to politicise events to their own advantage. As Professor Paul Sutter says in his pre-COVID-19 article "It’s OK to demand respect for science", published in Forbes in December 2018, “Stand up! Stand up for accuracy and completeness. Stand up for evidence and reason. Stand up for answering scientific questions with scientific answers. It’s okay to demand such respect for your beliefs, if you’ve given proper respect for theirs. Dialogs are, by definition, a two-way street. So, if the opportunity presents itself, share. Share how and why you know. Focus on yourself and your attitudes. It’s nothing personal. Just an explanation.” As scientists, we need to communicate broadly and frequently what we do, become more visible, and demand respect for the science and the evidence it produces. One of the toughest things to explain is the value of scientific consensus (as opposed to an individual scientist’s view) around an issue and, importantly, how it can change as evidence shifts. ‘Changing our minds’ in this way is counterintuitive to much of society; it is perceived as a weakness. But it is, in fact, science’s greatest strength. It is this that separates science from fixed dogma or belief systems, valuing most of all the power of iterative and improving evidence. I love the fact that there is a distinct possibility that with every new discovery, my mind is about to be changed. We must also look at ways of encouraging younger people to follow a career in the sciences in the knowledge that they will have a stimulating and full career. To do this we must encourage greater investment in education across science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM). We need to ensure there are strong career paths and

opportunities for future researchers, both men and women. We must make it easier for women to have an equitable pathway to a career in science and overcome the hurdles that foster gender inequity. We will continue to face great challenges as scientists. There will be more global pandemics to prepare for and respond to. And the great and urgent challenge of climate change looms large as the major crisis we still need to address. Having every confidence in the scientific community and in those who will follow in our footsteps, I believe that science has the answer.

Brendan Scott Crabb AC is an Australian microbiologist, research scientist and director and CEO of the Burnet Institute.

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THE MISSING LINK The winner of the 2020 Prime Minister’s Prize for Innovation, writes on how to improve the rates of success for Australia’s scientific and innovation enterprise, environment, policy and culture. By Thomas Maschmeyer

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hy is it that Australian technology often has to go overseas and only when successful there comes back as an imported good or service? What is it in the Australian technology transfer landscape that makes this unfortunate outcome occur much too frequently? I do not subscribe to the idea there is insufficient Australian capital to make technology transfer happen, or that there’s a shortage of motivated researchers or investors wanting to have a go. We have fantastic universities with highly motivated people, excellent national laboratories and a wonderful array of globally successful companies. Furthermore, we have stable governance, the security of contract law, a plethora of wealthy family offices and cashed-up superannuation funds, as well as a technology- friendly population that excels in being early adopters of all types of tech.

So, where is the problem? What is the missing link? As a veteran of many technology-translation start-ups both here and overseas, I am struck by how uniquely Australian it is that support for the commercialisation of new technology via preferential purchasing agreements, manufacturing grants and so on is viewed as "picking winners". Elsewhere, it is viewed as a deliberate choice to enhance the nation’s competitiveness in an increasingly unfriendly geopolitical landscape. Our thinking has to be guided by a strategic imperative, which is aimed at reducing the hurdles faced by true innovation. Examples of these might be stakeholder power controlling market access and the frequent instance of poor regulation – an inherent issue as, by definition, regulation always lags behind innovation. The point is to back the future, not the past. The markets will give the verdict on established technologies – and so they should. The

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State of Our Innovation Nation often-heard clarion call of established players for market intervention when losing market share should be ignored. Talking to various granting agencies that are the instruments for government policy can be a frustrating experience – likewise talking to government departments that have purchasing capability and to regulators. By contrast, talking to politicians can leave one excited and positive about what is achievable, though the translation of that promising discussion into outcomes on the ground is very often very poor. What needs to be done? How can these things be improved? Successful technology translation might be characterised as completing the chain that starts with scientific discovery, links it to spinouts that finally attract large investments and concludes with IPOs or buy-outs by established players. The reason why this happens too rarely in Australia becomes strikingly obvious when examining countries where it occurs more frequently. As an illustration, first cab off the rank is the requirement that for a new industrial plant to be permitted, one has to show, on average (small differences exist between states), two years of emissions data of a reference plant of the same or bigger size – somewhere else. This means nothing really new can ever be built in Australia. By law, it has to be built overseas first. How do other countries deal with the uncertainties? They very often have two regulatory systems, one for the country as a whole and

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one for so-called "sandpits" – industrial parks – which face tougher reporting requirements but whose developers can do new things under greater, sometimes daily, scrutiny, thus protecting the population while enabling innovation. This would be an easy, fast and low-cost win for Australia – a simple change that could be readily endorsed across the political spectrum, giving greater investment certainty and delivering for the nation. Encouragingly, some small green shoots are appearing, such as in the NSW energy precinct around Dubbo, where regulations have been adjusted for faster (but still environmentally compliant), safe and community-spirited development of renewable energy projects. The simple message is to enable the progress, we need to run our society in a more sustainable manner. The development of an appropriate bipartisan legislative framework is one of the big-ticket items for this generation of politicians – and time is running out. In the final analysis, Australia has suffered a revolving door of Prime Ministers due to division around innovation strategies regarding climate, energy and the circular economy. It is time to unite and progress together as a nation in an increasingly complex and uncertain world. Second cab off the rank: another hurdle for innovation in Australia is getting into the market at the right price at a low volume. All truly new technology will be low volume initially, as the introduction will be gradual. Building large-scale plants, putting steel in the ground,

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pouring concrete, moving large amounts of material . . . all this requires long-term, patient and deep capital investment. And what do investors need to be comfortable? They need top technology. They need a proven technical translation pedigree and the confidence that their investment will be financially successful. How can the public sector help to enable this path to success? Contrary to small-volume production of anything other than, say, computer programmes, which can be sent around the world by the click of a button, small-volume production of physical items tends to be expensive per unit produced. Only at scale does that price come down. Only at scale do supply chains become competitively priced. Only at scale does the establishment of distribution channels and technical support teams make sense. Getting to that scale in deep tech requires a successful traversing of the veritable mountain range that separates the technology entrepreneur’s valley of promise from the commercial valley of plenty. A product that is very expensive at low volume still has to be sold. It is an absolute necessity to reach, eventually, a volume that allows the product to be cheap enough to survive a tendering process when having to compete against existing purchasing (not nation-building) policies. This is exactly where publicly funded entities need to step in and rebalance the inevitable market failure. The long-term strategic value of something is not addressed by simple market forces – they operate on too short a timeframe. Our international competitors acknowledge this and have appropriate policy settings in place, from the superficially unsophisticated (“Buy American”) to the more nuanced (“1.2 trillion EU Green New Deal”), not to mention Japan or China, who put vast amounts of public money into the development and deployment of new technologies. Indeed, these different and more favourable policy settings are among the chief reasons why my technologies are more prominent overseas

or might go overseas for good. My Licella plastics recycling Cat-HTRTM technology is being rolled out worldwide. However, the plant that will be the last plant of the first wave is likely to be the Australian one. Regarding biomass waste, the first small-scale Australian Cat-HTRTM R&D plant is funded by our Canadian joint-venture partner, helped by Canadian government strategic investments with the aim of building a much bigger fully commercial plant in Canada. Equally, for my Gelion ENDURE TM battery technology we are starting to look at having to manufacture overseas, even assemble systems overseas, and then import them into Australia. The need for Australian political and public leadership in innovation is paramount. Government departments and agencies have a critical role to play in strategic investment for the nation towards fostering the successful translation of home-grown Australian technology into commerciality. However, when one has those discussions with public bodies, the response in the vast majority of instances is: “If we want something, if we want a technology, we go to the market at that time and we’ll go for the most compelling [read cheap] bid.” Only very rarely is any vestige of long-term strategic thought discernible. Interestingly, the individuals in charge of those government processes are very often keenly aware of the insufficiency of these very same processes and are personally deeply unhappy about being constrained by the policy settings under which they have to operate. Australia needs a bipartisan innovation strategy backed by meaningful resources that is courageous enough to let existing technologies be judged by market forces. Although there is some hope, the former Chief Scientist made attempts in a number of areas with some encouraging successes, despite the many constraints faced. Innovation needs to be strategically enabled to help protect, guide and benefit Australia, making it resilient in the face of increasing global competition and successful in its quest for a more sustainable tomorrow.

Thomas Maschmeyer is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Sydney and executive chairman of Gelion Technologies. He is cofounder of three companies, fellow of four academies, and serves on the boards of six international journals.

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AN ASTRONOMICAL ADVANTAGE Australia is better placed than most countries to address the grandest questions of the universe and should be doing more to attract investment in gamechanging, big-science projects.

stronomy is humanity’s study of the structure, content and history of our Universe. It is perhaps the most ancient of our sciences and has been part of Australia’s Indigenous culture for at least the past 60,000 years. Why does the sky look the way it does? How did it begin and what is out there in the darkness beyond what our eyes can see? These basic questions, asked by adults and children alike, and the quest for answers, have driven the growth of our science, culture and commerce for hundreds of years. Australia, as the home of the world’s first astronomers, has long been an active participant in the quest to find out how our Universe works. The discovery and mapping of the East Coast of Australia by Captain James Cook in 1770 were part of an astronomical expedition to collect observations of the planet Venus as it transited the face of the Sun. The location of Australia, under southern hemisphere skies, provides unique opportunities to see astronomical objects that are not visible in the northern hemisphere. For example, our nearest galactic neighbours, the two small satellite galaxies of our home galaxy the Milky Way, can be seen only in the southern sky. These “Magellanic Clouds” were discovered by Ferdinand Magellian in 1520 as his ship sailed into the southern Pacific. Australia’s unique location for observations was recognised in the 1901 Australian Constitution that gave the Parliament power to make laws with respect to “astronomical and meteorological observations”. Today, Australia’s global position also extends to our Antarctic territories that provide periods

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of 24-hour "night-time" as well as some of the driest and coldest observing conditions on Earth. As we look to new opportunities in space, the extent of the Australian landmass provides potential launch sites for spacecraft close to the equator for a maximal boost from the Earth’s rotation. The physical size of Australia combined with its modest population also provides large areas of low population density with skies free from the light and radio noise “pollution” that surrounds large cities and towns. The reward, as opposed to the tyranny, of this isolation is the ability we gain to see the faintest signals from the most distant and rarest objects in the Universe against a black, clear and quiet sky. While the Earth’s population grows, the quality of the Australian sky and landscape becomes a desirable asset that international collaborations and projects will seek out for investments in facilities that address fundamental questions in astronomy and science in general. While geographical isolation has its disadvantages, the location of Australia in “time zone space” places us temporally close to more than half the population of the planet. At a time when many of our endeavours are global in scope and require individuals to work mostly online for collaborative, commercial or educational reasons, proximity of time zones gives Australia an enormous advantage across India, Asia and the Asian-Pacific nations. In several emerging Asian nations, astronomy is seen as one of the key ingredients in community uplift, STEM education and a pathway to diversification of economies. The quest to uncover and understand the fundamental forces of nature and the building

By Professor Peter Quinn

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blocks of matter has driven science since the Renaissance. The discovery of the structure of atoms and the physical processes that govern the ways atoms bind together and emit energy gave us a mastery of chemistry and materials that enabled the Industrial Revolution and eventually the atomic age. The work of Newton and Einstein towards understanding the universal force of gravity has provided us with an ability to predict the cycle of the seasons and tides, as well as a way to navigate with a precision of millimetres across the entire globe with GPS. While these dual achievements on the atomic and cosmic scale are fundamental, they do not

Creating an early Universe “lab” like the LHC required addressing “big challenges” for materials science and for computing. Confronting and solving these big-science challenges required innovations that included the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. The conditions and physical processes that occur in the early Universe can also be observed directly with a new generation of telescopes. To see matter at the dawn of stars and galaxies requires looking out and back into the history of our Universe at the very faintest objects and signals we can detect from Earth. This again represents “big science” and would involve tel-

tell us how the Universe began or how matter and energy – and the processes that connect them – appeared and evolved. While Newton’s glass prism or Galileo’s telescope might have made fundamental contributions to our basic understanding, studying nature at the temperatures and pressures of the early Universe requires machines and laboratories that involve hundreds of people across multiple countries, costing billions of dollars and requiring extreme precision or rare specialist environments. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that straddles the SwissFrench border is an example of modern “big science”. This 27-kilometre wide “atom smasher” collides particles at energies similar to those in the early Universe to break them apart and look at the most fundamental constituents of matter.

escopes with collecting areas ("eyeballs") up to 100 times larger than what exists today, costing billions of dollars and involving the commitment and investment of multiple countries. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will start construction in 2021 across two sites in Western Australia and the Republic of South Africa. The SKA will be the world’s largest astronomical facility, with hundreds of thousands of individual receivers covering millions of hectares connected by thousands of kilometres of fibre optics that feed computers larger than anything available today. To achieve all of this requires innovation to meet the “big challenges” but also an environment that is free from the radio noise that would block the faint signals from the early Universe like, the way clouds often prevent us from seeing

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the stars. The abundance of isolation in the West Australian desert persuaded the international community to build a major part of the SKA in Australia. This represents not only a significant and long-term investment in Australian jobs and capabilities but also an opportunity for Australian researchers, students and industries to be involved in a big science project that will require significant innovations, comparable to the opportunities afforded by the LHC. Projects like the LHC and SKA are international in scope. They require a special relationship between governments (e.g. a treaty, an intergovernmental organisation) that enables

large-scale, off-the-shelf investment, as well as innovation, produces a connectivity and bonding between the aims of science and industry. Finally, in the words of Douglas Adams, astronomy is “mostly harmless”. It is a pure science that addresses those fundamental questions that everyone wants answered. We all live under the same sky and the information that astronomy produces is made freely available to everyone. Astronomy is therefore a useful vehicle for building international bridges, enabling development in diverse and emerging nations, and sometimes providing a forum for constructive and collaborative dialogue in tense times.

a free flow of funds, people and equipment across international boundaries. These relationships build strong research and innovation networks that can evolve across multiple projects and strategic priorities, and will allow Australia to be a significant player on the international research stage. Big-science projects also form an ideal platform to join science and industry into an innovative ecosystem. The focus of a project on producing a machine to do science that needs

Australia is indeed a lucky country. Our ancient island continent provides us with a unique and special place from which to view the Universe. With our protection and support, those special qualities will continue to attract the investments of global big-science projects. Through these projects, Australia will grow as a research leader, a collaborative nexus for science and industry, and an environment in which we can produce world-leading Australian innovators and innovations.

Professor Peter Quinn FTSE, FASA is executive director of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

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PEOPLE FIRST: FUTUREPROOFING AUSTRALIA’S STEM WORKFORCE Australia’s emerging innovators and entrepreneurs need only expert guidance and the freedom to collaborate to help steer the country towards a better future. By Dr Marguerite Evans-Galea

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cience, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is core to ensuring that Australia’s health system and economy can successfully navigate challenges and continue to thrive in the context of a changing climate. STEM allows us to address the hard questions about ourselves and the world in which we live – including those we have yet to ask. More importantly, STEM also helps us identify, develop and implement the solutions. In the throes of the rapidly evolving ‘big data’ era, we have never had a clearer nano-to-macro scale view of the world than we have today. STEM will create entirely new jobs and exports, and an advanced manufacturing sector with strong capacity for sustainable growth. The lack of a skilled workforce and poor collaboration are significant barriers to innovation. Paradigm-shifting research and innovation takes time, and a highly skilled, diverse and interconnected workforce is requisite to the cutting-edge research and development we will look to for solutions. Sector-wide mentorship that connects tomorrow’s leaders in STEM with today’s influencers and decision-makers will increase knowledge-sharing, idea-exchange and workforce mobility. Importantly, it will foster a culture of collaboration and innovation in Australia. This will require a coordinated, integrated strategy to connect students and graduates with

a range of professionals across the innovation pipeline, strengthen their understanding of the broader ecosystem, develop their professional skills and introduce them to a suite of careers. With visionary leadership and strategic investment, STEM will strengthen Australia’s health and economy and create jobs well into the 21st century. People make research and innovation happen In Australia, we graduate approximately 10,000 PhDs every year, and two-thirds of these are in STEM disciplines. Clearly, not all of these graduates can become professors in academia, and increasingly PhDs are finding employment at the highest levels of organisations in the public and private sectors. Universities and research institutes are now developing career information sessions and skills workshops to increase their graduates’ employability. But Australia’s future STEM leaders must also commit and invest in themselves. Their intellect, initiative and technical expertise are clear since they are doing a PhD. But students and early-career researchers also need to devote time to developing their interpersonal skills, honing their transferable professional skills, and establishing an entrepreneurial mindset – and they must be encouraged and allowed to do so. When you ask a researcher why they pursued

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a STEM education, they will often reply that they wanted to make a difference, help others and contribute to the greater good. When you ask an industry leader, many will say exactly the same. The fundamental drivers between these two groups remain the same, even after decades in their chosen STEM career, providing common ground for a mentoring partnership to flourish. Mentoring Australia’s workforce at scale The Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering created the Industry Mentoring Network in STEM (IMNIS). IMNIS is an industry-engagement initiative that breaks down barriers, enhances professional skills, extends networks and increases understanding of industry careers and the STEM sector beyond academia. All IMNIS programs around Australia offer a one-year mentoring opportunity, with each mentee paired with their own industry mentor. A number of networking events are hosted throughout the year so mentors and mentees from each state can meet and connect. Industry leaders encourage mentees to extend their professional skills and capabilities, and to think outside the square; to take charge of their future and be more strategic in their career. Mentees drive the partnership and identify the goals they want to achieve during the program. IMNIS actively seeks a diverse cohort of mentors who are inclusive leaders. Mentors lead by example and take the time to understand their mentee’s situation and the context of their research. Their primary motivation is to "give back" and they volunteer their time, energy and expertise to support and empower a PhD student or early-career researcher for one year. Mentors are committed and celebrate the success and achievement of their mentees, while holding their mentees and themselves to high standards. The value and impact of mentoring is frequently underestimated. For the first time since IMNIS piloted in 2015, the academy surveyed mentee alumni to determine if IMNIS had influenced their career trajectory since completing the program. All alumni respondents (n=135) were PhD students during their IMNIS program and just over half have now completed their PhD. The survey showed most IMNIS alumni

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recognise there are viable careers in industry. The majority said IMNIS influenced them either to consider or actively pursue a role in business or industry, with 17 per cent already working in those sectors. Only one in ten said they wanted to stay in academic research long term. Importantly, the majority of alumni said IMNIS influenced them to want to collaborate with business or industry. An additional 16 per cent said they are now actively collaborating with industry. Only three per cent said they did not want to collaborate with industry at all. IMNIS also influenced the direction of the respondents’ research. One third of alumni said IMNIS revealed novel ideas or inspired them to pursue new directions in their research, with a small number working on an entirely new project and more than ten percent taking their current research in a new direction. Approximately one-third stated IMNIS had no influence. The majority of IMNIS alumni stated they were keen to do an internship outside of academia as part of their IMNIS program. This aligns with the feedback in national program surveys, in which most mentees said they gained the skills and knowledge to attain an internship or job in industry, as well as to engage and collaborate with industry, but could not put this new knowledge immediately into practice. IMNIS breaks down barriers and fosters enduring connections between professionals and researchers in industry and academia. Most IMNIS alumni have remained in contact with the industry mentor in the last five years. Industry engagement through mentoring is fostering a culture shift towards industry-academia collaborations and innovation. IMNIS shifts perspectives, increases understanding of the key drivers in each sector and highlights the different roles across the innovation pipeline. IMNIS also allows industry leaders to see the potential value that today’s PhD graduates can bring to their organisation and the STEM ecosystem generally. Connecting for impact To excel in science and innovation, Australia needs a major culture shift. While we are internationally competitive in research, numerous reports show Australia ranks in the bottom half of OECD countries when it comes to university-industry collaborations – not just large businesses, but small-to-medium enterprises, as well.

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Fundamental, pre-clinical, translational and applied research are all vital to Australia’s health system and economy. Everyone in Australia benefits and our research contributes globally. The Australian Research Council’s Engagement and Impact Assessment Report, 2018/19, showed that most Australian universities can further improve the strategic planning and development of high-impact research, as well as research translation to social and economic benefits, especially in interacting with end-users. Australia’s academic institutions are starting to connect more effectively both internally and externally. The breadth and scale of interdisciplinary collaborative projects span international borders, and require a diverse set of skills and expertise, terabytes of data and years of research. Research programs operate on a start-up model as basic, translational and applied research teams synergise with their innovation experts toward a common goal. We can harness the full potential of our research workforce and energise innovation by fostering a culture that values all types of research – from fundamental research through to research that translates discoveries to product, practice and policy. To facilitate this culture shift, we need to provide researchers with the necessary skills and know-how, as well as the opportunities to develop. Young researchers are ready to engage and hungry to learn, and must be encouraged to do both. When collaborations and networks are supported, and resources are pooled and shared, cross-fertilisation of knowledge, workforce mobility and skills exchange not only increases productivity but, importantly, yields the best ideas and innovations. It also streamlines testing, translation and commercialisation, meaning faster implementation. By opening the ivory tower and investing in systematic structures to enhance industry-academia engagement, mentoring and collaboration, Australia will be able to respond to any crisis with resilience and innovation.

Dr Marguerite Evans-Galea AM is executive director of the Industry Mentoring Network in STEM, cofounder of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering and CEO of Women in STEMM Australia.

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COURAGE AND COMMERCIALISATION Our science cannot be a raw commodity, we need to apply it commercially to see its true value. By Dr Larry Marshall, Chief Executive, CSIRO

ustralia is at an interesting time in our history in terms of innovation. 30 years of economic growth have lulled us into a false sense of security, and over that time business investment in R&D has fallen. In fact, the rate of Australian innovation has been declining consistently since the Global Financial Crisis. But as we stare down a pandemic-induced recession, we are forced to face some hard truths: 1) Our economy was slowing even before COVID-19; 2) We desperately need to create new industries and reinvent old ones to grow out of recession and secure our future prosperity; and 3) We need to fire-up the Australian commercialisation engine that’s been sputtering and stalling for decades, and get it running like a dream. But is that just a dream? Australia has great research capability and potential to lead in future industries, but we have to get better at translating that research into impact – putting a real solution into the hands of real people who will use it to solve a real problem. And that impact needs to deliver growth here in Australia. If we don’t then our science will be a raw commodity, shipped offshore to be commercialised there, not here; to grow the economy there, not here; to grow jobs there, not here. Having lived for 30 years in the valley of death that separates an idea from impact, the places that do this well have three things in common – speed, market vision, and the courage to pick winners and bet the farm on the outcome. The scariest big bets are on markets that don’t even exist yet, but they are often

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

the game changers. China made bold investments in high risk markets that didn’t exist – like solar and optical communications – and today China owns those markets. They picked winners, invested heavily, and created a new market. Silicon Valley too leads with market and isn’t afraid to back one that doesn’t exist yet. We are willing to adopt the innovations from across the seas but lack an appetite for risk or investment in our own innovations. This is the first key part to the commercialisation engine – if we aren’t willing to take a risk on being first in the world, then we will more likely be last. Innovation is a winner-takes-all sport. The second part is differentiation. We are still a small population, but we are a smart one. We cannot compete on size or scale – our future must be about differentiation. Science has the power to reinvent our industries from producing raw commodities to instead creating high-value exports that differentiate our industries and grow our economy. For example, we’ve been turning mineral sands worth only pennies per pound into unique Titanium ink worth hundreds of dollars per kilogram, and using that ink to 3D print custom biomedical devices that save lives, which are priceless. When we add value from our intellect, we can transform a basic commodity that competes only on price into a unique product that drives higher price, higher profit, and higher wages. The last part to the commercialisation engine is partnership and collaboration. Industry partnership is the accelerant we

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Customised sternum and partial ribcage made from 3D printed titanium and combined with Anatomics’ ‘PoreStar’ technology, developed with CSIRO.

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need to turn research into impact. Without it, CSIRO could not have produced many of the innovative products used by Australians every day – like Aerogard, long-wear contact lenses, or “Softly” woollens detergent – all of these needed an industry partner to get them off the ground. More recently, we’ve been focussing on building the value chain to export clean liquid hydrogen. We started with the customer, both to convince ourselves it could be a real market, and to understand what would differentiate Australian Hydrogen from a commodity. But the big breakthrough came when Fortescue stepped up to produce hydrogen domestically, and partner with us to develop and commercialise our metal membrane technology. Now we are working towards a future where we save the $170 billion of export dollars we already create from coal, LNG and iron ore by building an Australian hydrogen industry to reduce the emissions but not the profits from a key pillar of our economy. As brilliant as our science and engineering is – it doesn’t amount to anything until industry is willing to bet on it and partner to

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produce commercial outcomes that create jobs for Australians. Our reliance on Aussie ingenuity may have waned over the last few decades, but there’s nothing like a crisis to snap us back into action. Ironically, this recession may be the greatest opportunity for innovation-led growth we’ve had in decades. To fuel this growth, CSIRO is co-creating a program of missions that bring together broad coalitions of partners across government, research and industry to address challenges like future industries, the health and wellbeing of 25 million Australians, and the impacts of climate change. By partnering on missions, we will enable new markets for Australia and reinvent old ones. We will differentiate Australia’s products and services to secure our place in the world, and we will collaborate generously to create impact at scale. This is the new model that’s needed to get Australia’s commercialisation engine singing again – the courage to bet on new markets, the intellect to differentiate our offering, and the strong network of collaborators to create impact.

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CONNECTION, COLLABORATION, COMPLETION To solve the biggest problems facing Australia, it is crucial that we build broad coalitions with different expertise. By Dr Cathy Foley, Chief Scientist, CSIRO “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” Harry S. Truman, 33rd president of the United States.

hen I think about collaboration, these are the words I find ringing in my ears. And they are words that have been demonstrated to be true by the incredible collaborative achievements we’ve seen recently in the fight against COVID-19, where competition and silos have been removed and replaced with a common goal. We’ve seen efforts to find a vaccine spark unprecedented levels of collaboration both domestically and internationally, driving vaccine development at breakneck speed and alongside critical advances in detection and therapeutic treatments. To put that in perspective, in a matter of months we already have vaccine candidates that have progressed through pre-clinical trials to Phase 1, 2 and even Phase 3 human trials, when this process can take a decade. On personal protection equipment like face masks, we’ve seen collaboration between industry, research and government to prioritise screening candidate materials for local production. As Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO has also opened Australia’s first national testing facility so that single-use surgical face

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masks can be accredited here instead of being sent overseas. And we’ve seen efforts to “flatten the curve” drive community collaboration and goodwill reminiscent of wartimes, with collaboration again driving flexible approaches to working, digital transformation changing business models, and public services adjusting to support communities into a new normal. If we can bottle this level of collaboration and apply it to forging our path to recovery and resilience, there’s almost nothing we can’t achieve. This is important, because along with the risk of a pandemic, there are some other big challenges we need to address to secure our future, and they are much bigger than any one organisation can tackle alone. Four years ago CSIRO went through a highly consultative process to identify six great challenges we face as a nation: food security and quality; health and wellbeing; a resilient and valuable environment; clean energy and resources; future industries; and a secure Australia and region. These are big, broad themes, but you don’t need to look any further than the drought, bushfires and pandemic of 2019/20 to see that they aren’t just abstract ideas, and that we can’t solve them in a segmented or isolated way.

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CSIRO, University of Queensland, CSL develop processes to scale-up, produce and purify the COVID-19 vaccine candidate

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The scale of these challenges require a different kind of response to collaboration and problem solving. They require large-scale, collaborative research programs to address – programs that cross borders, disciplines and industries. What has worked for us in the past is not going to work going forward – we need a new model for collaboration. It is no longer the age of institutions; it is the era of networks. What we see working so well in the world’s response to COVID-19 is a strong network of organisations working together to achieve a common goal, regardless of who gets the credit. It is a mission-directed response to addressing a pressing issue in a focussed, collaborative and problem-solving way. Outside of COVID-19, CSIRO has always created deep and broad networks to deliver solutions for the nation. For example, we have a national climate centre, an artificial intelligence network, a drought network, and a space network both nationally and internationally. More recently, we’ve been part of a dynamic response network around bushfires after the catastrophic fire events of last season. We are now forming networks around a new

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program of missions to help us accelerate the pace and scale at which we can address our six great challenges. Missions are major collaborative research programs aimed at making significant breakthroughs in areas like antimicrobial resistance, building resilience to drought, ending plastic waste in our environment, and creating a clear pathway to net zero emissions. Crucially, these are not just CSIRO’s missions. They are being co-created and co-developed with government, research and industry. They won’t all be led by CSIRO, but they will all have the benefit of the collective investment and expertise of a strong network of collaborators. For the ecosystem to be most effective, we need each organisation to play its role in moving an invention from a researcher through the value chain with industry partners until it becomes an innovation that can have impact in our world. Collaborative networks are the way that we will create impact from our science at the pace and scale we need to secure our future. The challenges we face are far too vast and complex to be approached in any other way. It doesn’t matter who gets the credit – it only matters that we solve the problem.

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AI RESHAPING INDUSTRY From systems embedded into smartphones to detect sk in cancer, to autonomous cars with driver fatigue detection and pedestrian avoidance systems, artif icial intelligence (A I) is rapidly transforming the world we k now. By Jon Whittle, Director, CSIRO’s Data61

I uses data-driven algorithms to autonomously solve problems and perform tasks without human guidance, enabling productivity gains for almost every industry. In fact, the adoption of AI is estimated to be worth $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, presenting significant opportunities for Australia, enabling us to perform tasks faster, safer and cheaper. However, as the technology leverages data to create algorithms, ultimately, it can only be as good as the data. While the algorithms that underpin the technology have been around for decades, exponentially growing volumes of data, as well as cheap and readily available computing infrastructure, now mean it can operate at scale and speed like never before, creating a host of applications across multiple sectors. Take healthcare - research has shown that artificial intelligence can reduce costs, improve wellbeing and make quality care accessible for all Australians. It has also become a key part of everyday food security and quality, energy resources, future industries, transport and infrastructure, playing a key role in transforming economies, unlocking new social and environmental value as well as accelerating scientific discovery. In 2019, the Australian government

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released its Artificial Intelligence Technology Roadmap, which was developed in partnership with CSIRO’s Data61 to identify strategies to help develop a national AI capability to boost the productivity of Australian industry, create jobs and improve the quality of life for current and future generations. Looking at the use of this technology within key Australian industries, it’s clear that some have been more enthusiastic adopters than others. In 2019, the introduction of a new global accounting standard IFRS16 required reporting of all leases, affecting $US3 trillion of assets. Legal and accounting firms worldwide were challenged by this new requirement to change their practices to lease abstraction, a time-consuming, error-prone task that manually extracts key information from a lease contract for reporting. Through a CSIRO KickStart project, natural language processing approaches, based on machine learning, were used to enable software to learn from large datasets of leases, find the patterns in the contextualised text data and code the data for use downstream. This resulted in the development of Accurait, a world-first automated solution for accurately extracting, storing and classifying information from commercial leases and exporting it to other management systems, including account books.

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Kakadu Park Rangers Serena McCartney (left) and Annie Taylor (right) use Artificial Intelligence to manage environmental threats.

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This technology has since been trialed and demonstrated on more than two million documents, driving productivity through higher rates of error detection, faster turnaround times and lower labour costs. Adoption of artificial intelligence is not just limited to industry. We’re also seeing it have a significant impact on our environment and the natural world, specifically Australia’s National Parks. In Kakadu National Park, concerns were raised when para grass, an invasive weed, began choking precious wetlands. The impact of this was vast. It began displacing native plants and reducing the habitat of magpie geese, a dwindling population considered to be a key indicator of ‘healthy country’ by traditional owners. Park rangers were struggling to monitor and manage the weed and had limited resources. In a bid to protect the natural habitat, researchers at CSIRO designed an AI tool, which, paired with Indigenous

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Knowledge, improved management of the area, resulting in the magpie geese population increasing from 50 to 1,800 birds — a 3,500 per cent increase. Such examples of artificial intelligence serve as a reminder of the good this technology can do — creating value that didn’t previously exist and profound benefits to the economy, society and environment. While this technology does indeed have the potential to drastically reshape industries, social and economic structures, the focus should be on creating real value. If we lay the right foundations, AI has the potential to boost productivity, grow the economy, generate jobs and create entirely new industries.

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MANUFACTURING AUSTRALIA’S FUTURE Australia is shifting its gears towards high-value, custom manufacturing that leverages its people, environment, and international reputation. By Marcus Zipper, Director, Manufacturing, CSIRO

he COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the fragility of global supply chains and the importance of Australia’s domestic, import and export industries. There have been fervent calls to “bring back manufacturing” and the term ‘sovereign capability’ springs up regularly as pundits fear an end to international trade. I refuse to imagine a world so dire. With that in mind, manufacturing is not dead. Far from it. Australian manufacturing employs nearly 900,000 people and has a Gross Value Added (GVA) of $26.1B (5.5% of GDP). But the industry has changed significantly in the past 20 years. It’s no longer dominated by relatively unskilled workers on assembly lines contributing to something big, like a car. Robotics have – as many foresaw – replaced the need for human assembly lines in many cases, yet nearly 7% of Australia’s total workforce still work in manufacturing. This is because it has evolved and created a wealth of new opportunities. Jobs in manufacturing now come in all shapes and sizes: scientists, engineers, computer analysts, data technicians, designers, machine operators, creative thinkers and entrepreneurs. Australian businesses are adapting and thriving by

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implementing advanced manufacturing technologies, systems and processes to supply high-value customised solutions on a global scale. Access to global markets, digitalisation and an increased demand for bespoke and complex solutions are helping to overcome Australian manufacturing’s challenges of a relatively small and dispersed market, geographical isolation and high labour costs. Businesses are leveraging both our natural resources (people and environment) and our international reputation. We’re seeing some of the sharpest minds work in fields like additive manufacturing, sensors, data analytics, robotics and automation. We’re developing environmentally sustainable energy solutions and we have a reputation for quality and safety which will continue to ensure our products appeal internationally. CSIRO, universities, and others working in the research and development (R&D) and innovation space play a vital role in growing and strengthening Australia’s manufacturing sector. To continue to grow, Australian manufacturing needs a thriving value chain powered by innovative research and development that strengthens Australian businesses and enables them to compete within local and global markets.

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R&D helps businesses to innovate by using advanced technology and robotics, materials, systems and processes to deliver products that meet the needs of customers in local and global markets. It connects businesses with excellent science and new technologies that improve health, safety and environmental outcomes to drive prosperity across the manufacturing sector. We should still focus on what we’re good at and drive innovation but be prepared to adapt, to be agile when our situation changes. Global supply chains will continue to provide

our manufacturers with access to markets in other countries and these networks will continue to provide products to Australians. But we need the manufacturing infrastructure to be able to pivot to meet needs when supply chains are disrupted. It’s true, manufacturing is undergoing a resurgence. But it’s not returning to the productions lines of last century, it’s shifting gears to become a high value, high tech, high skilled sector creating new businesses and industries in Australia.

CSIRO senior experimental scientist, Mel Dell’Olio, with fire-resistant panels for ships, developed with Tasmanian small business CBG Systems.

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FUELLING OUR HYDROGEN FUTURE Investing in infrastructure is the only way Australia can meet the defined global demand for hydrogen. Dr Patrick Hartley, Leader CSIRO Hydrogen Industry Mission

or something that hasn’t always grabbed the headlines, or shouted from the top of your social media feed, hydrogen is suddenly in the news. I don’t just mean overseas, or among your science-minded friends, but at the front of the local 6pm news. It’s threatening to become downright mainstream, a staple of public discourse, which for me as CSIRO’s hydrogen industry mission leader is interesting indeed. I’ve been asked if Australia is a leader in hydrogen, or did we miss the starter’s gun as critics accused us of with wind and solar? I tell them we could have started more quickly, but we’re catching up swiftly and emerging as leaders on several fronts. Now there is a real thrust for hydrogen to compete economically in Australia in applications such as integration into gas networks, industrial processes and transport within the next five years. At the heart of the mission I lead is a passion for the science of hydrogen, and its game-changing potential to secure the future of our energy system, while steering us towards net zero emissions. But while CSIRO is crucial to the gestation of the hydrogen industry, its maturation won’t happen in a vacuum. Industry and government are key actors as well. As things stand in 2020, most of the barriers to Australia’s market activation are in the lack of supporting infrastructure help build hydrogen demand, or the cost of hydrogen supply. Both of these can be overcome by sustained, targeted investment along the value chain from government and the public sector.

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Ultimately, it will be industry that makes this happen. In thirty years, the federal government sees hydrogen as an $11 billion-a-year industry in Australia, responsible for 7,600 jobs. Debate about the detail notwithstanding, hydrogen is winning support across the country at the federal, state and territory levels. I have some theories on why. One is that this technology offers a pathway to emissions reduction, but also to new economic opportunities. Based on the modelling work which we’ve done, it can become economically sustainable relatively quickly, as long as governments and industry continue to build on the momentum which has started. The long-term goal is to achieve this through the electrochemical splitting of water (electrolysis) which, when combined with renewable energy produces ‘green hydrogen’ with almost no greenhouse gas emissions. While this new technology ramps up, producing so called ‘blue’ hydrogen using fossil fuels in combination with carbon capture and storage could fast-track hydrogen market development while at the same time significantly reducing emissions. As you continue to hear about hydrogen in the news, and see your first hydrogen powered cars, buses and trucks in years to come, our CSIRO hydrogen industry mission will be there helping Australia hit specific targets, like those in the National Hydrogen Roadmap, and cultivate this exciting new industry that we believe will guide Australia into a low-emissions future.

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RECALIBRATING FOR THE INDUSTRIES OF THE FUTURE THE AI RACE: HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN HELP AUSTRALIA INNOVATE OUT OF RECESSION Professor Toby Walsh A RESILIENT DIGITAL AUSTRALIA Ken Boal GET READY FOR QUANTUM TECHNOLOGY Phil Morle TECHNOLOGY, INNOVATION AND THE NEW NORMAL Kim Krough Andersen AGILITY, CULTURE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP NEEDED Rick Mayhew LET’S GET SMARTER WITH DATA Robert Hillard BOUNCING BACK BETTER Ron Gauci DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION – WHAT MAKES SENSE FOR AUSTRALIA’S SPACE INDUSTRY Professor Russell Boyce SECURING SPACE Malcolm Davis BACKING AUSTRALIA’S VC FUNDED SPACE COMPANIES Adam Gilmour

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THE AI RACE: HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CAN HELP AUSTRALIA INNOVATE OUT OF RECESSION Australia doesn’t need to win the AI race to access the untold possibilities of this next great leap. The country’s wealthiest players do, however, need to raise their game when it comes to converting AI research into society-changing application. By Professor Toby Walsh

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he space race began on the first Friday of October 1957. On that momentous day, Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, was lifted into low Earth orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Sputnik wasn’t much to look at – a polished metal sphere about the size of a basketball. All it could do was broadcast radio pulses from its four external antennas. But it was enough to wake the United States up to the threat of Russia’s technical prowess and set off the space race. This technological race would take man to the Moon, rovers to Mars, and spacecraft to every planet in the solar system. And it would gift humanity everything from integrated circuits to cordless power tools. The AI race does not have such a clear beginning. You might look to the famous Dartmouth Conference in 1956, the year before Sputnik lifted into space. Many of the founders of the field, like the late John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, came together that summer to kickstart research into

artificial intelligence. In advance of that meeting, McCarthy even coined the term “artificial intelligence” to describe their ultimate scientific goal. But progress in building AI proved more difficult and challenging than those founders expected, and it was another 50 or more years before it came onto many of our radars. One candidate for the event that announced the start of the AI Race was the victory of an AI program, AlphaGo, in March 2016. The program was playing against one of the world’s best players at the ancient Chinese game of Go. In this case, it wasn’t the United States that awoke but the East. And it wasn’t a race to the Moon that was kickstarted but a race for dominance in the next great economic revolution. Shortly after this victory for AI (and the corresponding defeat of humanity), the Chinese government announced an ambitious plan to lead the world in AI. The Chinese plan estimates that by 2030 AI will contribute RMB 1 trillion (more

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than $US150bn) directly to China’s industrial output, and RMB10 trillion (more than $US$1.5tr) indirectly via related industries. How could a computer winning a simple board game have such an impact on China’s plans? It’s important to understand that Go has a special importance in China. The game was invented there over 2000 years ago. It is a game of mind-bending complexity. There are more possible games of Go than atoms in the Universe. Indeed, AlphaGo’s victory was sufficiently “upsetting” that the Chinese authorities banned live-streaming of the games. China’s AI plan does little to hide China’s ambition to use AI to gain economic and military dominance over the world. As Chinese President Xi Jinping reported to the 19th Party Congress in October 2017, China aims to become the “science and technology superpower” of the coming century. Many other countries have responded to the Chinese plan. Not surprisingly, the US has a plan to counter the threat of China winning the AI race and has announced billions of dollars in federal funding to back this up. Another to have responded is the UK, considered by many people to be the birthplace of the field of AI. The British mathematician Alan Turing wrote one of the first scientific papers about building intelligent machines. And the UK continues today to be a major player in AI research, with the country’s Sector Deal looking to spend £1bn on keeping the UK in this race. Many other nations have ambitious and costly AI plans in place. France’s plan will cost €1.5b . Germany plans to spend €3bn. Even India is looking to invest around US$0.5bn in AI. Sadly, the Australian government still has made only modest commitments to this area. There is little doubt that AI is transforming the current economic, political and societal landscape. A study by PwC in 2017 estimated that global GDP could be up to 14 per cent higher in 2030 as a result of AI. This is equivalent to an additional $15.7 trillion in inflation-adjusted terms. This would likely make it one of the largest opportunities for innovation in the next decade. There is plenty of historical evidence that economic shocks, like that triggered by the pandemic, tend to hasten the adoption of innovative technologies. It therefore seems likely AI is even more important now for our future economic prosperity.

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In addition to economic growth, AI is likely to have a significant impact on employment as it takes over more and more tasks in the workplace. A famous (and somewhat disputed) 2013 study from the University of Oxford estimated that 47 per cent of jobs in the US were at risk of automation. A similar study for Australia estimated around 45 per cent of jobs were at risk here. In 2017, I was tasked by the Chief Scientist of Australia, at the request of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, to co-chair a panel of experts from the various learned academies to undertake a horizon-scanning exercise for the Australian Council of Learned Academics. Our taskforce projected how AI is going to impact society over the next decade or so. Our goal was to identify how Australia might best respond to the opportunities and challenges that AI offers. Our report looked beyond the usual economic concerns. It argued that AI offers an opportunity to improve our wellbeing: economic, environmental and societal. The economic opportunity is, of course, to improve productivity, reduce labour costs, promote health and safety. But AI can do so much more. It provides an opportunity to make society more inclusive. These are the very technologies that will give hearing to the deaf, sight to the blind, mobility to those with disabilities. And these are also the technologies to help us act more sustainably, to heat and cool homes more efficiently, to feed populations more economically, to protect ecosystems and wildlife. Then there is the burgeoning research area using AI to tackle the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. Organisations like the AI for Good Foundation are applying AI to help solve social, economic and environmental problems. The foundation promotes a common vision for the AI research community, provides fora in which researchers, practitioners, policymakers and the public can come together, and offers incentives and funding for AI research outside traditional areas like defence and advertising and towards socially beneficial ends. I have talked about this opportunity as the AI race. And with giants like the US and China investing billions of dollars in winning that race, it’s hard to imagine that a small country like

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Australia has any chance of winning. Indeed, Kai-Fu Lee, an AI expert and former executive at Apple, Microsoft and Google, has suggested that even Europe isn’t in the race for third place. It is, however, wrong to think of this as a race with a single winner.

There is, of course, a scientific race to build AI. And as with any scientific race, only the first get the credit. But the race to apply and develop AI is one that the whole planet can win. A good analogy is the race 100 or so years ago to develop and apply electricity. It is true that people like Edison and Westinghouse received the initial patents. And it was their companies that initially gained many of the economic benefits. But today, electricity is used by companies and individuals around the world, many of them here in

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Australia. It is all of us who share the benefit of the electricity race. AI will be similar. It will be a pervasive technology like electricity: in every home, office and factory. And all of us can share the benefits. Finland’s AI plan is a fine case in point. As a small country, Finland doesn’t have the resources to compete with the US and China and win the scientific race to build AI. But the Finnish AI plan sets out the more realistic goal of being a winner in the race to apply AI. Australia should have similar aims to Finland. It would be irresponsible not to identify the risks that AI poses alongside the opportunities. These risks break down into economic, political and societal. Economic risks: Concerns about the economic impact of AI have often focused on issues like employment and inequality in developed nations. Will robots take over many jobs? Will AI increase the inequality that is already fracturing these countries? More work is needed to understand the risks and develop strategies to mitigate against them. However, it is already clear that doing nothing is not an option. AI is coming, and nations like Australia need to prepare economically. Political risks: Democratic institutions around the world are under siege. Trust in politicians and the political process is at an alltime low. And technologies like AI appear to be amplifying these changes. We see AI, for instance, being used to micro-target voters as well as to generate deepfakes of audio and video that never took place. Technology companies are unsurprisingly under increasing pressure to address misinformation and polarisation on their platforms. Societal risks Novelists like Orwell and Huxley have painted pictures of dystopian futures that AI could take us towards. This is suddenly becoming apparent on a wide scale. AI-driven face-recognition software can, for example, be used to surveil and oppress populations on an unprecedented scale. AI could impact on many other human rights, even the right to life if we see AI being used on the battlefield to decide who lives and who dies. Even when restricted to large technology companies, we see AI driving societal outcomes that are highly undesirable, such as filter bubbles and radicalism.

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State of Our Innovation Nation No nation can sit on its hands and ignore the coming changes. There are perhaps half-a-dozen actions that a nation like Australia could take today that would ensure the AI race improves the wellbeing of all of its citizens. Indeed, Australia is arguably better placed than many to take advantage of these changes. Education Finland is aiming to teach 20 per cent of its population (1 million out of a population of just over 5 million) about the basics of AI with an online course, “Elements of AI”. In its first year, they have already reached 1 per cent of the population. If Australia wants its citizens to profit from the coming AI race, it should have a similar ambition to equip them with the necessary skills. In addition to lifting skills broadly, strategic investment in research, especially in postgraduate scholarships, could help provide valuable technical expertise. It is not well known that there are only around 10,000 PhDs in AI worldwide. A modest investment could therefore have significant returns. Government Perhaps the institution best placed to profit from AI is government. It has the challenging job of delivering services efficiently and effectively to its citizens on a scale that is larger than any commercial operation. It collects more data than almost any other institution and often is more trusted by citizens than any other institution. Applying AI to deliver better services such as healthcare, education and welfare starts with data. In fact, with universal health care and education, Australia is better placed than many nations to collect the data that will drive better delivery of these services. It may also help for government to assemble a “tiger team” with strong skills in AI and outside the conventional departmental structures. Regulation: Nations and supranational bodies like the EU are starting to regulate the use of AI. It is not enough to let the market decide how technologies like AI impact on our lives. We can already see problems starting to develop.

Every nation state needs to consider where it might usefully regulate these technologies. For instance, most countries have strict rules on the use of conventional media like TV for political purposes, especially in the run-up to elections. Social media is arguably even more persuasive, and yet is much less regulated. Most countries hold soap adverts on TV to higher standards than the political messages distributed by social media. Perhaps micro-targeting of political adverts should be banned? If you have a political message, you can target voters just on age (are they old enough to vote?) and location (are they in my voting district?). This would maintain freedom of speech, yet might help prevent the polarisation we see today. Diplomacy Perhaps the most challenging area in which China plans to develop AI is on the battlefield. Over 30 nations have called at the UN for a pre-emptive ban on the use of fully autonomous weapons. Australia, with its strong ties to the US and the UK, would be well placed to take moral leadership on this issue and help ensure the world’s security is not destabilised by the introduction of such weapons. The world will be a very unsafe place if such weapons turned up in hot spots like the China/India border or the DMZ between North and South Korea. Now is the time to raise the alarm. Like in a number of other scientific areas, Australia punches well above its weight in AI research. It ranks among the top ten nations worldwide for the quality and quantity of its AI research. However, it lacks the strategic investment from government and other large players to turn this into application. Australia is currently being outspent by many smaller nations including Canada, Denmark and Singapore. Some of these nations are spending multiples of what Australia has committed to invest in AI over the next five years. As the government looks to set priorities on spending to restart and grow the economy after the shock caused by the pandemic, it is hard to imagine an area more deserving of attention than the AI race.

Toby Walsh is a Laureate Fellow, Scientia Professor of AI at the University of New South Wales, and of the Australian Academy of Science. He has authored two books on AI for a general audience, the most recent titled 2062: The World that AI Made.

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A RESILIENT DIGITAL AUSTRALIA Digital readiness is a defining characteristic of successful 21st century societies, and where we choose to invest is key. By Ken Boal

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igital readiness is defined as how well-positioned a country, state or territory is to benefit from the digital economy across seven components: basic needs, human capital, business and government investment, ease of doing business, startup environment, technology adoption and technology Infrastructure. Understanding our digital readiness supports decision-making in key areas where further investment or acceleration of capabilities may be required. Cisco released its second Australian Digital Readiness Index in 2020, providing a snapshot of Australia’s evolving digital capability at the state and territory level, and acting as a guide for where investments are needed. Australia remains among the forefront of digitally transformed nations, ranking 12th across the globe in terms of digital readiness (according to Cisco’s 2019 Global Digital Readiness Index). It follows Iceland and Luxembourg, and stands among Singapore, the US and European nations. Little did we know that two years later the value of those investments would be repaid many times over by providing Australia with a robust and comprehensive digital capability that has played a critical role in our response to the COVID-19 crisis. While the pandemic has exacted a high economic and social toll, its consequences would have been much greater had Australia not already made significant investments in digital readiness. For example, the deployment of high-speed national network infrastructure has meant many organisations can keep their staff both safe and productive by enabling them to work from home. That same infrastructure provides a vital

connection for thousands of students who participate in remote learning and has become the backbone for remote health consultations, keeping many frontline responders safe. Likewise, investment in digital skills has allowed businesses and government agencies to accelerate their rollout of digital services, including bricks-and-mortar restaurants and retailers who have switched to e-commerce to continue trading. The investments will play a vital role in helping Australia navigate through the post-COVID-19 world, but further work is needed if we are to achieve the productivity uplifts necessary to bring Australia out of recession and ensure we remain competitive. Cisco’s global research has always shown a high correlation between digital readiness and economic prosperity, and other nations are stepping up their investments accordingly.

This infrastructure will deliver to its full potential only if we invest in building the skills of our people to use, create and defend digital services.

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In addition to the need for ongoing support of the higher education sector, Cisco has joined forces with TAFE Directors Australia and our partner Optus to call on the Australian Government to assess the growth in technology-intensive jobs requiring sub-degree-level qualifications in order to help the TAFE sector more rapidly prepare for, and respond to, anticipated demand. We have also called for funding of the development and delivery of micro-credential digital programs to help in the reskilling and upskilling of workers displaced by recent developments. Australian industry has a desperate and growing need for people equipped for a dynamic, digitised world, including having general digital skills that help businesses to move up the value chain as industries further automate. Development of "blue tech" or digital trade skills will be vital to meeting those needs. Critically, we must also be sure not to lose sight of the need for the outcomes of these investments to be shared equitably across Australia. Equitable access to digital services and training represents the 21st century equivalent of the age-old Australian concept of giving everyone a "fair go". The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the importance of continued investment to ensure those communities that are least served digitally today do not experience additional hardship from future events. It is important that we don’t become complacent about Australia’s digital readiness. The index highlights the need for accelerating

Australian industry has a desperate and growing need for people equipped for a dynamic, digitised world new investment with a focus on improving Australia’s global competitiveness and bridging the divide between states to build further societal resilience. Growing digital divides within and between states need to be addressed for Australia to unleash the totality of its digital potential. Government, industry and academia will have key roles to play in empowering our country to become a global digital leader and build resilience for our economy. The example of rapidly emerging countries such as Singapore, which ranked first in the global Index, should help Australia set its ambition for digital readiness. Digital readiness is the key to economic prosperity, but it is also critical to building societal resilience. Only by continuing to invest in our digital capabilities can we maximise the benefits in the good times and ensure we are best placed to manage the future crises that will inevitably come our way.

Ken Boal is vice president, Cisco, Australia & New Zealand.

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GET READY FOR QUANTUM TECHNOLOGY As massively as computer technology has advanced in 70-odd years, that could be small fry compared with what’s possible if quantum computing delivers on its promise. Investors need to back it – then hang on for the ride.

By Phil Morle

uantum computing technology is transitioning from the lab into industry. Some businesses are already working with early quantum computing companies to prepare for the inbound possibilities to come. Over the next ten years, these businesses will discover advantages that will set them apart from the competition. It will happen quietly as they learn how to use a technology that has exponential performance. For years, the outcomes will be unimpressive. But one day a tipping point will be reached. And for certain types of problems, quantum computers will outperform classical computers, allowing business to deliver solutions that the world has not seen before. If you are in an industry that can benefit from quantum technology, we hope to convince you that now is the time to start getting ready. Imagining the opportunity It is hard to see technology leaps coming. In the

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19th century, few people thought there were better means of production than people making things by hand and horses helping out when more power was needed. Then along came the steam engine and 100 years later, in Britain where it all began, GDP doubled per capita. Certainly, the companies that made steam engines had created a new industry – an industry that sold machines. But that was nothing compared with the industries around them that were fueled. By the early 1900s, the internal-combustion engine had replaced the steam engine as the most widely applied power-generating system. Not only was it more thermally efficient, it provided a light, compact, self-contained power plant. The world started to move faster. It could get more done with less. Quantum computing is going to drive a similar transformation. The CSIRO’s 2019 roadmap, “Growing Australia’s Quantum Technology Industry”, predicts that quantum computing

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could deliver $2.5bn per year to the Australian economy and 10,000 new jobs by 2040. But if we work together to build the industries that will rise around this new capability, then the opportunity to fuel the economic performance of Australian industry is far greater. Why Australia? The labs of Australia have been busily developing quantum capability for the past 25 years and we are now a leader in this field in terms of facilities and global talent. We have 22 quantum-related research institutions, including two centres of excellence dedicated to quantum technology and three more around quantum physics. These have made Australia an attractive destination for talent. As an industry emerges from the labs, we already have 14 quantum technology companies that have collectively raised more than $125m in the past two years. Australian businesses have exceptional global talent and capability with both commercial pull and government incentives to catalyse engagement. Can your industry be transformed by quantum technology? Quantum computing will deliver new and different computing capabilities to industry. It won’t be used to add up numbers faster and play video games. We’ll still use classical machines for that. But when it comes to calculating large complex systems, quantum will deliver new possibilities as the world needs computing to solve the next wave of problems. If your business could reach new heights through calculating complex systems, then it can probably benefit from quantum computing. But we need to get ready. We need a workforce that understands quantum systems and how to develop products on top of them. We need local hardware and software companies that build these products on our shores and with whom local industry can collaborate so we’re at the front of the discovery wave. We need to start now and build our capability as quantum advantage reveals itself.

Another known use case for quantum computing is the simulation of systems from nature. Some examples: simulation of proteins when developing new medicines; simulation of battery cells when developing batteries that age less; simulating electricity in cable to minimise energy loss; simulating new materials; sequencing genomes. In autonomous systems, quantum computers will watch transport systems and respond to thousands of events; they will find the optimum routes for delivery drivers. Some of these use cases could reach commercial viability in the next five-to-ten years, and companies that have this capability will have an advantage over their peers. How to get ready In the 1960s, no one could have imagined how we would use computers in our lives today. The same is true of tomorrow’s quantum computers. We have not even begun to imagine how these systems will be used. We don’t know what we don’t know. As businesses start to develop their quantum capability, they will discover unimagined new value. It is the matching of the new performance of these systems and the ingenuity of industry that will create untold opportunities for our economy. Business is already collaborating with our early quantum technology companies. The technology is breaking out of the lab into cloud services and hardware that Australian business can use. In most cases this work is not yet delivering commercial results, but it will. In the beginning these partnerships will be fumbling around buggy technology with no intuitive idea about how to apply it. But the capability of the people and the technology will grow, pathways will emerge and one day these companies will have "overnight" power in their hands. If you are a technology leader in finance, pharmaceuticals, advanced manufacturing, autonomy or defence, I suspect it is time to have a look at Australia’s young and exciting quantum industry, and then go say hello.

Phil Morle is a deep-tech venture capitalist, and partner at Main Sequence Ventures, an Australian-based VC firm attached to the CSIRO.

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TECHNOLOGY, INNOVATION AND THE NEW NORMAL The days of resisting or merely tolerating the spread of technology through our lives are over. Having had our eyes opened by the pandemic to technology’s virtually limitless potential, we need to steer Australia skilfully as it hurtles towards an ultra-connected future.

By Kim Krogh Andersen

he world changed in 2020. In the space of months, technology enabled much of life to go on in a way that would have been impossible just 20 years ago. From working, learning, socialising, shopping, eating, being informed and entertained, technology has become the enabling foundation of our lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has, in effect, thrust upon us a decade’s worth of technology disruption in a matter of months. Just like during other times of significant change, we have a rare opportunity to learn lessons, adapt to the new norm, and come out stronger. We should not miss this chance to ensure the pandemic is a catalyst for innovation towards creating a stronger, more resilient, more vibrant and better world. So, where are the opportunities for positive change? Most technologies are, to an extent, dual- or even multipurpose technologies. That means they can be used for bringing about positive change but may also have unintended consequences that need to be considered pre-deployment. The application of new solutions should be paired with sensible regulation that does not inhibit innovation or unnecessarily slow its pace and has the good of humanity at its core. There are several key opportunities that exist in two simple environments: inside of the home and outside. In the home A stable and fast internet connection has supported our working and learning from home during the day, with increased video streaming and gaming in the evenings. More Australians have realised the benefits of shopping for groceries and services online,

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with the demand for practically anything delivered online having skyrocketed. Even after COVID-19 passes, we expect many of these habits to remain and that Australians will have a better appreciation of good-quality connectivity throughout their homes. As cinemas and sporting stadiums fell silent, in-home entertainment came to the fore. Board games, video streaming and arts and crafts graced our home environments, with the uptake of video games dramatically accelerating in the first six months of COVID-19. Simultaneously, another type of gaming market is taking off: integrating gaming into the cloud. Cloud gaming will have all its processing done outside the home in the cloud and streamed to the device’s screen at home. This allows gamers to access higher quality gaming experiences than might otherwise be possible on their device. Cloud gaming will become increasingly important with the further rollout of 5G, where high quality gaming can be played inside or outside of the home and on low-powered devices, potentially transforming what we think of as the casual gaming experience. South Korea is leading the rest of the world in the intersection of gaming and 5G. The country was the first in the world to launch a commercial network in April 2019 and its largest telco, SK Telecom, was forecasting 6-7 million 5G subscribers by the end of 20201. South Korea is the fourth-largest mobile game market in the world, and more than half of its citizens play mobile games monthly. 2Korea is also arguably the birthplace of esports with the mainstream popularity of StarCraft. Computing devices are also getting more personal, and most of us have essentially become

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integrated with our personal technology without realising it – more than half of people sleep with their mobile phone within an arm’s reach, and with modern smart watches supporting our exercise habits and even monitoring sleep, we take them off only briefly for charging. There are even more devices coming to join the "BAN" – Body-Area Network. Smartphones and wearables either already are, or soon will be, complemented by "hearables" (smart headphones), smart glasses and even smart clothes that can provide a novel interface for input as well as tactile discreet feedback or with assistants driven by AI. We will start seeing more Australian households demanding faster internet plans to be able to support these now-mandatory services. Australia is currently at a mediocre 68th place in OECD’s global internet speed rankings, but with more fibre being laid out and faster consumer-grade broadband speeds of up to 1Gbps, and the potential of 5G home internet, the future is looking faster. There are plenty of international examples showing that even gigabit speeds will be utilised by consumers and will likely come to be considered the new normal. In one aspect of smart homes, science fiction has already come to life – many of us talk daily to our digital assistants, whether for simple tasks like setting a kitchen timer or playing music, or more complex tasks like setting up appointments or conducting phone conversations. While the increased presence at home will likely change the mix of smart-home solutions offered, the smarthome experience at its best will be one where the home itself takes care of optimising the comfort of its occupants. Out of the home Outside the home, we will task our voice-driven digital agents with other assignments. Bots are already capable of negotiating a better deal and can even try to get us out of a parking ticket. Soon they will manage our home’s utility contracts and find the best of everything according to our preferences – a personal concierge for everyone. During the pandemic the government encouraged Australians to download and use the COVIDSafe app in order to provide an easier way to automate contact tracing to reduce further infections. While its success was qualified in contact tracing, it paves the way for a digital platform that can be deployed to help prevent the next communicable disease from becoming another full-blown crisis.

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Quick, transparent and interactive communications were also very important. Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services needed technology to help ensure compliance to the mandatory 14-day self-isolation period for close contacts of COVID-19 and used Whispir’s mass communication platform to perform this function with great success. We also recognised the fragility and lack of endto-end visibility of our delivery and supply-chain systems. Startups like Wiliot are developing the next generation of asset-tracking technology, where tracking tags do not need batteries, removing the need for staff to recharge or replace tags in the field. Such tags can be placed on objects important to a business to gain intelligence around their location and movements, improving visibility and allowing AI/ ML-based augmented decision-making. The new environment Offices will permanently evolve as a result of COVID19. There is high employee desire to continue working at least partly from home, and even previously reluctant companies are finding that remote work is feasible. While a gradual shift to more flexible working arrangements was a trend prior to the pandemic, it is likely the world will experience a years-to-months transition in this respect as well. Remote working enables not only working from home but more convenient working from co-working spaces, digital nomad lifestyles overseas or even a more globally distributed workforce. A reduction in carbon emissions via reduced commuting will help the environment, as well. However, more remote work also means there is an urgent need to evolve the cybersecurity, technology processes, and communication and collaboration tools to enable the shift to remote working to unfold successfully. Irrespective of the size of the organisation, the pandemic has pushed CIOs and IT departments to modernise various systems at a record-breaking pace. Local councils all around Australia are starting to build out their visions of a smart city, with initiatives like smart parking, smart bins and traffic and waste management. There is a push to embrace smartcity connectivity and the innovation it could enable. The pandemic has also been driving automation. Robots don’t need to practise social distancing; nor can they get sick. As such, where the capability exists, robots are being deployed for cleaning, disinfecting, detection of fever symptoms and monitoring mask and social-distancing compliance, among other tasks.

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Where robots were already deployed in situations that are risky for humans, COVID-19 is creating more of these scenarios. Wheeled robots from Starship Technologies are delivering food and shopping to local residents in the UK; flying drones patrolling public areas of quarantine regions in Melbourne to spot breaches; and Singapore has been using a robot dog to remind people of social distancing in a park. An additional effect is that the presence of these robots is gradually normalising them, thus helping people feel comfortable with automatons operating in their environment. While fully autonomous systems are still few and far between, the pathway seems clear to a medium-term future featuring autonomous delivery drones both on the ground and in the air. The elusive autonomous car will also begin to be deployed, just not as rapidly as many in the industry had once believed. People skills are still key Deploying and using technology effectively requires skilled humans, and as the technology develops so does the mix of skills required to capture the opportunities. Digital skills, in terms of being able to use computers and work with machines, are one key aspect. Unfortunately, OECD surveys indicate there is still a lot of educating to be done in this basic area, with less than 10 per cent of people in OECD countries having high computer skills. At the same time, the sometimes-derided soft skills are growing in importance. While AI is poised to take on many repetitive tasks previously done by humans, people will continue to flourish in areas where we excel: creativity, empathy, problem-solving, innovation. But it does call for renewed attention on certain key skills such as sense-making, social intelligence and novel and adaptive thinking. The new world of remote working also requires skills in virtual collaboration. The education sector will not only evolve to provide a skill mix with more soft and entrepreneurial skills, education and the learning stack itself is transforming to a more flexible model. While university degrees are likely to remain relevant, other

channels to "expertise" are also emerging, from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to microcredentials and other "lighter" forms of accreditation. This will require a more flexible approach to candidate appraisal and hiring on the part of companies. No longer is the top university the only, or even the best, talent pipeline. Conclusion “People always over-estimate the impact of technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term.” – Amara’s Law. While the pandemic has thrown massive changes at us, technology has enabled life, and business, to go on. That is not to ignore the difficulties. While some of the changes will recede in the post-pandemic world, many others are here to stay and will provide the platform for further innovation. In the home, we’ll see faster internet enabling more advanced entertainment and educational technologies. I expect further innovation in television, gaming and work/education tools, while communication devices will be front and centre in consumer electronics R&D in the next 12–24 months. The pandemic has reinforced how critical technology is to our daily lives, specifically dependable and fast connectivity. The need for network reliability and resiliency when we first moved to working from home was an early indication of how vital connectivity will be in the future. The world is slowly exploring ultra-reliable lowlatency use cases like autonomous driving, remote surgery, robotics, smart cities and smart homes. 5G, Edge Computing, IoT and AI are critical technologies in Industry 4.0 for us to enable these advanced scenarios, but we can’t forget that security, privacy, customer experience and operational excellence are equally as important as we embark on this journey. Because it’s people who will give purpose to technology. Thoughtful application of technology and innovation, coupled with curious and smart minds and a determination to push through the aftermath of the pandemic, will ensure Australia bounces back stronger and better equipped for the challenges that lie ahead.

Kim Krogh Anderson is group executive, Product & Technology, Telstra, and a technology expert. He is recognised as an expert in communications technology internationally. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/12/robots-deliver-food-milton-keynes-coronavirus-lockdown-starship-technologies https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/elite-police-drones-to-roam-lockdown-suburbs-amid-covid-19-spike-20200702-p558f7.html 7 https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/boston-dynamics-dog-like-robot-spot-used-on-social-distancing-patrol.html 8 https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ 5 6

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AGILITY, CULTURE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP NEEDED There is a clear need for businesses to embrace cloud computing to deliver automated digital services instead of competing on labour costs, giving them resilience and flexibility.

he COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the need for businesses and government agencies to be agile, and able to respond to rapid change, and to seamlessly deliver their services. Those organisations that had embraced cloud-based technology were able to make a quicker transition as access to critical IT systems, tools and collaboration "spaces" was not defined by physical location. As we come to the end of the mining boom, combined with a series of droughts, floods and bushfires that exposed just how vulnerable our agricultural sector is to climate change, and as much of Australia’s manufacturing sector moves to cheaper labour markets, it is now more critical than ever for Australia to build new industries. Technology will be key to this – both as an enabler and in terms of the products and services that might be produced. It is also a sector that taps into our educated population, the resourceful Aussie approach to problem solving. Cost-effective labour arbitrage will give way to lower-cost, effective, automated digital solutions. However, this requires more than words and wishes. Fundamentally, government and business – including large technology firms – must work together to create an environment that fosters and nurtures innovation through seed funding, partnerships and collaborative idea-sharing. This would provide the support for small entrepreneurial entities to attempt new ideas with a safety net that allows them to "fail safely". And cloud-based technology will fuel this entrepreneurship. Cloud applications enable greater

agility, as capacity can be quickly scaled up or down. They free the user from a physical location and security can be built in and constantly updated. Self-healing networks and cloud elasticity will drive mass proliferation of IOT devices enabling further ingenuity and invention. Importantly, removing location as a key factor opens a huge door of opportunity for Australia in the new global digital economy. Cloud also provides the framework for today’s hyper-connected society. Data are gathered from embedded sensors in anything from critical public infrastructure to personal wearable devices. The data combine with analytics, automation and machine learning to increasingly automate responses or "selfheal" – from adjusting lane flows on the Sydney Harbour Bridge to allowing a customer to track their approaching IT engineer or pizza delivery, as well as new takes on Uber-esque sharing-economy business models. However, just “lifting and shifting” existing processes to the cloud does not drive innovation or transformation. More than one in three Australian organisations say they failed to realise notable benefits from cloud computing when they did not integrate their IT migration into their broader business transformation strategy. The opportunity for innovators is to use cloud capabilities to continuously reinvent the way an organisation delivers it products and services – and even what those products and services are. It is time to create Australia’s future – and it is reimagined in the cloud.

By Rick Mayhew

Rick Mayhew is the APAC vice president and general manager at Unisys, a global information technology company that solves complex IT challenges at the intersection of modern and mission critical.

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LET’S GET SMARTER WITH DATA If we have an abundance of anything in 2020, it is data. But are government and business using it to maximal effect towards better, more rapid decisionmaking and judicious policy adjustment? By Robert Hillard

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he overwhelming political narrative of the twentieth century was the collision of ideologies as entire nations operated as laboratories for ideas based on models from the political left and right. In the twenty-first century we can do better as we have more data than ever from across all of our communities. Models of society have a long and successful history and we don’t hesitate to use them in economics, but we’re still reluctant to use them in the tuning and refinement of social policy. Central banks change monetary policy based on their simulation of the economy both as a whole and in individual sectors. However, decisions about criteria for social care or financial support are generally not as

issues such as jobs and health. But the effective use of data is currently much less common in social policy areas. This is despite the science telling us that just as the economy needs to be constantly finetuned, so too does social policy in line with the needs of communities, for support changes depending on many complex factors such as the job market, our health and other social issues. In Australia, using the data in order to get a better insight into the future matters. When politicians are misdirected to believe all jobs are at risk, they assume that globalisation needs to be opposed, automation needs to be moderated and even that robots need to be taxed. That would be a tax on productivity

rapidly adjusted based on data. Science tells us that the economic policy needs to be constantly finetuned. This is also true of social policy, which impacts real life

in a world where jobs are still being created. Research into the future of work in Australia highlights the need for data. People we think are at most risk of losing out to globalisation

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often turn out to be those in the greatest demand. For example, unmet demand for customer service skills, such as those used in call centres, exceeded more than five million people as of 2019. Data can help in other social areas . In some countries effective data analysis has led to lifting the retirement age, and a revision of attitudes about the valuable human resource of those over 65 and many of whom wanted to continue working. This decision, in turn, has lead to a reconsideration of continuing education and re-skilling , across a wider age spectrum. Thorough use of data can clarify misconceptions. One of these concerns the perceived threat of automation to human jobs. Technology in many areas is actually creating jobs, not eliminating them. Assumptions about ageism look more like a challenge with our approach to front-ending education. Where there is a problem, there is a job. And we aren’t running out of problems. Many of these problem-solving opportunities are in the domain of caring, or "jobs of the heart" – a real driver of employment growth. These “jobs of the heart” include interpersonal and creative roles that will be hardest of all to mechanise. We estimate that 86 per cent of the jobs created between now and 2030 will be knowledge-worker jobs. By 2030, one quarter of

Australia’s workforce will be professionals. Most of these workers will be in business services, health, education or engineering. Twothirds of jobs will be soft-skill intensive by 2030. These job-market trends aren’t alarming; they’re liberating. The most boring, repetitive toil will be performed by robots, leaving the more challenging and interesting work for humans. Though well-armed with data, leaders in both government and business need to be prepared to experiment. They need to celebrate being wrong in trialling policies, programs, services and products; otherwise they risk trying to live up to a standard of infallible leadership, which is unachievable. Business is beginning to understand the importance of failure, as part of a positive process. The electorate also needs to step up and reward those leaders who are humble enough to celebrate trying an idea and sharing the nuanced learnings, and to admit unsuccessful outcomes as a natural part of a trial and error process. Because of the sea of data that we swim in every day, we seldom deploy the available tools to make sense of it all. Instead, we use our belief system as a filter. Reversing our positions based on new facts goes against the dominant model of the strong leadership, a view more aligned with the ideologue than the open-minded sage. The more aligned an idea is to the ideals of past ideologies, the harder it is to embrace the data, iterate and learn as a society.

Robert Hillard is Deloitte Australia’s chief strategy and innovation officer. He is also the chairman of the Australian Information Industry Association.

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BOUNCING BACK BETTER COVID has removed our lethargy and reluctance to operationalise technology and accelerate its pervasiveness. What is most significant, however, is what happens next. By Ron Gauci

he most obvious examples include our ability to work from home, turn our small bricks & mortar businesses into global online digital opportunities, the transformation of education and telehealth services, including digital prescriptions and the revolution of the contactless supply chain and cashless society are other industries that have been positively impacted. What has lingered as a possibility for over a decade, has thrust us towards adoption with hyper speed proportions in a matter of months. The possible is now inevitable and the resistance is now adoption. Our nation’s students are inspiring. At the Australian Information Industry Association’s iAwards in 2020, I was able to to see the application of AI, machine learning, data analytics, Internet of Things and coding capability addressing physical and hearing disabilities, mental health, solving medical and ethical issues. This is the next generation of Australians leading the way in providing hope, excitement and energy to innovation. We are a truly clever nation with very intelligent, innovative and entrepreneurial people. Our global peers recognise it, but I am not as convinced that

we recognise it ourselves. The opportunity for our country to invest in this capability and present it to the world is not limited by our ability to mine minerals, manufacture goods or cultivate our fields. It relies on our ingenuity, our resourcefulness and our capacity to do things differently in an innovative way through the practical use of technology. The technology industry is not dependent on size or geography. The incremental growth potential is at least $300bn in GDP value to the Australian economy. The innovation of a few can influence and positively impact so many. The digital capability that Australia now across so many different industries can be a global point of differentiation. It also has the potential to provide Australia with a sustainable self-sufficiency and independence that protects us against the exposure of global economic crises. There is an excitement that this brings with it, as there is a caution that hangs over it. As we debate matters of privacy, data protection, national security, sovereign capability, the ethics that must underpin AI, and trust in our Government and our corporate institutions, we must ensure that the debate does not become a roadblock or an undermining of our opportunity. The good news is that we are well advanced in the laying of sound foundations to address these questions of ethics, morality, good governance as well as the sensitive balance between the protection of privacy and the national security agenda. I am truly encouraged and excited by the potential for Australia’s wealth and prosperity that innovation technology presents in the shift from becoming consumers to commercial producers – not only for our recovery post COVID but for our growth and influence on a world stage. The evolution of technology to becoming a powerful enablement platform is how we realise that potential.

Ron Gauci is CEO for the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA).

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DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION – WHAT MAKES SENSE FOR AUSTRALIA’S SPACE INDUSTRY? Using the principles of innovation theory, Australia can pick how it wants to compete in space, maximising its advantages, playing to its strengths and wasting no effort.

he vision for Australia’s space sector is to grow a vibrant and commercially successful space industry that will take its share of the global space economy. The downstream side of space activity – utilising space-derived data and services for terrestrial benefit – is, and will always be, where (most of) the money is, and Australia is well known for its innovative capability to do this. Much of the impetus for our energetic launch of the Australian Space Agency, however, is the opportunity afforded by the current paradigm shift from the traditional very large, very expensive, very risk-intolerant space missions (Big Space) to the accessibility and affordability of miniaturised satellites (New Space, or Space 2.0) for Australia to become a player in the upstream in-orbit activities rather than relying on the rest of the world (and risk freeloading). Developing strategy to achieve that vision involves addressing two important questions. Where will we play? And, how will we win? The Australian Civil Space Strategy 2019–2028 tries to answer these two questions. It describes four strategic pillars to transform and grow Australia’s space industry, including building national capability via "leapfrog R&D" in areas of future competitive advantage. Essentially, disruptive

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innovation – and the more disruptive the better. The evidence from the history of competitive markets shows that disruptive innovation is the only way that new entrants have been able to compete and win against the incumbents. It is not sufficient simply to become active with the technology. Let’s skip to the punchline. How will we win in the game of disruptive innovation in space? Australia must be prepared to take risks in space. We must fly often, be prepared to fail early, but keep flying, learning and growing. We need to back winners in this effort. Multiple missions for fewer players, rather than diluting the funds too much, is more likely to lead to success. Some of those players need to be from our research sector, flying “push the boat out” missions to meet bold scientific goals – for the global space sector shows that it is from such efforts that most innovations are developed and spun out. When we invest, in the words of Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen, we need our money to be impatient for profit before growth, so that low-cost business models become part of the way we will eventually disrupt the incumbents. Finally, we need to invest in training our people in the leadership and business skills needed for the game.

By Professor Russell Boyce

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Let’s elaborate Disruptive innovation and disruptive technology are phrases coined by Christensen. He described how technology in any open, competitive market improves over time through a process – sometimes incremental, sometimes radical or “leapfrog” – called sustaining innovation, which involves efforts by incumbents to meet customers’ performance expectations. During this process, commercial success depends on maximising performance, which, in turn, requires internally integrated control over the interdependencies across sub-system interfaces. Supply-chain competitors must provide well-defined, non-innovative sub-systems to the integrator, who retains most of the profit to be made. Historically, attempts by new entrants to take on the highly motivated incumbents in sustaining-developments have rarely succeeded. Disruptive innovations, on the other hand, do succeed, when the technology has improved to the point where it exceeds requirements. New entrants who can offer modularised plug-and-play solutions with better performance in value categories such as speed, convenience of access and cost, can step in. The new mix of attributes is immediately attractive to customers who do not need and cannot afford to pay for the higher performance of the incumbents’ products, or to an entirely new group of customers who previously could never afford or easily access the technology. The disruption takes place when the new entrants with lower-margin business models and processes improve their technology until they satisfy the incumbents’ customers. The incumbents find that while they can match the technology, they cannot compete in terms of cost structure and internal processes and approaches. As long as they have the right leadership mindset and criteria for resources allocation and investment that are "impatient for profit, patient for growth", the new entrants steadily take over the original market. The incumbents are disrupted. So what about space? As various authors have observed, traditionally this sector has not been an open, competitive market. For many decades, the space domain was dominated by a relatively small number of integrated primes building small numbers of large, complex, expensive satellites for a small number of government customers or for the telecommunications industry. Risk tolerance in either case was very low, and significant technological innovations tended to result from the demands of science missions. For the most part, improvements were sustaining in nature, as the

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incumbents continued to meet the expectations of their customers. In the last decade, the domain has undergone a paradigm shift, a result of the miniaturisation of satellite technologies, efforts to standardise such technologies (CubeSats), affordable space access and a transformed approach to risk. As Robbie Schingler, cofounder of the US$1bn+ space startup Planet, writes: “…We’ve entered the era of the ‘Space Renaissance’, a rebirth of space activities that are accelerating innovation. Agile aerospace – a philosophy of spacecraft development that encourages rapid iteration – is now an ideal that many in the space industry are striving for. The space community has experienced a shift in behaviour”. Thus, miniaturised satellites, such as shoe-

box-sized CubeSats and washing machine-sized microsats, are appearing in large numbers, steadily growing in performance and – most importantly – opening up new opportunities and markets for space technology-derived information in cheaper, faster and more accessible ways and for new customers. An open, competitive market has evolved.

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As observed by the few authors on the subject, this paradigm shift represents disruptive innovation. In particular, we have seen new entrants enabling non-traditional customers – developing space nations, startups and even universities and schools – to become space players while the incumbents or traditional customers largely ignore the technology. Within that new market, we are seeing performance improvements via sustaining innovation, and some of the early entrants have become a new breed of incumbent. From personal experience, New Space technology performance is not yet good enough to meet New Space customer needs. Which is why, for example, UNSW Canberra Space is almost fully

from failures, maturing and flying again and again opens the door to success. We are now seeing that success with our current M2 Pathfinder, which lays the foundations for next year’s complex M2 mission. M2 will, in many ways, push the art of the possible. Not taking the risks, or stopping at the first hurdle, would have blocked innovation. "Good enough" is not too far away. And when it comes, modular plug-and-play will begin to dominate, and Christensen would predict that the New Space profits will shift to the sub-system providers. Meanwhile, when miniaturised satellites become equipped with powerful on-board artificial intelligence-enabled processing, turning data into information at

internally integrated to handle the interdependencies between subsystems as we develop and fly missions. Along the way, however, we have experienced failure. Our second CubeSat was never heard from after it reached orbit. Space is hard. And risky. But embracing the risks, learning

the edge, and, in turn, are mesh-networked into intelligent constellations that can provide secure, auditable, actionable information rapidly and directly to the terrestrial user, New Space will attract more and more traditional customers and pose a serious threat to the traditional providers.

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Australia’s opportunity Returning to Australia’s space industry vision, and the two strategy questions “where will we play?” and “how will we win?”, the following conclusions seem reasonable. Australia needs to carefully consider the difference between sustaining space technology innovations and disruptive space innovations, and which we should invest in. This applies to both Big and New Space. For Big Space, Australia could seek to grow organisations capable of competing for opportunities in the global supply chains of international primes. In this case, we are talking about relatively small volumes of well-defined components fitting well-defined interfaces within or across sub-systems, and our industry would face very stiff global competition – unless we pursue innovation in not-yet-good-enough subsystem technologies and become very good at them. For New Space, we should not settle for just growing organisations capable of developing and selling miniaturised satellites. Instead, Australia should engage in the next phase of the disruption, in the fringes between space and other disciplines such as artificial intelligence (AI) – especially AI-at-the-edge – and quantum technologies. For example, intelligent, networked, quantum-enabled satellite constellations are not a matter of “if” but “when”. Australia is as equipped as any nation to pursue such opportunities. Indeed, Australia’s largest space research effort, the SmartSat CRC, has such developments as part of its roadmap. Yet its main “industry” partners are certain Big Space incumbents and the S&T arm of their biggest customer – Defence. There is, therefore, a strong likelihood that the projects that will be pursued by SmartSat, at least in upstream technology, will implicitly support sustaining innovation developments for these main players. Projects are needed that position the smaller players for disruptive innovation. In turn, the research sector should conceive and drive many of the projects in SmartSat and beyond. It is from that direction that many (perhaps most) of the ideas for disruptive innovation will come. Decades of international space

activity have shown that it is the needs of bold science and exploration missions that, by definition, “push the boat out’’ and drive innovation, more so than operational space activity. Research-focused missions, involving concepts and advances from within university groups incentivised by spin-off opportunities and not just research income, must therefore be prominent in Australia’s efforts to grow the industry.

Space is hard. And risky. But embracing the risks, learning from failures, maturing and flying again and again opens the door to success. ASA’s $150m Moon to Mars program offers immediate opportunity to stimulate disruption, but it must embrace risk in order to do so. The program’s Demonstrator missions, many of them science-driven, should be used to deploy to orbit building block technologies for disruption, such as laser communications, distributed edge-AI, quantum and autonomous system concepts. The Trailblazer mission would then be positioned to blaze a trail for Australian disruptive space innovation, putting the Demonstrator pieces together to show the art of the possible – for example, a small networked, intelligent, potentially quantum-capable constellation in Low Earth Orbit as a pathfinder for later deep- space activities, with Australian organisations (both industry and the research community) providing the elements. Australia has not been playing the in-orbit space game for very long, and so we are relatively free of sustaining innovation baggage, and yet have world-class skills and an exceptional talent pool. With careful attention to the nature of disruptive innovation, we can increase the odds of winning in the global space game.

Russell Boyce is the Chair for Space Engineering at UNSW Canberra, where he leads the UNSW Canberra Space Research effort. He played a significant role in the establishment of the Australian Space Agency and is Australia’s only living fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

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SECURING SPACE For Australia to take advantage of commercial opportunities in the space sector, it needs to consider the security implications of sovereign capabilities as key to any strategy.

t would seem that Australia is definitely on the right path towards a future as a new space power. The 2020 Defence Strategic Update and its accompanying Force Structure Plan saw the space domain elevated in prominence in government thinking. The documents emphasise greater support for developing sovereign space capability for the ADF. There is heightened potential for both Defence and the Australian Space Agency to foster closer collaborations with international partners, beyond the links with Japan’s JAXA space agency and NASA in the US. In considering the future, it’s good to see government is fully engaged with Australia’s commercial space sector. By letting the commercial sector lead, Australia is best placed to exploit innovation and leap ahead through second-mover advantage. Letting the commercial space industry build space capabilities, including satellites and launch vehicles, and establish launch sites, is the smart way forward for Australia in space. This is a much more innovative approach, which is aided by the impact of new Space 2.0 technologies that offer faster, cheaper ways to access and use space. Small satellites (known as "smallsats"), "fractionated constellations" of cubesats where tasks are spread across swarms of small networked satellites, and increasingly, reusable launch capability, will make space faster, easier and cheaper to access for many more actors, and allow quicker innovation. This, in turn, enables a ‘democratisation of space’ extending down into opportunities for academic institutions to do interesting things in space at low cost. The future will see Australian high school students building cubesats and organisations such as the Australian Youth Aerospace

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Association highlight that Australia’s next generation of space-policy and space-industry leaders is already making a big impact on this nation’s rising profile in space. The trend towards faster, cheaper and more agile access to and use of space will only sharpen in the coming decades, as new approaches to manufacturing through the fourth industrial revolution make space open to all. Australia should fully exploit that "new Space" leading edge of the Space 2.0 approach across the entire spectrum of its commercial space sector. It’s important to embrace innovation through a readiness to learn from failure rather than over-regulate the space sector in a manner that smothers progress and is risk averse. Government could make a good start by ensuring effective de-regulation of the commercial launch industry occurs to promote growth, rather than imposing unnecessary bureaucratic and fiscal burden on local space startups. That’s important not just for commercial space opportunity but also for our defence and national security interests in space because the two are tightly interrelated. There are real challenges ahead for Australia in space. In a defence context, space isn’t a sanctuary that sits serene and untouched by geopolitical rivalries below. Space is contested as major-power adversaries develop a full range of "counterspace" capabilities designed to deny us access to vital satellites in a future conflict. Australia must work alongside key allies such as the US and others in the face of this growing anti-satellite (ASAT) challenge. To respond to this challenge, we firstly need to burden-share in orbit by boosting space resilience as a means to establish credible space deterrence. The starting point to achieving that is through space domain awareness, and Australia is already playing a key role via hosting a US space surveillance

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radar and optical telescope at Exmouth, Western Australia. It also shares intelligence on activities in orbit via the 2014 Combined Space Operations (CSpO) Initiative with its Five-Eyes partners plus Germany and France. It would be a good move to expand CSpO membership to include Japan and India too. Our unique geographical position allows Australia to make a significant contribution to space domain awareness and we can expand this role by allowing our commercial space sector to contribute additional space surveillance capabilities in the future. The 2020 Force Structure Plan also states in paragraph 6.9 that “Defence will need capabilities that directly contribute to war fighting outcomes in the space domain using terrestrial and/ or space-based systems. The Government’s plans include the development of options to enhance ADF space control through capabilities to counter emerging space threats to Australia’s free use of the space domain and that assure our continued access to space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance”. Depending on exactly how the government is thinking about space control and the challenge of counterspace threats, this is probably the most important statement on space to emerge from Defence in a long time, as the implications are very significant for Australia’s commercial space sector. But it also creates a dilemma for Australia. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) doesn’t prohibit testing or deployment of non-nuclear space weapons, and clearly major-power opponents are developing a full range of such capabilities. On the one hand, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade makes clear that Australia supports establishing international legal and regulatory measures to ensure good order in space, and to clarify how international law applies on orbit. DFAT notes that there is a need for transparency and confidence-building measures that could supplement the OST. This could be realised through non-governmental efforts, such as the University of Adelaide’s ‘Woomera Manual’ project, which seeks to strengthen regulatory controls on the military use of space. At a governmental level, Australia is also active in the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA)led conferences towards space arms control. But a diplomatic and international legal solution to the counterspace challenge must be matched with credible capability options if it is to be effective. With this in mind, Australia

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should firstly seek to augment US and other partner space capability prior to a crisis by having the capacity for rapid deployment of locally produced satellites that disaggregate essential space support for terrestrial forces across many smaller satellites. That would make an adversary less able to strike at our vital space systems with ASATs in a scenario often referred to as a Space Pearl Harbor. To strengthen that resilience further, there should be a means to reconstitute lost capability if space deterrence fails. Both tasks would require Australia to have the ability to manufacture satellites at speed,

and then launch those satellites on Australian launch vehicles from Australian launch sites when needed by the ADF or our allies. That takes us back to the need for government to support, explicitly, sovereign space launch as policy, – and

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so far, it hasn’t taken that step. It’s overdue, especially as Australia’s commercial space sector includes companies, such as Gilmour Space Technology, that are building launch vehicles to launch from Australian launch sites. Government needs to catch up to the private sector. And it shouldn’t be risk-averse on this issue, lest it risk seeing its policy fail. A comprehensive and balanced approach to building sovereign space capability for Defence can also contribute to civil applications for space, through enhanced earth observation, secure satellite communications and enhanced

positioning, navigation and timing functions. That, in turn, boosts Australia’s high-technology sector, not only in space but in secondary and tertiary supporting sectors across the country that would contribute to job growth and greater prosperity. That’s a goal highlighted in the Australian Space Agency’s 2019 Civil Space Strategy and there needs to be continued close coordination between Defence and the Space Agency to ensure a coherent approach to space. The benefits don’t stop there, as a rapidly growing commercial space sector that is contributing to the needs of Defence and commercial interests will generate demand for an expanding cadre of space professionals. This, in turn, boosts the importance of STEM in higher education. Space becomes a self-sustaining national industry that simply didn’t exist in past decades. All of this means that Defence needs to clarify its Defence Space Strategy, and how it sits alongside the Australian Space Agency’s civil space strategy. An unclassified document is absent, and Australians are less informed about Defence thinking on space as a result. As a way forward, the 2020 Defence Strategic Update and Force Structure Plan is a good step, but further detail is needed. An unclassified Defence space strategy, encompassing all the key elements of Defence activities in relation to space, and stating clear goals to inform future capability development and organisational reform is the next step forward. In the 1960s Australia was a nascent space power with its participation centered around space-launch activities out of Woomera. We threw away the opportunity to take that forward in subsequent decades because the governments of the day lacked the vision to see the benefit to the nation. In 2020, we are looking forward to a very different future with space able to benefit all, grow prosperity and promote rapid innovation. Australia can be a world leader in space. There’s broad popular support for growing the space sector, and there’s a clear need for a credible space posture in relation to our defence and national security needs. We are now on the right trajectory – going forward and up.

Malcolm Davis is a senior analyst in Defence Strategy and Capability for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, specialising in the intersection of space and defence.

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BACKING AUSTRALIA’S VC-FUNDED SPACE COMPANIES For Australia to become a player of note in the new space revolution, key bodies need to inject funds where they’re needed most: the local space companies that are close to commercialisation. By Adam Gilmour

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venture capital (VC) investor I once met described a startup as the functional unit of innovation, and remarked that the best among them would go on to (re)define the future of their industries. Governments are more prosaic. They recognise that startups that survive will become small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – the lifeblood of any economy. But they will often leave their fates to market forces and the VC community. As we reexamine innovation in Australia, it is important to know that today’s new space revolution has the potential to change the way we live on Earth as well as in space, and that it is being led by innovative, VC-backed space companies.

Globally, over US$20bn has been invested into new space companies in the last decade, $6bn in 2019 alone. Some of the biggest names in space – SpaceX (the world’s most successful rocket company), Planet Labs (the largest commercial operator of satellites by number), and many of the world’s most promising small satellite and small launch vehicle providers – are VC-backed companies. Australia, too, is attracting its share of global investment, with at least three space companies now securing two rounds of VC funding. (Statistically, less than three per cent of startups make it to this round.) In the last four years, Australia’s VC-backed space companies have secured new global

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Venture capital companies invest in the early stages of a high-growth company, usually when it is pre-revenue or pre-cashflow-positive, and when traditional financing options (such as bank loans) are not available. Not all startups need or want VC financing, but among those that do, less than one per cent will succeed. VCs look for big-market opportunities, sound business plans, evidence of why you’re different, how you can win and the strength of your founders and team. By those standards, VC-backed start-ups think BIG. They don’t just aim to survive, but to become the leaders in their industry.

customers, booked revenues in-country, grown sovereign space capabilities where none existed before, and created hundreds of new jobs for the future. These companies are becoming the champions of Australia’s space industry, both domestically and abroad. They are providing long-term jobs for our STEM graduates; educating and training "the next 500" space engineers, who will go on to train the "next 5,000"; building sovereign capabilities and supply chains that will provide revenues and jobs for hundreds more companies; bridging the gap between innovation/R&D and commercialisation; and enabling Australia’s space industry to produce components locally, for export globally. Private sector has led the way Despite VCs playing a critical role in finding and financing startups with significant commercial potential, the growth of any new industry needs to sit within a well-defined and effective government strategy. To date, very little funding has been available to the industry, and in particular to Australian space companies. Most of our Space Agency funds over the last two years

have gone into setting up operations, maintaining/upgrading existing space infrastructure, funding university or research-led projects, and inspiring STEM across the country. While much of that has been understandable, these are not the type of investments that will achieve the government’s target of $12 billion in space revenues and 20,000 additional space jobs by 2030. It appears now that the Space Agency is pursuing a strategy for broader participation in their Moon-Mars Supply Chain Capability Improvement program. We do not believe that this dilutive approach will be effective in growing companies that will become the champions of our industry. Tipping point Rather than getting more Australians involved in space and giving out short-term monies for ad-hoc projects, a better way to grow the space supply chain would be to enable Australia’s maturing space companies to compete for more significant government and agency contracts – for example, to build a space-capable communications satellite and launch it from an Australian launch vehicle. In doing so, the agency would be injecting funds where they are needed most, further down the innovation funnel, and helping to raise the technology readiness levels of Australian space companies that are close to commercialisation. For VC-backed companies, every $1 million received from a government grant or contract can be further leveraged into $5 million in VC capital, creating five times more jobs and impact on the supply chain. Remember, these are the companies that aim to be disruptive, and have been "pre-qualified" by VCs with a track record of success. We believe that with the right support from our government and Space Agency to grow the champions of our industry, Australia need not ‘settle’ for being a small player in someone else’s supply chain. We can build our own.

Adam Gilmour is the CEO and Founder of Gilmour Space Technologies, a venture-funded rocket company based in Queensland that is developing a new breed of hybrid launch vehicles for small satellite/payload customers.

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HEALTH, MEDTECH AND BIOMEDICINE THE HEALTHCARE REVOLUTION Jeffrey Braithwaite PERSONALISING COMMUNITY HEALTHCARE Paul D’Urso HOW TO CREATE AND KEEP THE NEXT COCHLEAR Rick Holliday-Smith BENCH TO BEDSIDE Professor Scott Bell MBBS, MD, FRACP, FThorSoc COLLABORATING WITH CHINA TO COMMERCIALISE BIOTECH Professor Barry Marshall TO MARKET WE GO: BIOCURATE AND THE CHALLENGE OF COMMERCIALISATION The Hon John Brumby AO THE FUTURE OF HEALTH MONITORING IS SENSIBLES Shiv Meka

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GENOMIC RESEARCH: WORKING BETTER TOGETHER Bruce Goodwin SOLVING BIOMEDICAL COMMERCIALISATION Jennifer Herz and Dr Simon Fisher MEDICAL INNOVATION IN A POST-COVID WORLD Susan Martin PROPELLING MEDICAL R&D FORWARD Liz Chatwin MAXIMISING NUTRITIONAL HEALTH Professor Ian Brighthope INNOVATION IN AUSTRALIAN SPORT Luke Jansen WHERE THE PATH OF INNOVATION LEADS Professor Frank Gannon BRIDGING THE VALLEY OF DEATH Professor Shaun Jackson

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THE HEALTHCARE REVOLUTION Jeffrey Braithwaite, gives a preview of what Australia’s future healthcare system should look like: AI-assisted, remote care for an increasingly older and chronically ill population. By Jeffrey Braithwaite

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onsulting a doctor from the comfort of home for your suspected cancerous tumour or a fractured collar bone, and artificial intelligence (AI) interpreting the subsequent medical image in the blink of an eye. This is the tip of the innovation iceberg in the revolution of the Australian healthcare system brought on by technology, and hurried along by the impetus of the COVID-19 pandemic. The revolution is being built out of innovations everywhere you look. If we are scientifically smart and sociologically astute, this will add up to real and sustainable transformation. Not that long ago, it would have been inconceivable that appointments with general practitioners and specialists would not be held face-to-face. The old adage said you only had to look in a waiting room to see why everyone was called a patient – they had to be. But the COVID-19 pandemic catapulted telehealth from the edges of clinical practice to a nationwide front-and-centre-response. This is a particularly good news story for those who are older or living with disability, and now no longer needing to leave home to consult a healthcare provider. With the use of technology, they can receive advice and obtain prescriptions and referrals in a time and place that suits them. The shift to telehealth is not on its own truly revolutionary – it is more of a natural evolution, because the technology has been around for a while. The backstory that it’s part of – the problem that needs to be solved – is worth recounting. Already a million Australians are aged over 80 years and this is on the rise. A woman aged 65 years today can expect to live almost another 25 years, and a man perhaps 20. This is good news, but it also places a huge load

on the health system. Older people, even healthy ones, need more care. One in every two Australians is now living with at least one long-term chronic condition such as diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, arthritis, asthma or cancer. Regular and more frequent contact with health professionals is needed to support such people – and not just treat them, but help them manage their own health and avoid acute episodes that may result in hospitalisation. Health systems and medical researchers, alongside many clinicians, had for some time advocated the normalisation of telehealth to lift the burden of frequent out of home healthcare. It took the self-isolation and physical distancing requirements brought on by COVID-19 to drive the policymakers to move barriers and enable the change, and of course, for the Federal Government to fund it. Canberra did that overnight. But that innovation is only a modest down-payment on the real revolution encapsulated in the march of astonishingly clever machine learning in healthcare. Not only are

We will know we have succeeded when every Australian has access to the care they need, where it suits them and at a cost and in a form that is sustainable to the individual and the health system

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AI models now able to interpret medical imaging with great accuracy, AI enabled decision-support technologies are unlocking the possibility of truly personalised medicine like never before. If we can support clinicians through AI we can get faster and better diagnoses, tie together huge data sets including genomics data, and genuinely take on board patient preferences. We will be witness to a prodigious leap forward in care. But what’s often lost in the headlong rush to exploit technology is that it all comes at a cost and health systems and governments will need to think and act strategically to stay ahead of the curve. Telehealth funding models were devised in haste due to demand brought on by the coronavirus pandemic and will require fiscal retrofitting to be sustainable. In the future, funding models should anticipate change and lay the foundations for well resourced, equitable and safe implementations – whether in times of crisis, or more considered eras. Yet there’s something more. We have to figure out how to package all this change into a modernised health system for everyone. At the crossroads of people, technology and funding is the development of what we call a learning health system. This is one that is able to unite these innovations and adapt to them in real-time – because change is not a thing, and never a destination, but a journey. So, system-wide, clinically oriented and patient centred outcomes will be possible like never before – if we exploit technology well. Last century we were asked to think global and act local. In the 21st century a better aphorism is to reimagine change over and over again, off into the distant future. A learning health system is what is going to make this work. For Psek and his colleagues, this is one which can “utilize sophisticated technologies … to integrate clinical operations, research and patient participation … to continuously generate knowledge, improve care, and deliver value". Or, in ordinary language, make the health system better each day than the day before. It’s a set of arrangements that leverages learning – whether via sophisticated information technologies, or data mining, or machine learning, or

genomics. This will enable us to more quickly and more precisely match the best available approaches to treat every patient’s unique and individualised needs. Essentially, we will be putting all the information that is needed in the hands of clinicians and patients so they can make much better decisions. Australia’s healthcare revolution is not about small intubations brought about by any one new technology, nor a knee-jerk reaction as experienced due to COVID-19. As important as that is, it won’t last forever. But the continuous revolution I have in mind comes from the significant changes to our population demographics, our opportunities with technology that we haven’t even invented yet, the dedication and professionalism of our healthcare workforce and our ability as a prosperous nation to support new funding models to pay for it all. It was Buckminster Fuller, the American architect, who said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Let’s do that continuously. We’ll have healthcare that will flourish for decades to come.

Jeffrey Braithwaite is President-Elect of the International Society for Quality in Health Care, and Founding Director of the Australian Institute of Health Innovation.

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PERSONALISING COMMUNITY HEALTHCARE Surgeon creativity is being strangled by red tape and buried under overpriced machinery. Community-based personalised healthcare (CBPH) shakes up an outdated system and promises better outcomes for patients. By Paul D’Urso

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hen I started training in neurosurgery in 1991 my mentors taught me to be frugal with resources. They had mastered clever ways of making do with what we had. In those days if we needed ‘level check’ in spinal surgery the radiographer would develop the film in a dark room next to the operating theatre. Our first MRI in town was reserved for only our most complicated and unusual cases. Now more than 25 years later I am astounded by the complexity and expense involved with the delivery of health care. In my hospital we have a hybrid operating theatre, many 3D navigation systems, spinal operating tables, a robot and soon an intraoperative CT scanner. Unfortunately, this plethora of technology does not appear to be as beneficial to our patients as we would have expected. The technology seems to have taken on a life of its own. The surgeons and hospital seem to have been hypnotised into believing that expensive equipment is necessary to deliver ‘quality care’. The clever corporation markets this technology to give their representatives an unprecedented opportunity in the OR to sell their overregulated, off-the-shelf prosthetic devices. Techno toys now ‘help the surgeon’ put overpriced, legacy mass-produced devices ‘in the right place’. They are cheered on by a well-trained sales and marketing force flush with lucrative consultancies and ‘Vegas training’. Surgeon creativity and ingenuity has been supressed by overregulation and red tape. Our current healthcare model leaves surgeons

powerless to make even the simplest change in the design of instruments, devices and prosthetics due to suffocating regulatory and bureaucratic red tape. Innovative surgeons trying to improve efficiency and outcomes are quickly disenchanted and frustrated by the obstacles of an outdated, twentieth-century regulatory framework constructed to protect the corporation from competition. The disruptive nature of additive manufacturing (AM) now enables surgeon-specific and patient-specific solutions to be delivered in hospitals by point-of-use manufacturing. Traditional manufacturing systems are inefficient and require the importation of medical devices from large-scale, offshore manufacturers. High-volume, factory-based manufacturing of off-the-shelf devices requires complex supply chain logistics that consistently increase costs. Environmental costs incurred by air and road couriers, packaging, waste and sterilisation are also substantial. As no two people are the same, the limited number of sizes of off-the-shelf prosthetics do not suit everybody. Efficacy and outcomes are not clearly defined, and insurers and the public have been left wanting superior solutions. Outdated regulatory frameworks, quality systems and reimbursement requirements for offthe- shelf devices have become dysfunctional and expensive, adding hugely to the delivery cost of healthcare. These twentieth-century regulations do not apply to surgeon- and patient-specific solutions. Governments are

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wrestling with the burgeoning cost of delivering unsustainable medical care to their populations. Although innovation has occurred in research and development, it lags far behind in the government regulation and vision. Community-based personalised healthcare (CBPH) is a new way of thinking about healthcare. It unlocks the potential of surgeons to engage with advanced manufacturing to innovate and create both surgeon-specific and patient-specific therapeutic solutions. CBPH architecture can be used by schools, hospitals and universities to enable sharing and creativity. Point-ofuse, distributed manufacturing improves efficiency, reduces waste and creates sustainable value- based outcomes. Patients, government, and insurers benefit from a cost-effective and sustainable healthcare solution that is affordable and available to all people.

CBPH uploads a person’s unique characteristics to cloud-based machine learning software that accredited designers can use to develop personalised medical solutions. Such designers can share a global intelligence built by research and the user base. Every iteration of design can improve the solution via the use of machine learning and a transparent metrics outcome assessment tool. Solutions can be manufactured in the community of the end user to the specifications of the treating medical practitioner. Soon, a process-orientated regulatory model will enable healthcare facilities to collect outcome data and manufacture their own solutions. Such a resonating system ensures organic improvements by way of the intelligent use of iterative design and manufacture.

Professor Paul D’Urso MBBS PhD FRACS is an Australian neurosurgeon who pioneered the medical applications of additive manufacturing (AM) 25 years ago and founded Anatomics in 1995.

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HOW TO CREATE AND KEEP THE NEXT COCHLEAR Australia’s holy trinity of medical success stories – ResMed, CSL and Cochlear – turned research into revolutionary products. How can we build the next long-term success, and keep it onshore? By Rick Holliday-Smith

ustralia has a well-earned reputation for punching above its weight when it comes to medical and health research. The frequently cited examples – cervical cancer vaccine, spray-on skin, the electronic pacemaker and, of course, the bionic ear or cochlear implant – are known to most Australians and the global scientific community. COVID-19 has again seen Australian medical researchers come to the fore, with the University of Queensland partnering with CSL and Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations on a COVID-19 vaccine candidate based on pioneering ‘molecular-clamp’ technology. In 2019, the Global Innovation Index (GII) ranked Australia in the top 10 for human capital and research1. Quite rightly, over recent years, the Australian government has sought to capitalise on this competitive advantage by investing billions in medical and health research, primarily through the Medical Research Future Fund, university research funding programs and the R&D Tax Incentive for companies in the clinical trial and commercialisation process. Over the past 20 years, it is likely public support has exceeded $200 billion2. The impact of COVID-19 on university research budgets must be reckoned with. To those who think about the long-term future it is clear that investing in medical and health research must be a priority for all modern, developed nations. It is also obvious that it is best for long-term viability if these investments lead to quality, well-paid local jobs and a self-sustaining capability, meaning less reliance on the public purse. Self-sustaining means Australian companies are able to base themselves in Australia while exporting to the world – think of export-oriented success

stories like CSL, ResMed and Cochlear. It also means making sure our existing medical-innovation success stories stay in Australia. That requires a globally competitive business environment built on the right policy settings to hold our own against the many other countries who know the value of these companies, actively compete for their investment and offer incentives to attract them. We also need the right policy settings to build new success stories that stay located in Australia. We all should understand the value of medical and health research that leads to medical innovation and improved health outcomes for Australians – and people around the world. It is arguable this virtuous cycle always holds value in and of itself. However, the value to Australia could be increased by many magnitudes if we were better at commercialising this research and building large, successful medical innovation companies that stay in Australia and deliver long- term economic benefits to Australians. While Australia is ranked in the top 10 on the GII for human capital and research, it is ranked a lowly 31st for innovation outputs, meaning we rank well behind other high-wage, high-tax economies like Canada, France and Norway. Most worryingly, Australia is ranked 88th for knowledge diffusion – that means measures including IP receipts and high-tech net exports as a percentage of total trade. There are fewer than 120 medical-innovation companies listed on the ASX. Only three – the holy trinity of CSL, ResMed and Cochlear – are Australian-founded and significant in size. During the past 20 years, there has been no new CSL or Cochlear, while ResMed has progressively moved offshore to benefit from a more attractive business environment, more supportive

INSEAD Global Innovation Index 2019 https://www.globalinnovationindex.org/gii-2019-report. In FY 19/20 Government expenditure on the R&D Tax Incentive NHMRC and MRFF was $3.18B: see Science, Research and Innovation Budget Table https://www.industry.gov.au/data-and-publications/science-research-and-innovation-sri-budget-tables 1

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policy settings and better investment opportunities. Many promising Australian medical innovations and startups have been bought out and/or relocated overseas, including the buyouts of Sirtex by a Chinese consortium and Elastagen by global biopharmaceutical company Allergen (which itself was recently acquired by AbbVie). When these companies leave Australia, well before full value is achieved, our economy loses well-paid jobs, IP, tax revenue and advanced manufacturing, and this undermines development of the local ecosystem to support future growth. It is critical for Australia to invest in R&D and we should be doing more, not less, of it. But in medical innovation most of our investment is underwriting the realisation of long-term benefits by foreign companies and other countries. Why aren’t we benefitting more from what we put in? It is hard, expensive and takes decades to nurture and build strong, sustainable medical innovation companies that ultimately need regulatory approvals that can take, in some cases, more than 20 years to secure. To change this, Australia needs two significant groups of stakeholders to act differently – equity owners/private capital and policy makers/government. Looking at equity/capital, two questions come to mind. Can we convince capital to be more patient and understand the risks better? And can we convince them to be more patriotic? On patience, few investment funds are thinking 15-years plus, particularly in Australia. And High Net Worth investors are offered little by way of upfront tax incentives and are asked to invest highly taxed dollars into these relatively long-timeframe, yet still risky, activities. On patriotism, if I look at Cochlear’s investor base, the majority of its long-term investors come from overseas pension funds. This was not the case 10 years ago. We need to ask ourselves why Australian super funds are not investing in Australian companies. It must relate to their view of long-term value relative to the views of other major global investors. We need to consider what kind of mechanisms or incentives can be put in place to encourage both patriotism and patience. Which brings me to the second stakeholder, policy makers or government. Government can help us bridge the gap between broader public interest and capital, providing incentives to stop Australia missing out

when companies and IP are sold overseas and/or effectively move offshore. If the companies and the IP stay in Australia, the main advantage of export revenues and high-quality, wellpaid, tax-paying jobs stay here. Government can play an important role in encouraging capital to invest in Australian Medical Innovation by incentivising business investment in R&D. The R&D Tax Incentive (RDTI) has been subject to multiple reviews in the past 10 years and the trend was toward reducing support for business. Thankfully, as part of the 2020-21 Budget, the Australian Government righted the ship, increasing the cap on RDTI eligible expenditure from $110M to $150M and substantially increasing the benefit for companies with a high R&D ‘intensity’ (the proportion of overall expenditure spent on R&D). But perhaps more importantly, government incentives and support along the medical innovation value chain tapers off almost completely at the point of greatest potential social and economic benefit – when products progress closer to commercialisation and manufacture. Australia is in a global competition for medical innovation companies with long-term potential, but many other countries offer a more advantageous environment, including better access to skilled labour, a more competitive corporate tax rate and a more generous suite of R&D and commercialisation incentives. For example, 15 of the 28 European Union member states currently offer an IP tax incentive (otherwise known as a patent box), which provides a reduced effective tax rate on income from eligible IP. These incentives are available only for IP generated by local R&D, which helps capture the benefit of government support for R&D when it is at its most valuable stage – when it is has been commercialised and is generating tax revenue and creating jobs. There are many reasons the medical-innovation sector can be a key driver of Australia’s postCOVID-19 economy and beyond, including our outstanding medical and health research capability. If we stop short of making the policy changes we need to enable Australia to compete with other countries, then we have no excuse for failing to achieve our potential. If we are bold and committed, we will not be waiting another 20 years for the next homegrown – and home-based - medical-innovation success story.

Rick Holliday-Smith is chairman of the ASX, and Cochlear.

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BENCH TO BEDSIDE Translational research is key to improving the health of Australians. How can we improve it?

By Professor Scott Bell MBBS, MD, FRACP, FThorSoc

ranslational research focuses on health and medical research which aims to translate laboratory-based research into the clinic to improve the detection, diagnosis and treatment of disease and improve health outcomes for the population. In each case, it almost invariably takes more than a decade and costs more than $1bn to take a novel scientific discovery through to a new diagnostic or treatment for patients. Despite this time and investment, many discoveries still fall by the wayside, even those that have reached pivotal phase III human clinical trials. Over the past two decades, governments around the world have increasingly invested in programs to support translational research pathways and training opportunities that aim to decrease the time it takes for such discoveries to reach the clinic. In parallel, there has been rapid growth in the number of scientific journals focusing specifically on translational science, and likewise in conferences and courses for training scientists and clinicians in translational-research approaches. In Australia, the Commonwealth Government’s investment in the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) has demonstrated its focus on ensuring the investment in research not only generates new knowledge but that this knowledge ultimately leads to better health outcomes for Australians.

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Stages of Translational Research Translational research can be classified to describe where a specific project sits on the translational research continuum. Whilst this pathway can lead to health benefits for the broader population, ideally researchers, industry, clinicians (and their patients) and research funders are involved in all translational stages Broadly, there are two approaches to progression along the translational pathway. The first begins in the clinic, where a new diagnostic or therapy is applied to patients in a clinical setting, leading ultimately to evidence to support implementation to the patient population. The second approach is where a discovery leads to early-stage translation (T1), often in an academic research setting, followed by links with industry, which then takes on the role (usually in collaboration with researchers) to develop the next stage of the translational pathway (T2 and beyond). There are several key components to the translational research ecosystem, which include access to research collaborations and state-of-the-art research equipment; direct linkages to clinicians and their patients; and dedicated clinical-trial facilities. In early October 2020, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the first all-female team, Professors Jennifer Doudna and

Biomedical Research

Translation to Humans

Translation to Patients

Translation to Practice

Translation to Communities

Pre-clinical and animal studies but not involving intervention with human subjects.

Proof of concept studies and early stage clinical trials (phase I).

Clinical trials (phase II and III), and clinical research studies to inform evidence-based guidelines.

Post-marketing studies (phase IV), health services and implementation research (including real-world studies).

Population-based outcomes research), studies and of the impact on policy.

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Emanuelle Charpentier, for the discovery of gene editing using the platform of CRISPR/ CAS9 technology. This scientific advance has revolutionised discovery research and could potentially translate into new therapies for many diseases. CRISPR/CAS9 has provided researchers with novel and powerful tools to support improved understanding of genetics of diseases. It is supporting the development of precise cellular and animal models of human diseases. It is now feasible to generate in vivo animal models specific to diseases within weeks. Importantly, this technology also has tremendous therapeutic potential, particularly for developing gene therapies (where a patient-specific mutation is genetically corrected) for human diseases that are currently inadequately treated. Already there are clinical trials being undertaken using ex vivo gene therapy on patients with a number of blood disorders, including severe combined immunodeficiency, Fanconi anaemia and sickle cell disease. The discovery of the CRISPR/CAS9 and its ultimate application in the clinic is a compelling example of the importance of bridging discovery science and translational research pathways: bench to bedside to bench.

“Translational research is key to improving the health of Australians. How can we improve it?” During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that the limited MedTech manufacturing industry in Australia contributed to critical supply-chain gaps and delays. In Australia, we excel in the academic sector (universities and medical research Institutes) for research discoveries and early-stage translation. However, there is a growing realisation of the need to develop the MedTech manufacturing capability nationally. Supporting the MedTech

industry through emerging startup and SME companies to develop their translational pathways locally is now seen as critically important for the future of both translational research development and advanced manufacturing. There are challenges to supporting the efficient progression of developing evidence along the translational pathway. These include the need to link translational-research developments back to their origin (discovery science) so we ensure there is an ongoing pathway of new diagnostics and potential treatments flowing through to basic discovery laboratories and preclinical studies. This also requires ongoing financial investment through traditional funding sources such as the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Australian Research Council (ARC). Another challenge is to support clinician scientists to ensure translational research pathways are clinically relevant. There is a need to maintain clinical connectedness between the discovery scientists to ensure that the key questions in the clinic today are being addressed in the basic science laboratories (bench to bedside and back to the bench). The important final challenge is to make clinical-trial platforms readily available to support translational research nationally.

Professor Scott Bell is CEO for the Translational Research Institute.

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COLLABORATING WITH CHINA TO COMMERCIALISE BIOTECH Barry Marshall has continued his Nobel Prizewinning research into gut bacteria in China. This piece examines how both Australia and China benefit from academic and commercial collaborations, and offers advice based on firsthand experience in navigating the political, economic and funding environment in our nation’s biggest trading partner. By Barry Marshall, Nobel Laureate

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fter receiving the Nobel Prize in 2005, I continued with a mix of research, academic, commercial and promotional activities in Western Australia. I became aware that the Perth time zone [GMT+8] and lack of daylight-saving time was 100 per cent in sync with China. In 2015 I took up an opportunity to expand collaborations between the University of Western Australia and China, where Helicobacter still infects half the population and where gastric carcinoma is one of the top three cancers. The second incentive was that Chinese funding seemed more certain than in Australia. In China, modern health practices had been given greater priority since the SARS scare of 2003 and the PRC could now afford the educational and scientific resources which underpin 21st century healthcare. Several large funding programs were in place to attract successful mid-career scientists back home. These programs were a mix of peer- reviewed science, private capital and provincial government.

As a partner in this process, Australia offers high- class, mature institutions, which are attractive to a multitude of entrepreneurs and investors in China who can translate innovations quickly into new products. How can young Australian innovators connect, in a mutually beneficial way? Perception of Chinese collaboration from Australia For decades I had been invited to participate in commercial ventures in Asia. Before participating I asked around among the people I knew, who were in business, government and academia. The university collaborations were clearly a success for both parties, as the intellectual exchanges resulted in revenue in Australia, smart students and prestigious academic credentials for them back in China. My impression was that an entrepreneur developing a small project, or a new product, had no clear path to follow. The research and development stage of a new project was not attractive to anyone who could make a

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State of Our Innovation Nation difference. Australian private funding was focused on modest returns from mid-to-latestage proven technologies, not on high-risk early-stage novel ideas. China funding seemed faster, with nimble development teams, a long view and the prospect of a very big market. But no one could tell me exactly what to do and most people advised against investing my time in a China venture. So, my specific question was, “Do you know researchers in Perth who have actually had a successful experience dealing with business partners in China?” The answer was, “Nobody”. The good and not-so-good aspects of Australian business From my own experience and the opinions of Chinese friends, several issues exist. Australian innovative products, and subsequent international markets originating from Australia, are difficult to maintain unless very strong intellectual property and powerful global partners exist to keep generic competitors away. Outside Australia, sharp entrepreneurs can often copy the Australian business, navigate around local regulators and purchase a generic sourced from China. Their low start-up costs give them a major pricing advantage. The ray of hope in this process lies in customers who see that a reliable supply chain, tight quality control, smart scientific backup and efficient product support all make a more expensive Australian product competitive over

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a generic. Clearly, a business model that combined the Australian quality process with inexpensive Chinese manufacturing would be more certain of long-term success. Entrepreneurs with health innovations in Australia may have too rosy a view of their chances in China. They might not feel as much competitive pricing pressure as at home. Here, new products must pass scientific review, then TGA approval and, finally, achieve subsidised funding by the government. This slow and expensive entry cost provides long-term certainty and protects against me-too products, at least for several years, but does not reflect the situation in Asia. What might work? Firstly, for innovators based at a university, high- level scientific advice is easily available. Speak to the development office and find some Chinese faculty members who might already be making academic and business connections. Secondly, try to find some Chinese business people locally who have family networks back in China. They might be a source of investment for the Australian side which can be valued as “in kind” support for the start-up costs in China. This is an important component if the Chinese provincial or city government is part of the new company. Thirdly, do not spend your own money in China. Costs there should be borne by the Chinese partners. Reciprocally, don’t expect the Chinese

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partners to finance activities in Australia unless very tangible goods are being transferred. Finally, be patient and concentrate on relationships that are mutually beneficial. If the Chinese partners can share in Australian and international success, then a long-term relationship will grow. My strategy Connect with an Australian advisor resident in China. This could be via Australian government, state government or even sister city/state connections. Find that knowledgeable person and access any funding available through that connection. After that, prepare to pay for their services in China. Expect that the Chinese collaborator will decide the way the business should run in China. Ideally, their networks should include academic, business and government. Coming from Australia I am often amazed to meet individuals who distribute to thousands of retail outlets such as pharmacies or hospitals. This kind of setup ensures that a useful innovation will succeed in China. Because of the volume of sales in China, a modest royalty is likely to be a significant success for the Australian entity. If the IP can be managed from Australia, then the Chinese investors can see the two-way exchange of value and will also strive to protect the Chinese IP, licenses and trademarks. This type of property is becoming easier to manage in China because everything of value is searchable on the internet. Always make sure that the Chinese partners are paying up front for reasonable costs of time and expenses. With a new collaboration, never pay for yourself then expect reimbursement. In China, what seems certain initially can easily be delayed or cancelled through events out of your partner’s control. In China it may not always be clear who your investors are, and complicated currency restrictions might cause delays. Payments might best be made through the business responsible for exploiting the technology or product.

The final outcome An ideal scenario might look like this: A new technology has some IP developed and a small startup in Australia to exploit the idea of the product. Proof of principle might only be to in-vitro laboratory testing. A small team of individuals with Chinese connections is excited about the plan. The Australian partner participates in an academic/government/business grant application in China. Funding is for three years initially, with training positions in the Australian university laboratory related to the technology. After three years, commercialisation of the product is achieved in China and the Chinese entity continues to manage, and share the major benefit of, joint IP in China. At this stage, the Australian entity registers the product in Australia and then in various international markets. The Chinese partner transfers to the Australian distributor at the China price. Sales increase, the Australian entity receives a small license fee off China sales. In addition, the Chinese connections receive a royalty from the Australian and international sales. Finally, profits are returned to the universities, and academic exchanges occur both ways. Investors continue to support biotech innovations. Skilled, stable manufacturing jobs are created in China and support services are shared appropriately. In conclusion For Australian researchers, advantages exist if strong relationships can be developed with Chinese universities and sophisticated manufacturers. After early scientific development, clinical evaluation and roll-out can be achieved efficiently in China. This data then support Australian and international registration. Finally, since each party has a stake in the other’s success, strong and long-term trustworthy relationships result. The beginning of this process depends on academic excellence, curiosity-driven basic research and an environment that can quickly finance the original start-up process. After that, patience, mutual respect and transparency are the ingredients for a long-term success.

Dr. Barry Marshall is an Australian physician, Nobel Prize Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, and Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the University of Western Australia.

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TO MARKET WE GO: BIOCURATE AND THE CHALLENGE OF COMMERCIALISATION R&D research ventures such as Biocurate can bridge the gap between Australian scientific research and the commercial market. The author shares lessons from experience, offering targeted lessons to improve our medical research outcomes.

hen I was a young backbencher in the Hawke Government, one of the people I admired and learned from was the Minister for Science, Barry Jones. Barry had written the globally influential book Sleepers, Wake! in which he warned that "technologically based transitions create revolutionary economic and social changes." He called on governments to shape the future for the better through smart responses to technological change. To his credit, Barry Jones pushed the Hawke Government to invest a lot more in science, R&D and technology. He secured some wins, including a $1m National Biotechnology Program. Barry once told me, however, that he had a recurring nightmare. He worried that after all our efforts and all our investments, we would look back in years to come and find that Australian scientific research had not moved far along the path from

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the laboratory to the market. If this happened then our research would have failed to make its maximum possible impact in the world. I’m afraid to say these fears came true. Australia can be proud of our scientific achievements, especially in medical research. But an ongoing frustration is that too little of it makes the long journey to market. Too much is lost in the "valley of death" before it can even reach the clinical trial stage. And if it doesn’t reach clinical trial, it can’t reach patients. BioCurate was set up to address this problem, and has already become an important part of Australia’s innovation ecosystem. BioCurate came about thanks to an unprecedented partnership between the Vice Chancellors of Victoria’s two biggest universities: Monash University and the University of Melbourne. It was the first time two universities of this size,

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in such close proximity to one another (making them competitors) had come together in this way. Both Vice Chancellors recognised that their universities were sitting on a gold mine. Melbourne and Monash receive about $100m per annum each in government funding for medical research, and both are in the top 100 universities in the world for research output. But the Vice Chancellors also realised that the right settings were not in place to make good on the promise of this research – to get it to the bedsides of the patients who need it. They decided to put their money where their mouths were. Each university invested $25m, and the Victorian Government invested another $10m. BioCurate was launched in 2016, and I was proud to come on board as Chair. In 2017 we were delighted to appoint distinguished haematologist and oncologist Dr Glenn Begley as BioCurate’s inaugural CEO. The Biotech Century I have long been passionate about medical research. To my mind, there are two reasons why Australia should aim to be a world leader in this area. One is the potential benefit to patients. Science has made great strides in the battle against disease and disability, but there is still a long way to go. Australia faces increasing challenges with the rising incidence of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and more. The financial and emotional costs of these diseases to individuals, families and communities is immense. If Australia can be at the forefront of medical research, then our patients will be among the first to benefit – if we can meet the challenge of commercialisation. The second reason Australia should aim to be a world leader in medical research is the potential economic benefit. Every time there has been a global economic revolution – whether the agricultural or industrial revolutions, or the information revolution we are still living through today – those societies prospered which got out in front and led the way. I have long believed that the next big revolution will be in biotechnology. That’s why the government in which I served as a Minister, Treasurer and then Premier invested so heavily in the scientific institutes and infrastructure necessary to position Victoria at the forefront of the biotech revolution. In the

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year 2000, Premier Steve Bracks announced that we would aim for our state to be recognised as one of the top five biotechnology locations in the world by 2010. We invested in the Bio21 Institute at the University of Melbourne, and the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, which is now the largest brain research group in the Southern Hemisphere. We helped double the size of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and funded the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute at Monash University. We secured the tools scientists told us they needed: the $100 million IBM Blue Gene supercomputer for the University of Melbourne, for example, as well as the Australian Synchrotron at Monash. We also fixed the legislative roadblocks that meant it was easier to set up a new gold mine in Kalgoorlie than it was to obtain approvals for a small biotech start-up in Victoria. We amended the partnerships legislation in an effort to make Victoria the easiest place in Australia to attract venture capital and commercialise research. Today Melbourne is known as a top city for research and innovation in the medical space. But the missing piece of the puzzle is still commercialisation. It’s a formidable obstacle: a recent study by Tufts University estimated that the cost of bringing a new drug to market in the USA is around $US1.4bn – plus another $1.2bn in returns foregone by investors during the eight to 12 years the development process can take. It’s no wonder that in Australia, many new discoveries fail to get the investment support necessary to bring them into that process in the first place. This failure is one of the key reasons the Federal Government established the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) – not just to support more medical research, but to help it move along through translation and commercialisation. The challenge of commercialisation The QS World University Rankings ranks 1000 universities on factors ranging from research performance to academic reputation, graduate employability, and staff to student ratio. Australia currently has seven universities in the top 100. This is a very good result. But there is another global ranking we should also be paying attention to: Reuters’ list of the World’s Most Innovative Universities. This list identifies

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State of Our Innovation Nation the institutions doing the most to invent new technologies and contribute to new markets and industries. It is based on analysis of patent filings as well as research paper citations. On this list, South Korea has six universities in the top 100. Singapore has two, as does Israel. (It’s worth noting that these two countries each have economies approximately the size of Victoria’s.) At present, the number of Australian universities appearing on Reuters’ list of innovative universities is zero. This needs to change, which means we need to understand why so many of our discoveries falter in the "valley of death" between discovery and development. There are multiple reasons: Funding: Australia’s peak funding body for medical research, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), spends its $900 million annual budget on research, not commercialisation. For this reason, scientists looking to secure a portion of that funding will understandably focus their efforts on the research side. Like everyone else, scientists go where the incentives lead them. Intellectual property: A related issue is the difficulty of securing intellectual property (IP) rights. The incentive for academics is to publish. When a new piece of research is published, the IP involved can quickly dissipate. If IP is not properly protected (and seen to be protected) it becomes even more difficult to secure the many millions of dollars of investment needed to bring a drug to market. Expertise: Scientists are good at science. They are not always very experienced or knowledgeable about the process of translating a discovery into an investible product. That’s where BioCurate comes in. Collectively, the BioCurate team has over 150 years of combined biotech/ pharma industry experience, has been responsible for 70 therapeutics that are currently in the clinic, and has experience in over 25 therapeutic areas. Culture: Most scientists would like their work to have a real world impact. This is especially true in medical science, where a breakthrough could lead to a better life for untold numbers of people. At the same time, scientists at work

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need to concentrate on the task at hand. Pure research can only be done for its own sake, and not with a constant eye on the possible applications down the track (as these are impossible to predict). We do, however, need scientists to adopt a positive attitude to commercialisation, and to work constructively with industry and organisations like BioCurate. There is clear evidence among younger scientists that this is happening, which is very exciting for Australia’s scientific future.

enough patients to make the trial worthwhile. Potential projects must be able to demonstrate that a trial is likely to be feasible when the project is ready to be tested in this way.

How BioCurate works The combined research strengths of BioCurate’s two shareholders, Monash University and the University of Melbourne, place these universities in the top five globally in pharmacology, metabolism and immunology, and in the top 10 in paediatrics, neurosciences, and cardiology. BioCurate focuses on very early stage work in therapeutics – that is, drugs that are placed inside a patient through injections or ingestion. There is understandably a very high bar to overcome before a new drug can be tested on a human being. The projects engaged by BioCurate are typically three to five years away from clinical trial. BioCurate’s independent experts work closely with the universities to scout for potential projects. When a promising project is found it is subjected to careful evaluation on a number of criteria:

Committed researchers: BioCurate needs to work with researchers who are committed to the long haul of getting a discovery from the laboratory to the bedside. Fortunately, most researchers today understand that commercialisation is a way their work can make a real difference in the world. It is, of course, much too early to measure BioCurate’s impact. But I am very excited about the potential, and I know that our two university partners are too. International Pharma has also been exceptionally positive about BioCurate and numerous MOUs have already been signed. And while BioCurate is a Victorian project – funded in part and strongly supported by the Victorian Government – I believe that in the medium to longer term, BioCurate’s impact will be increasingly national. And as the line between therapeutics and medical devices becomes more blurred, we will also see programs that move beyond therapeutics to medical devices, and potentially digital technologies and many other areas of scientific and technological enquiry. Governments need to be smart in their responses to technological change. Early movers benefit the most. BioCurate exists to harness the energies, talents and achievements of our scientific community, and direct these towards improving Australia’s record in bringing new discoveries to market. We’ve made a great start, but there’s much to do ahead of us.

Unmet medical need: The new discovery must have the potential to meet an existing clinical challenge. A regulatory path to market: Ultimately the regulators are the ones who determine whether a new molecule will be approved for clinical trial. BioCurate must see clear evidence that this will be a plausible outcome in time. A clinical development path to market: At any given time there are many clinical trials underway. Clinical trials require time, resources and

Robust data: Much published research is not yet up to the standard required for a clinical program. The research involved in discoveries that may be funded towards commercialisation by BioCurate must be of a quality beyond that which is required for initial publication.

The Hon. John Brumby AO is the current Chancellor of La Trobe University and a former Labor party politician who served as the Victorian Treasurer from 2000 - 2007 and Premier of Victoria from 2007 to 2010.

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THE FUTURE OF HEALTH MONITORING IS SENSIBLES Sensibles may sound like science fiction, but this revolutionary technology is making waves in aged-care facilities, and has the potential to transform health monitoring at scale.

magine a world where your fitness tracker could be replaced by something far more whimsical, intriguing, and, dare I say, magical. Picture a device that keeps an eye on your wellbeing without ever actually touching you, like an invisible guardian angel who's always on the lookout for your health. Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? But let me introduce you to the enchanting world of "sensibles." You're likely acquainted with wearables, those pesky little gadgets that cling to your wrist like a needy koala, constantly reminding you of your daily exercise (or lack thereof). They tell you when you're stressed, when you need to shed a few extra pounds, and when you should probably sleep. But like any high-maintenance relationship, these devices demand attention, like charging them or wearing them even while you sleep or shower. What if you could harness the power of something as simple as your home WiFi router to monitor your physiological signals, like heart rate and respiratory rate, without ever strapping anything to your body? It's like a return to the nostalgic days when diabetes-alert dogs would bark to signal their owners' elevated sugar levels, but with a high-tech twist. The term sensibles may not be in your vocabulary yet, but it will be soon. They work much like the radars used by the military to track flights and space debris, by beaming radio waves into the environment and collecting data from the altered signals. This enables you to monitor something hundreds of miles away – or, in the case of sensibles, your own vital signs.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Recent breakthroughs in research have shown that Channel State Information (CSI) – a series of values containing frequency content from specific areas in space – can be utilised to monitor physiological signals. And what existing device can act as a radar to pick up these signals? Your trusty WiFi router, of course! Radio frequency (RF) sensing is a version of sensibles that's already making waves in aged-care facilities. In these settings, privacy is paramount, and video surveillance is often

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off the table. This is where WiFi-based RF sensing (known as rPPG in health contexts) comes in, with its ability to sense through walls without being nosy. Miniature antennae, strapped to patients' beds, remotely monitor their vital signs and potential risks of falling. Like any emerging technology, sensibles still have some quirks to iron out. Identifying individuals with high accuracy in the RF realm can be tricky, and closed environments with lots of signal scattering can pose challenges. Many devices remain lab-bound, waiting to be unleashed into the world. Despite these hurdles, the advent of machine learning and AI has reignited interest

in sensibles. By training models to analyse wave reflections, they can be taught to identify heart rate, blood pressure, and even glucose levels. Imagine a future where city-wide radar systems monitor not just your health, but also that of your beloved pets. As we take baby steps toward this reality, the potential for emergency use in monitoring patients at scale and detecting vital derangements could be transformative. After the internet, microwave ovens, and GPS, we may be on the brink of another military innovation that could revolutionise our health. So, buckle up, because the future of health monitoring is as mesmerising and magical as it is practical.

Shiv Meka is a Principal Data Scientist at the Royal Perth Hospital.

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GENOMIC RESEARCH: WORKING BETTER TOGETHER Universal genomic screening, along with a streamlined clinical trial process, could help Australia fight disease and gain a competitive edge in health care.

he Australian health system is good by world standards. Australians enjoy universal healthcare, have access to a reasonable range of medicines and medical devices, and are treated in high-quality hospitals. Still, stakeholders are striving to improve the system, with significant advances being made in the implementation of the National Digital Health Strategy, including the My Health Record initiative. The system is also supported by Australia’s well-regarded, well-resourced academic health research efforts. However, Australia has not yet fully harnessed the growing potential of the technological developments that have occurred in recent decades. On April 14, 2003, the Human Genome Project finally completed sequencing the entire human genome. This remarkable achievement has been the foundation of the explosion in genomic medicines we see today. Genomic sequencing significantly improves the diagnoses of disease and provides better, more personalised treatments for many of them. The vital ingredients in better treating complex diseases, such as advanced cancers, are ensuring that sufferers are, firstly, properly diagnosed in a timely manner, and secondly, given access to treatments, including new, experimental treatments best designed to fight their illness. In July 2018, I was fortunate enough to join the board of Omico (Australian Genomic Cancer Medicine Centre Limited), a new public-private

partnership designed to meet exactly this challenge. Omico represents a nationwide collaboration, encompassing government, industry and the community. It supports a network of research and treatment centres that facilitates, supports and promotes clinical trials in genomic cancer medicine and will help drive broad-scale genomic screening. Community support is vital. We know that 75 per cent of Australians would be willing to use genetic testing to identify the most effective medicine to treat their disease. Of those people, 95 per cent said they would consent to having their results used to improve treatments for future patients1. The Australian government has already recognised the importance of genomics medicines through its Genomics Health Futures Mission2 . The mission aims to ensure Australians live longer and healthier lives through access to genomic knowledge and technology, and to position Australia as a global leader in genomics research. That is a key part of Omico’s mission, too. The opportunity is enormous. In 2019, R&D spending by the biopharmaceutical industry totalled US$186 billion globally3. Increasingly, the industry’s R&D programs have a genomics competent as companies look to find treatments for major health burdens facing all countries. In Australia, the industry contributes more than $8.9 billion to the economy, supporting almost

By Bruce Goodwin

https://www.austrade.gov.au/Digital-Health/digital-health-precision-medicine https://www.health.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/genomics-health-futures-mission 3 https://www.statista.com/statistics/309466/global-r-and-d-expenditure-for-pharmaceuticals/ 1 2

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23,000 full-time jobs4. We also know that clinical trials contribute over $1 billion annually to the economy, supporting nearly 7,000 highly skilled jobs . At Omico, to date, we have attracted strong industry partnerships contributing over $47 million, returning almost $8 for every dollar contributed by the government. An initial assessment commissioned by Omico suggests that increased genomic research, linked to medicine access, has the potential to: • Provide an additional 2,000 and 3,500 years of progression-free and overall survival respectively for those Australian cancer patients placed onto clinical trials. • Create up to 2,750 long-term, high-value jobs either directly or through expanded Australian industry. • Deliver over $2 billion in foreign direct and private investment, including for Australian-owned businesses. • See $520 million of healthcare costs avoided through a greater proportion of cancer patients participating in clinical trials. So, what more is needed to deliver the health and economic benefits of a larger genomic-medicine footprint in Australia? Firstly, we need to address some of the persistent issues related to clinical trials in Australia. To become a world leader in the delivery of clinical trials, we must be able to commence trials quickly and in a consistent, cost-effective and efficient manner across multiple centres around Australia. Unfortunately, delivering a multi-centre trial in Australia across state and territory borders continues to involve significant duplication of effort, complexity and inconsistencies. This can lead to, for example, unreliable recruitment of clinical-trial patients within the required timelines. Medicines Australia has put forward two recommendations that would help address these issues: • All National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)-nationally accredited ethics committees can review and approve trials at all public and private

hospitals and trial sites, and in universities. Once a trial is approved by a NHMRCnationally accredited ethics committee it will be automatically accepted by all clinical-trial centres without exception and without additional written agreements being required. • That Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) and Site-Specific Assessment (SSA) submissions are harmonised into one Australian online portal and reviewed in parallel. In addition, we need to have a way of delivering universal genomic testing for all Australians who need it. Currently, next-generation sequencing, which provides more complete genomic sequencing, is not government-funded in Australia. This means that most often genomic testing is done, if at all, only for patients with advanced disease. By having funded access to next- generation sequencing, appropriately utilising the My Health Record to ensure appropriate management and access to data, Australia could develop an unparcelled genomics research capability that would improve health outcomes and medicines development. Because multinational biopharmaceutical companies are developing, or looking to develop, significant numbers of treatments that are genomic biomarker-directed, having genomic screening already in place would be extremely beneficial. It allows the efficient identification of genomic biomarker-defined patients who may be suitable for clinical trials. The principles of making a proper diagnosis and treating with the best-available therapy are ancient. However, a new set of principles – to screen, to research targeted therapies, to harness different technologies, and to do all that across communities – is not. Enshrining it will require new partnerships, new approaches, goodwill and leadership. With those elements in place, we will be on our way to giving Australia a competitive advantage.

Bruce Goodwin was the managing director of Janssen Australia and New Zealand, the pharmaceutical arm of Johnson & Johnson, between 2016-2020, and served two terms as a board member of Medicines Australia. The economic contribution of the innovative pharmaceutical industry to Australia. PricewaterhouseCoopers and Medicines Australia, February 2018. https://medicinesaustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/52/2018/07/Economic-Contribution-Innovative-Pharma-industry-Australia.pdf 5 Clinical Trials in Australia: the economic profile and competitive advantage of the sector; L.E.K. Consulting & MTP Connect, June 2017. https://www.mtpconnect.org.au/clinicaltrials 6 LEK Consulting report commissioned by Omico, November 2020. 4

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SOLVING BIOMEDICAL COMMERCIALISATION How can better coordination lead to improved outcomes for biomedical commercialisation? Two experts weight in with measured advice.

ranslation and commercialisation of medical research are key priorities for governments, research organisations, industry and society to ensure that ultimately novel health technologies reach patients and improve health outcomes. We propose that further investment and attention in three key areas could provide solutions: 1. Greater alignment of funding with product- development outcomes 2. Targeted recruitment to secure talent acquisition and address skills gaps 3. Working together to increase global impact through critical mass Successive federal and state governments have recently invested significantly in the commercialisation of medical research, with the creation of the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF), which is a $20 billion long-term investment supporting Australian health and medical research. The

Biomedical Translation Fund (BTF) provides companies with venture capital through licensed private sector fund managers, and MTPConnect, Australia's Growth Centre for the medical technologies, biotechnologies and pharmaceuticals sector and various follow-on initiatives. Despite this, there is still a wide, cultural mindset-and-capability gap within the scientific ecosystem in recognising the complex and expensive global process of medicine development and the level of time, skill and planning required, particularly in the preclinical stages. Commercialisation of biomedical inventions is different to commercialisation of other technologies. There is a high level of risk, with long development timelines, capital-intensive processes and a globally competitive environment. The inherent technical requirements drive a need for skilled people.

By Jennifer Herz and Dr. Simon Fisher

Figure 1 Drug development process

Drug development is lengthy, complex and expensive, typically taking more than 10 years and at a cost of more than $1 billion.

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A recent survey of workforce skills and capacity in the Medical Technology, Biotechnology, Pharmaceutical and Digital Health (MTP) Sector identified the following skill gaps1 : • Business skills and commercial expertise • Regulatory and quality • Clinical • Biological sciences and technologies • Informatics, computation, mathematical and statistics • Chemical science There is also a disincentive to commercialise versus ‘publish’. The academic track record in publishing is a key criterion for government grants, the majority of which are typically structured to be led by academic institutions and not industry, further compounding the problem. There are multiple sources of R&D funding that lack the coordination and alignment to support end-to end product development. For as long as we fail to address these issues, we will continue to fund research that may not be of commercial value. Of course, there may be other good reasons to do so, but there is little in our system that supports termination of projects that may not be commercially viable or feasible. Uniting around common purposes with a high probability of success requires that we recognise that both the research sector and the biomedical industry are complex, fragmented and represented by multiple stakeholders that are not always aligned. Speaking to government with one voice is therefore challenging and this, in turn, contributes to the suboptimal understanding of, and collaboration with, industry. Finally, our federal system of government means states and territories are often in competition with one another. We are a small country in a global industry. If we want to attract more overseas research, funding and talent, we should all be working together to increase our global impact. In addition, there are many service providers supporting the sector – regulatory, quality and commercialisation consultants and clinical research organisations, which include many people with international experience who have returned to Australia and brought these skills home. The skills gaps that have been identified can be closed by these service providers, but there is a culture of mistrust in the consultancy model. This must be overcome for these people to become a more prominent voice in the

ecosystem. These service providers can help close the skills gaps that have been identified, but funding initiatives are typically not directed at service providers and they are not appropriately valued in the product-development continuum. It is as if we were investing all our money in the architectural design of innovative new buildings, without recognising the need for the plumbers, electricians, bricklayers and other expertise that is needed to execute on the building and design. Successful models of private and academic partnerships do exist. Australia has centres of excellence that will benefit from continued nurturing, investment and capability building. The recent investment in Westmead by the MRFF is a good example. In order to become the world leader we aspire to be, these funds should be used to bring in the industry skills required as well as supporting researchers. Though decreasing the number of publications, this will increase the probability of success. The adage “publish or perish” should be replaced with “partner or perish”. There is a need for specific collaborative projects with early industry engagement and with KPIs focused on product- development outcomes and not just research outcomes. This will also enable ultimate access to patients. Australia can be a world leader in high-end medical manufacturing, but some critical capability gaps must be addressed. These skills do exist in the country but are fragmented and are still in the ‘cottage industry’ stage, where many experienced and knowledgeable people are working as standalone consultants or in SME consultancies and lack the voice or critical mass to be heard. The pandemic has seen strong and rapid alignment around a common purpose, removing some barriers and creating goodwill, but there is still insufficient early engagement with industry and a myopic approach across the development landscape. This has highlighted the gaps and sovereign risk described above. These issues can be addressed as the knowledge does exist in Australia. However, the people with the expertise need a platform from which to be heard to create a skill base to complement our world-leading science and clinical-trial capability. The valley of (product) death lies between these two. Partnerships between government, industry and academia with new voices are essential to narrowing it.

Jennifer Herz is the managing director of Biointelect. Dr. Simon Fisher is the chief scientific officer, Novartis. Both have extensive experience in commercialisation and drug development. MTPConnect (2020): A Survey of Workforce Skills and Capacity in the Medical Technology, Biotechnology, Pharmaceutical and Digital health (MTP) Sector https://www.mtpconnect.org.au/images/MTPC_Workplace_Skills_Report.pdf 1

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State of Our Innovation Nation

MEDICAL INNOVATION IN A POST-COVID WORLD While COVID-19 has upturned the table of life it has also knitted disparate parties and even fierce rivals into unlikely collaborations for the common good. Going forward, that same communal spirit directed toward generating and commercialising Australian innovation would be a boon for the country.

eople, companies and governments across Australia were busy planning for the future as we entered 2020. Looking for fresh challenges and vowing to break bad habits. Considering new markets with one eye on disruptive competitors. Building a better tomorrow without leaving anyone behind. Then the world was thrown into chaos by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many found themselves having to start all over again after losing their job or going out of business with entire industries grinding to a halt. There’s still much recovery to be done, but we must also look to the future and decide what role we want Australia to play in the world. Recordbreaking decades of economic growth built mostly on the back of the resources industry are over. So, what now? Much of what happens next will depend on how state and federal governments support innovation across industry sectors. There are encouraging early signs of a renewed commitment to Australian innovation. Industry has also responded. We’ve seen car makers, distilleries and fashion brands using production facilities to make hand sanitiser, personal protective equipment and ventilators. Businesses have been collaborating with government, with other companies in different industries and even with fierce market rivals. I experienced this spirit of cooperation firsthand when the medical devices industry came

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

together to ensure Australia had enough life-saving medical equipment as part of a coordinated national response to COVID-19. Changes that would typically take years or months were happening in weeks or days. It would be difficult to overstate how important it is that we build on this momentum. From a medical perspective, Australia is an excellent country in which to foster innovation. Just look at the groundbreaking work done by our clinicians and researchers. Our science-led, rapid and coordinated response to COVID-19 has been world-leading, demonstrating that Australia is a safe and appealing place to invest. These are important considerations for multinationals such as mine in this highrisk environment. In the quest to support and foster local innovation, we must not lose sight of the contribution that multinationals make in improving access to lifesaving medical technology and developing treatments that improve health outcomes. Our industry experience, policy knowledge, financial support and market access helps academics and startups commercialise their bright ideas. For most academics, it’s hard to look much further than accessing the next grant. So helping them turn their ideas into viable products is often life-changing. This support will be even more critical for university research departments following the brutal funding hit delivered by the pandemic.

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Johnson & Johnson has entered more than 60 collaborations with Australian researchers, biotechnology companies and entrepreneurs in the past few years. Multinationals like J&J also provide invaluable access to markets by partnering with entrepreneurial Australian businesses. Or through significant investments, such as the $50m J&J injected into Australian-born Protagonist Therapeutics to advance the clinical pipeline of its innovative peptide drugs for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease. Now a NASDAQ-listed biotechnology company, it was valued at $US823m at the time of writing. These partnerships and investments bring new talent and fresh thinking into our innovation ecosystem. We’re hungry for more. In our experience the successful research, development and commercialisation of new drugs and novel medical technology requires several key elements to create an eco-system for innovation. These include quality scientific infrastructure, great research, a willingness to collaborate, a robust, respected and enforced intellectual property framework, an entrepreneurial mindset and a competitive funding base that is stable, consistent and knowledgeable. If one or more elements is missing, the chances of turning a great idea into useful medical innovation is significantly diminished. Australian manufacturing has been in decline for many years because products can be made more cost-effectively in other locations. But the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed weaknesses in global supply chains that have given government and business leaders reason to reconsider. Consumer appetite for locally produced products and services has also grown. Medical innovation and technology could and should be at the forefront of a resurgent Australian manufacturing industry. The Federal Government has committed $20bn to its Medical Research Futures Fund to deliver long-term investment, and we’ve seen sustained investment from some state governments. But we need more consistency throughout the country. Australian governments should look at

policy initiatives in countries like Israel, Singapore and the UK to get a sense of what it would take to make Australia a regional hub. It should surprise nobody to hear that employment incentives and tax breaks are near the top of the list. Israeli technologies are powering advances in cardiology, genetics, neurology and many other scientific fields. Often referred to as the Startup Nation, it leads the world in private research and development expenditure as a percentage of gross domestic product. Despite having a population of just 8.5 million, only the US and China have more companies listed on the NASDAQ. Israeli Government support includes incubators all over the country offering up to 85 per cent funding of early-stage project costs for the first two years. It offers multinationals reduced company tax rates, investment grants and employment grants, covering about 25 per cent of salary for every new R&D employee. Closer to home, strong government support for innovation is also helping Singapore cement its position as the gateway for multinationals to reach the world’s fastest-growing region – Asia. Its Research, Innovation and Enterprise Plan (REI 2020) pumped $US19bn into the development of R&D capabilities, enterprise innovation and entrepreneurship. Thousands of multinational corporations have chosen Singapore as their regional headquarters because of its strategic location, attractive corporate tax structure and robust intellectual property protection. Adopting some of these employment and taxation initiatives would see more multinationals flocking to support the innovative ideas generated by Australian entrepreneurs. But we also need stronger ties between research and industry to commercialise the many brilliant ideas generated in labs around the country to ensure Australia’s life science and medical technology capabilities are maintained and expanded. With every challenge comes an opportunity and COVID-19 has given us a rare chance to set the Australian economy on a more forward-thinking path. Industry, government and academia must work together in grabbing this opportunity with both hands.

Susan Martin is the managing director, Australia and New Zealand, Johnson and Johnson Medical.

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PROPELLING MEDICAL R&D FORWARD A leading figure in the pharmaceutical industry lays out her plan for making Australia more appealing to R&D investors.

ife-changing medicines do not happen without innovation. R&D multiplies its downstream benefits, yielding outcomes many times the value of the initial investment. As the most sophisticated and digitally advanced manufacturer and exporter of pharmaceuticals in Australia, AstraZeneca takes a long view of the value of medicines to the global health system. We understand how finely balanced innovation can be, and how a metaphorical headwind or unexpected hurdle can derail a discovery. We understand these realities, and we stay the course. We live this commitment in our pursuit of an effective vaccine for COVID-19. When contemplating the future of innovation in R&D, we must understand the environment in which medical research is performed and appreciate the risks and hazards that need to be negotiated to deliver a life-changing medicine. We first need to consider the environment under ‘typical’ circumstances (a distant memory in the current world) and then understand how that environment changes in a crisis. Finally, we need to be able to see how a proactive, cooperative approach between government and the pharmaceutical industry can enhance patient care. International competition to attract R&D investment is fierce, with seemingly every country presenting itself as the ideal recipient. Australia has a strong case to make – world-class scientists, a high standard of education, excellent research facilities, a great lifestyle, strong infrastructure and political and cultural stability. However, there are also factors that counterbalance our appeal. For example, Australia’s approach to R&D taxation is notably more onerous than that of some comparable economies. Following Brexit, Ireland is offering tax incentives to encourage European

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

organisations headquartered in the UK to move their operations across the Irish Sea, boosting the local economy while allowing the organisations to retain EU benefits in an English-speaking country. Australia’s energy costs also create headwinds for technology-heavy enterprises, such as our Sydney-based manufacturing facility, from which almost one billion units of asthma medicine are exported. Unintended impacts of government policy have made recruitment of specialised talent from overseas more challenging and complicated the establishment of clinical-trial sites in Australia. Unsurprisingly, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced both industry and government to demonstrate an uncommon level of agility, decisiveness and responsiveness. I’m proud, both as an Australian citizen and as the leader of AstraZeneca’s Australia and New Zealand operations, that both parties rose to the challenge. Together we have navigated obstacles that could have threatened the entire vaccine project, and we have put in place an agreement that will ensure that a vaccine, once established as safe and efficacious in clinical trials, will be produced locally. So, having demonstrated our ability to innovate under both crisis- and non-crisis conditions, what have we learnt about how to highlight Australia’s appeal as a premier R&D destination? It is important to understand how profoundly uncertainty can threaten the viability of an innovative project -We could leverage our cooperative COVID-vaccine experience – the positives and the challenges –to develop a roadmap for innovation – a template for future innovative projects, one that would reduce problematic uncertainty to a more manageable level.

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It is a natural inclination in the face of disruption to withdraw, conserve resources and avoid risk. But there is also risk in foregoing opportunity, in adopting a defensive mindset. Shock and disruption of existing industries can change the fabric of society. Following the Global Financial Crisis, we saw businesses emerge with untested approaches, and yet today it would be hard to imagine life without GroupOn (2008), Uber and Square (2009), and Instagram (2010). Safe, defensive thinking would not have launched any of these suddenly ubiquitous entities. In response to the pandemic, the federal government has attempted to stimulate various sectors of the economy, prudently aiming to insulate against shock. That protection will stand those sectors in good stead as the economy recovers. That same stimulus, applied to pharmaceutical innovation in the form of tax reform, incentives and other measures, could place Australia at the forefront of global R&D investment. As much of the economy has stalled during the pandemic, this is the perfect time to consider how we rebuild the country and invest in new areas of growth. With the need for new approaches, companies and government may be more willing to invest in new technologies, rather than persist with existing ones. Adjusting policy to remove barriers to investment and experimentation would be a step in the right direction, as would the consolidation and coordination of funding opportunities. An NHMRC grant to encourage research in essential but highrisk avenues – similar to the US National Institutes

of Health High Risk High Reward program for scientists “pursuing pioneering approaches in innovative, high-impact projects” – would incentivise our most talented researchers to pursue careers in Australia rather than seek overseas opportunities. The value of this program is illustrated by one statistic: 160 US researchers supported by NIH grants have been sole or shared recipients of 94 Nobel Prizes. In comparison, Australia has seven Nobel Laureates. We have the talent to be more competitive with the US and other countries, but we need to give those talented scientists the best opportunity to do their work – and then get out of their way. Companies like AstraZeneca will always seek opportunities to innovate – it’s simply the way we operate. However, with the right template for collaboration between government and industry, that innovation could be faster, more efficient and more beneficial for all. Consider what an amazing difference that could make to Australia’s future. Crisis spawns once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. Right now we face a choice: withdraw under pressure, or see those opportunities for what they are: a chance to achieve things that would otherwise stay beyond our reach. We’re in a period when taking risks may seem daunting. But in a time of crisis, taking them may actually be more sensible than declining to act. Opportunities are emerging as we speak. My question to both my colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry and to leaders in government is this: are we prepared to take those risks, so that we might do what otherwise would not be done?

Liz Chatwin is the country president of AstraZeneca Australia and New Zealand

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MAXIMISING NUTRITIONAL HEALTH Amid COVID-19 and beyond, it would serve Australia well for the medical establishment to countenance new/old approaches to fortifying immunity and optimising health. Editor’s introduction, by John Keeney The following piece on vitamin therapy was written by Professor Ian Brighthope, a medically trained doctor and surgeon. For 50 years he has been a leader of a growing number of scientifically trained and certified medical doctors driven by duty of care and curiosity to examine potential cures outside mainstream medical practice. As a result, he has frequently found himself at loggerheads with health ministers and fellow doctors. In 1982 he founded the Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine in Melbourne. This elite program was open only to certified medical doctors, and required a minimum of three years’ rigorous part-time study to achieve a fellowship upon graduation. The college has since graduated more than 700 doctors, one of whom hailed the courses for addressing “the many important things not taught at any traditional medical school in Australia and, almost certainly, anywhere in the world. Particularly as regards nutritional science. There is no equivalent university course comparable to ACNEM in Australia, though there are a few roughly similar organisations overseas in the US and UK, though I would regard Australia as more progressive as a whole.” ACNEM provides course material and training subject matter which is strongly evidence-based and consistent with traditional scientific methodologies. The college forms part of a larger progressive trend across the country, encompassing new scientific thinking about nutrition, environmental medicine and therapies such as prolotherapy and high-dose intravenous vitamin C injections, once considered “fringe”, now gaining acceptance. Dr. Ng Eng Kee, a Malaysian medical doctor

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

famous there for his charitable medical and missionary work in the remote Pahang jungle region, emigrated to Australia more than 45 years ago. He has been an acknowledged world-leading acupuncturist since, whilst running a full practice, and is still active today at 84. He has consistently participated in world conferences, and notes that some of the best recent advances in acupuncture have occurred not in China but in Sweden. He has taught and certified over 500 medical doctors in this ancient Chinese remedy. Along with two doctor friends he was responsible for Australia’s private health funds providing rebates for acupuncture – the first western nation in the world to do so – during the 1980s. These and other trends, including the recognition and regulation of organic farming and foods, are on the rise. Across the board, one can observe a progressive movement combining new and old knowledge, methods and treatments entering the mainstream of medicine, spurred on by a growing legion of medical doctors . Professor Brighthope founded biocentric nutrition and vitamin clinics and a high end (meaning based on molecular and clinical analysis ) nutritional aids company, Nutrition Care, more than 35 years ago. Recently, he partnered with a Chinese company in that venture and launched a new research company devoted to medical applications of cannabis. He is active, fit and healthy at age 75. In the following viewpoint article Professor Brighthope promulgates one of his life’s missions: awareness of the medically based value of vitamins and nutrition, in particular vitamin C. He was a personal friend of Dr. Linus Pauling, a twotime Nobel Prize winner and the original vitamin

By Professor Ian Brighthope

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C advocate, who wrote the foreword to the professor’s book The AIDS Fighters. Dr Pauling was arguably America’s finest chemist of the 20th century, yet was attacked vehemently by many in the medical establishment for his contention that vitamin C in large doses had numerous disease-prevention effects. The debate continues today, though many on a personal, empirical basis have found benefit from high-dosage vitamin C intake. His basic hypothesis was science-based: the human body does not manufacture vitamin C, which is essential for proper functioning, and therefore supplementation is required in the absence of adequate dietary intake. As Dr. Hilary Roberts wrote in a 2015 article in support of Pauling’s theories: “Irwin Stone first introduced Pauling to vitamin C, and explained that it wasn't really a vitamin at all, but an essential substance we could no longer manufacture in our bodies. Most animals make their own vitamin C, in large amounts. In humans, the gene for this ability has mutated and no longer works properly”. Dr. Brighthope’s views on vitamin C and nutrition are best considered against a backdrop of continuing debate. Notably, some of the world’s foremost nutrition doctors (such as Dr. Mark Hyman in the US) now focus on vitamins and nutrition on a level of molecular chemistry, as did Linus Pauling.

he world will be more resilient in the face of future pandemics only when we acknowledge that certain scientific fundamentals have not been applied in the fight against SARSCoV2 (COVID-19). While the social distancing, hygiene, testing, tracking and tracing have been effective, a comprehensive approach should include keen attention to vitamins and nutrition. Currently, the innate strength of the human immune system is substantially ignored by the mainstream. And yet it is the most powerful defence we all have against coronaviruses and every other pathogenic microbe. The effectiveness of the immune system depends significantly on the individual’s nutritional status and genetic makeup. It is the basic building blocks of amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins, minerals and trace elements that determine how powerfully the immune system responds to an infectious agent such as a virus, bacteria or fungus. Any deficiency or imbalance of a single nutrient will weaken the response and permit invasion, and infection, and potentially

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serious symptoms, in some cases, mortality. Doctors practising nutritional medicine understand how important diet, nutritional supplementation and the elimination of excess sugar, alcohol and saturated fats are to preventing, or reducing the severity of, most diseases. For decades now, experts in nutritional medicine (NM) have been quietly defeating infectious diseases, often where orthodox medicine has failed. They have been preventing or successfully treating influenza, severe herpes simplex, coronavirus infections, intractable bacterial infections and pneumonia using nutrients that are essential for improving the immune response and suppressing the viral load, including killing the viruses responsible. The advent of COVID-19 saw panic, pandemonium, economic destruction and death. We have now witnessed the extent to which our health institutions were unprepared for a pandemic of this magnitude. Countering the outbreak with complementary strategies – beyond applying simple epidemiological tools – could improve outcomes. The scientific evidence and practitioner experience that NM has accumulated over the decades has been largely ignored by much of the establishment. NM exponents have tried valiantly to make authorities aware of its beneficial attributes, but often to little avail . January 2020 saw the start of the ‘CD-Zinc Campaign’, which consisted of public health recommendations for the entire population to take vitamins C and D and the trace element zinc, the most critical, effective, safe and readily available nutrients for optimal immunity. The common cold is typically caused by respiratory viruses. Regular oral supplementation with Vitamin C has been found to reduce the duration and severity of common colds in adults and children. Vitamin C deficiency results in impaired immunity and higher susceptibility to all infections. Thus begins a vicious cycle, because infections significantly impact on vitamin C levels due to enhanced inflammation and metabolic requirements. Supplementation with vitamin C both prevents and treats respiratory and systemic infections. COVID-19 causes more serious conditions such as pneumonia, acute lung injury (ALI), acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), septic shock and multiple organ failure. Some patients develop serious co-infections

Nabzdyk CS, Bittner, EA, “Vitamin C in the critically ill – indications and controversies”, World Journal of Critical Care Medicine, October 16, 2018 Grant WB et al, “Evidence that Vitamin D Supplementation Could Reduce Risk of Influenza and COVID-19 Infections and Deaths”, Nutrients, April 2020

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State of Our Innovation Nation

of bacteria and fungi. ARDS is characterised by severe hypoxemia (low-blood oxygen), uncontrolled inflammation, oxidative damage and damage to the air sac barrier in the lung, which can lead to death. Infections and sepsis cause the ‘cytokine storm’. This leads to fluid accumulation in the airways. Increased oxidative stress is a key factor in pulmonary injury including ALI and ARDS. Vitamin C can act as a COVID-19 prophylaxis or treatment through numerous pathways. It can reduce the incidence and severity of bacterial and viral infections.1 Vitamin C increases white blood cell activity, reduces the replication of viruses, enhances the production and activity of white blood cells, including natural killer and helper cells, and increases antibody formation. Also, it is a very powerful antioxidant that can protect cells and tissues. Its anti-viral effects have been demonstrated in influenza, herpes viruses, pox viruses and coronaviruses.2 Vitamin C can ameliorate hyperoxia-induced ALI and attenuate hyperoxia-induced white blood cell dysfunction. It prevents the cytokine surge that damages the lungs. It eliminates alveolar fluid by preventing the activation and accumulation of neutrophils, special white blood cells. High-dose intravenous vitamin C (HDIVC) is instrumental in recovery from influenza and ARDS and other serious complications of serious viral infections. Patients on life support (ECMO) with a poor prognosis have been rapidly and successfully recovered using HDIVC, with no evidence of lung fibrosis. IV Vitamin C use in septic shock has been shown to reduce mortality. It also reduces the length of stay in ICU and significantly shortens the duration of mechanical ventilation. HDIVC does not cause kidney stones or kidney damage, excuses used by opponents to justify refusal to use the treatment. A very rare side effect is the preventable breakdown of red blood cells. This can be very serious and result in anaemia. A test called the G6P-D deficiency test is performed to ensure that very high doses of vitamin C are not administered if the test is positive. In March 2020, on the back of data published by what translates as the “Expert Group on Clinical Treatment of New Coronavirus Disease in Shanghai”3 the Shanghai government announced its official recommendation

that COVID-19 should be treated with high doses of IV Vitamin C. The experience of thousands of doctors around the world who have used HDIVC is that this molecule is one of the most powerful in virtually all human conditions, including physical and mental illnesses and trauma. It should be used as the treatment of first choice in every epidemic. Vitamin D is the sunlight vitamin. When ultraviolet light falls on the skin, it manufactures a precursor of vitamin D that goes to the liver and kidneys, which make active vitamin D – or, more accurately, a hormone called calcitriol. Deficiency of vitamin D results in ricketts in children, bone disease in adults, such as osteoporosis, and a greatly weakened immune system. Cod liver oil is a rich source of vitamin D. It was used extensively for children in the past during winter to protect against colds and flus. This ‘sunlight’ vitamin D is essential for strong anti-microbial immunity. Lack of exposure to sunlight in winter increases the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency. The seasonal increase in vitamin D deficiency amplifies the risk from respiratory viruses, including the COVID-19 coronavirus. More than 25 clinical trials of vitamin D supplementation for the prevention of acute respiratory tract infections have been conducted during the past two decades. In 2017, a systematic review and meta-analysis concluded vitamin D supplementation was safe and protected against acute respiratory tract infections, with the most severely vitamin-D-deficient patients experiencing the most benefit.4 People with vitamin D deficiency are much more likely to suffer serious outcomes from exposure to respiratory viruses than people with optimal vitamin D levels. In particular, elderly people, especially those in aged care, are at risk from the consequences of vitamin D deficiency, unless given adequate vitamin D supplementation to maintain optimal levels of vitamin D. Others who cannot manufacture enough include people of colour, people restricted to indoors, the obese, diabetics and others with chronic diseases. The Nordic countries have public health policies around vitamin D supplementation and food fortification. They also have among the lowest mortality rates attributed to the SARS – COV2 coronavirus. (Following the devastation

Mao E, Chinese Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2020 Martineau AR, “Vitamin D supplementation to prevent acute respiratory tract infections: systematic review and meta-analysis of individual participant data”, BMJ, February 2017 3 4

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caused by further outbreaks in Scotland and England, the UK government is distributing free vitamin D to millions of Britons. However, the dose is very low and being given very late in the piece. It will be interesting to see the results of this inititiative.) In Scandanavia, vitamin D adequacy in the general population led to lower mortality. Countries that do not have a public health policy of vitamin D supplementation in winter create at-risk groups to viral respiratory infections. Accordingly, further surges in cases and deaths from influenza-like viruses, including COVID-19, occur. Public health programs of vitamin D supplementation protect elderly people and healthcare workers from serious illness and death and allow for less-severe lockdown and economic destruction. In fact, overall, it leads to greater productivity and economic gains, even when severe non-COVID-19 viral infections dominate. Vitamin D supplementation is extremely safe, effective, cheap and readily available. No toxicity has been reported with doses of up to 4,000 iu per day. The myriad mechanisms of action of vitamin D are well understood. In fact, it has now been reclassified as a hormone (I call it Hormone D or its proper name, calcitriol). Logically, routine testing of people at risk of insufficiency should be conducted. If the level of Hormone D is low, it should be medically corrected with supplementation, just as is done with insulin in diabetes and thyroid hormone in hypothyroidism. If vitamin D were a drug, it would be prescribed extensively by the medical profession. Change the name to calcitriol, classify it as a drug, and prescription rates would likely climb. The immediate introduction of public health 5

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measures to improve vitamin D status globally is essential, particularly in settings where insufficient levels and profound vitamin D deficiency are common. Finally, to zinc, a critical trace element in the fight against COVID-19 and future pandemics. It plays a fundamental role in protecting us against invaders. I use the metaphor of zinc as the moat, turrets, gates and locks to the fort. Without it, we are unprotected. Zinc creates a powerful killer mucous that lines our airways from the nose to the airway’s final passages. It holds our airway-lining cells together. Without zinc, our white cells are limited in their production of antibodies and our genes cannot express and repair themselves amid viral onslaught. Researchers have concluded that “the enumerated evidence from the literature strongly suggests great benefits of zinc supplementation [in the treatment and prevention of COVID-19]. There is, therefore, a strong case for global health authorities executing a CD-Zinc supplementation program worldwide. It is readily available and cost-effective. There is no excuse for denying the people of the world a new, cheap, available and science-based approach to assist in our war against the pandemic and its attendant pandemonium. We need not wait for all the new clinical studies to emerge because there is more than ample experience around the current science and vast evidentiary proof already in existence. We cannot wait while watching the bodies drop. I have been inspired by the following statement made by Albert Szen–Gyorgyi, who discovered vitamin C in the 1930s: “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”

Wessels I, “The Potential Impact of Zinc Supplementation on COVID-19 Pathogenesis”, Frontiers in Immunology, July 2020

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State of Our Innovation Nation

INNOVATION IN AUSTRALIAN SPORT Sport in Australia is a pillar of Australian life. But do we, to create a competitive edge, know enough to make us world leaders in sporting prowess and a recognised player in the lucrative global sports industry?

he sports industry sector continues to grow a substantial economic footprint, with millions engaging both in organised sport, recreation activities and personal fitness regimes. A number of novel technologies have evolved to support these endeavours. From innovations such as wearable heart rate monitors, to personal recording and tracking devices, this sector is expanding rapidly. But what are the future technologies and breakthroughs that can drive not only a greater participation and understanding of sport, but create an ecosystem that will support innovation with competitive advantages for our athletes? Australia has a need for a front door for innovation in sport that can tap into a vast network of innovative Australian individuals and enterprises to further the understanding of sport and build a competitive advantage over the rest of the world. Areas such as medical research and understanding of human movement and performance, data driven insights into emerging areas such as predictive analytics for individuals and teams, enabling big data, point cloud and volumetric capture to drive an instant athlete feedback loop and build simulations of sporting situations. Research and manufacturing can create new products that can help athletes perform better for longer with less impact on their

bodies. Then there are the great unknowns of the future, the sparks of ideas that in an ecosystem of bright minds can fan the flames of innovation and stimulate a vision of a future that can be brought into reality. Through the power of research and development, testing and rapid evolution these innovations become so useful and ubiquitous that people ask, “Why didn’t we think of that before?!” Australia needs a vision to create a sports innovation ecosystem that is fully inclusive and available to for the broader citizen sports industry. A place where concepts are brainstormed, incubated, and matured to create new products with a purpose, support a sustainable industry and drive economic growth. A place where research, academia, government, private enterprise, finance, science, business, entrepreneurism, and production capability converge to create an exciting and prosperous future for Australia’s sports industry. Building a broad-based sports innovation industry will be a challenge. It will be a journey of inclusion, of consultation, of alignment of vision, and of building of capability to bring innovation to life. The sports loving people of Australia will need to unite. If sport is the glue that binds our communities together, it can also be evolved into an industry that leads the world. And what could be more Australian than that?

By Luke Jansen

Luke Jansen is Project Director, Infrastructure and Facilities Services, Australian Institute of Sport.

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WHERE THE PATH OF INNOVATION LEADS Research should have consequences, and a link with business to obtain investment for rigorous clinical trials sparks great Australian innovation. By Professor Frank Gannon

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obel Prizes for medical research usually go to researchers who have defined a new cellular process or structure. Increasingly, Nobel Prizes announcements stress the potential benefits to society, and the step from innovative research to innovative products. Likewise, most funding agencies and governments expect a return on investment, something I am acutely aware of as the director of a medical research institute. The task with which we are charged does not end when we publish a paper: it has to be carried through to the clinic or to society. When we start on a path of innovation, we may have no idea where it will lead or what benefits it will bring. Of the many examples from my time at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, none better illustrates this than revolutionary new immunotherapies developed in the laboratory of Rajiv Khanna and his colleague Corey Smith. The end point has been exciting new treatments for cancers and auto-immune diseases. But we should start at the beginning, more than 25 years ago, when Rajiv, then a young researcher, joined the laboratory of Denis Moss. Building on Denis’ pioneering work understanding how the immune system controlled Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV), Rajiv deciphered how EBV interacted with the immune system. Rajiv reckoned that this knowledge could be exploited to stimulate the immune system in the absence of the active virus itself. Today this is what is happening in our laboratories. Basic research has been translated to new therapies. The successful development of immunotherapies relies on a deep understanding of how the immune system responds to external challenges.

A type of immune cell known as a T cell can be stimulated to respond, for example, to a pathogen. To illustrate the process, let’s consider the focus of their recent work. EBV commonly causes glandular fever – sometimes known as the "kissing disease" – in Western populations, but for reasons related to genetics, food and the environment, EBV can cause a type of head and neck cancer, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, in people in South-East Asia. In a world-first clinical trial, Rajiv’s lab, working in conjunction with the Queen Mary Hospital and the University of Hong Kong, brought blood samples from patients in Hong Kong to QIMR Berghofer in Brisbane, where the white blood cells were "trained" to attack specific proteins from EBV present in cancer cells, before being sent back to Hong Kong for treatment of the patients. While this sounds straightforward, the immunotherapy had to be produced under clinical-grade conditions, transported internationally and maintained in a pristine state with stringent temperature control and monitoring. For this to happen, QIMR Berghofer had to develop the technology, skill base and infrastructure – a suite of clean rooms built to exacting GMP standards. This cell therapy manufacturing facility, known as Q-Gen, is available to internal and external researchers. Importantly, it addresses a major gap in the global cell therapy manufacturing capacity as the number of cell immunotherapy clinical trials grows annually (more than 250 in 2018). This initial clinical trial has been expanded to people from South-East Asia now residing in Australia, and has stimulated interest in an unrelated area. A clinician at the Royal Brisbane and

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State of Our Innovation Nation Women’s Hospital, Professor Michael Pender, proposed that EBV-infected cells played a role in multiple sclerosis (MS). Using QIMR Berghofer’s capability, Rajiv Khanna undertook an initial pilot study for patients with MS. The data were very promising and, together with the oncology trial results, attracted international interest. US-based cell therapy company Atara Biotherapeutics has now licensed the EBV technology for use in MS patients, with Q-Gen manufacturing the products for the Phase 1 trial. Australia can build on these advanced manufacturing capabilities, given the high skill base and infrastructure now available in Queensland, the strong regulatory framework under which we work and the novelty of the products we have developed. These immunotherapy studies using blood products derived from the patient are just a start. QIMR Berghofer is now working with T cells that come from healthy volunteers, allowing the development of off-the-shelf products that can be available on demand. Furthermore, QIMR Berghofer scientists have expanded the range of products to include other viruses, such as cytomegalovirus (CMV), a common virus that can kill immune-suppressed people. Transplant surgery usually requires suppression of the patient’s immune system to stop it attacking the transplanted material. This very suppression may allow viruses such as CMV to run rampant. In one case, a child who had received a transplant developed a severe infection that threatened his sight, and could have taken his life. Immunotherapy targeting CMV was used to successfully treat this child. A clinical trial has recently been successfully completed to treat adult organ transplant patients who had CMV complications, and a new study is being initiated to address CMV and other post-operative viral infections in children receiving transplants. Immunotherapy targeting CMV has also been expanded to treat the deadly brain cancer, glioblastoma. CMV might not cause glioblastoma, but it is a frequent bystander and therefore a potential target for effective treatment. The road from the initial work on these

World first trial: Prof. Rajiv Khanna of QIMR viruses has been decades long. It required persistent research to refine the initial discoveries. It was underpinned by a very significant understanding of the immune system. Links with clinicians were essential to bring the early stage research through to the clinic. Significant investment was required to ensure that the products could be manufactured at QIMR Berghofer. The attraction of international investment adds to Australia’s economic strength and there is great potential for more. Each step has been driven by an environment and individuals committed to innovation. We at QIMR Berghofer believe research should have consequences. We believe in linking with business to obtain the required investment, particularly for clinical trials. And we believe the rigor of these trials makes them great Australian innovations. A Nobel Prize was awarded in 2008 for the discovery that a virus caused cancers. The Nobel Prize in 2018 related to the role of T cells as an immunotherapy. The translation of such fundamental discoveries is at the heart of continued innovation. We at QIMR Berghofer are pleased to be part of that continuum.

Professor Frank Gannon is the current CEO of Australian medical research institute QIMR Berghofer. He has previously served in director and executive director positions at medical and scientific research organisations globally, including France, Germany and the United States of America.

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BRIDGING THE VALLEY OF DEATH What are the challenges facing Australian research teams seeking to bring breakthrough drug innovations to market? By Professor Shaun Jackson

ustralian medical researchers have a long and distinguished history of making major scientific breakthroughs of global significance. As a result, our medical research sector is a shining light within our innovation economy. Australia regularly ranks in the top 10 in global rankings for academic excellence. But less well known is that a 2014 report from the Office of the Chief Scientist found that Australia ranks 32nd out of 33 OECD countries for research institution to industry collaboration with small and medium sized businesses (SMEs), and 33rd out of 33 (last) for collaboration with large companies. So, what does that mean in real terms? Essentially, it means that Australian researchers are very good at discovering things, and very poor at commercialising these discoveries due to inherent market challenges. Consequently, success stories in the Australian biotech industry are unfortunately far too few and far between, particularly for a nation that has been so productive in medical research and has great capacity in the ‘discovery’ end of the drug development spectrum. Let me offer a practical example where I have had a front row seat to the challenges of research translation in Australia. The Valley of Death After many years (often decades) of hard work and persistence, and many millions of dollars invested by the Federal Government, via the major peer reviewed granting schemes such as National Health and Medical Research Council (NH&MRC), the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) and the Australian Research Council (ARC), new drug development eventually enters its most critical but vulnerable phase.

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Known as the ‘Valley of Death’ phase; it is characterised as a point at which new innovations are deemed ‘too early’ for sophisticated investment, and ‘too late’ for further support from the Government. A past example is Gardasil. Former Australian of the Year, Professor Ian Fraser and colleagues were celebrated globally for developing the vaccine for certain strains of human papillomavirus (HPV). However, in order to fund the ongoing trials, the only viable pathway was to sell the global rights to this vaccine to the American pharmaceutical company Merck. In 2019, Gardasil sales for Merck rose 27 percent to USD$828m. One current example is the Heart Research Institute and its breakthrough treatment that can safely treat blood clots in patients with stroke or potentially individuals with COVID-19. The latter produces a highly aggressive blood clotting disorder that can lead to the development of a storm of blood clots throughout the lungs, brain and heart. Australia retains the intellectual property and commercial rights to this drug that is poised to have a major impact on the treatment of stroke and other cardiovascular diseases. This treatment, proven safer than aspirin, could achieve global market sales >USD$1bn per year. Surviving the Valley of Death After 20 years and $50M of continued investment, the HRI is now firmly wedged in the ‘Valley of Death’, with limited domestic funding options to continue Phase 2 clinical trials. There are many similar examples of lost economic and heath opportunities, from all over the country.

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State of Our Innovation Nation So, what’s the solution? The factors responsible for the ‘Valley of Death’ in Australia and around the globe are well known. There is often a significant funding ‘gap’ between Government funded competitive grants and private investment. The recently established $20bn Medical Research Future Fund is trying to address this problem by providing seed funding through the Biomedical Translational Bridge Program (BTB) that provides matching $1m grants to early-stage projects to assist with the attainment of important technical milestones that will increase the likelihood of attracting private investment, particularly from Australian venture capital funds. Unfortunately, the BTB program has limited funding and is in very high demand, such that the success rate is very low. The MRFF also provides support for the local venture capital industry through the establishment of the Biomedical Translation Fund (BTF), a AUD$500m fund jointly capitalised by the Federal Government and local venture capital funds. This is an important source of venture capital funding for the Australian biotechnology industry. However, the Australian venture capital industry has received harsh criticism in the past by the industry veteran Gordon Bell for being ‘greedy and nasty and for stunting Australia’s startup companies’. As a result, many academic organisations and startup companies are wary of Australian VC investment and have often chosen to list their companies prematurely on the ASX. My own experience in the U.S. as a faculty member of the Scripps Research Institute, San Diego, California is that there is a plethora of business angels, venture capital investors and government granting schemes that support preclinical and early phase clinical trials. For example, the NIH has competitive grant schemes that fund Phase I and II trials for academic institutions and small companies. Similar funding schemes are available through the U.K. via the Medical Research Council and the British Heart Foundation. Unfortunately, in Australia, business angels are few and far between, our VC investors are risk averse and there are limited examples

of NHMRC and MRFF support for breakthrough technologies discovered and developed here in Australia. As part of the 2019-20 Budget, the Australian Government announced a $5bn, 10-year investment plan for the MRFF that directs MRFF funding into four themes. • Patients: Funding innovative treatments, supporting clinical trials, and delivering more advanced health care and medical technology to improve the health of all Australians. • Researchers: Supporting our researchers to make breakthrough discoveries, develop their skills and progress their careers in Australia. • Research missions: Helping researchers think big to tackle significant health challenges through investment, leadership and collaboration. • Research translation: Moving research ideas from the lab to the clinic, so that medical discoveries become part of clinical practice for GPs, specialists and hospitals. I’d like to encourage the Australian Government to establish a MRFF clinical development fund to support the early clinical development of breakthrough medical devices and therapies. This peer reviewed and independent program should make its investment decisions via applications that will be critiqued on the scale of the health problem, the existing availability of affordable treatment alternatives, the short-comings of existing therapies, and the ‘size of the economic prize’ once the drug reaches the market. Australia commits billions of dollars to fund world-class ‘discovery’ research, only to miss out on the ‘pay day’: the capability to bring our own new drugs and devices to market, via a thriving Australian biotech development and manufacturing industry. We know such a nation-building endeavour will protect patients, create thousands of jobs of the future, support a vibrant health system, create new export trade opportunities, attract investment and deliver long term economic prosperity for our economy.

Professor Shaun Jackson is Director of Cardiovascular Research, a joint initiative between the Heart Research Institute (NSW) and the Charles Perkins Centre (the University of Sydney).

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INNOVATION IN PRACTICE We examined innovation at the organisational and firm level across Australia, in research institutes, private companies, startups, government bodies, and regional cities, to understand how innovation is practised in real-time throughout Australia. These organisations, which believe strongly in the importance of a national innovation narrative, helped to fund and sponsor this project. They provided a window into the innovation practices across vast sections of the economy, and the motivations, and philosophies which drive them. Each has a different story to tell, and a different lesson to impart. Only by understanding and measuring innovation can Australia advance its ability. We hope you enjoy these pieces as much as we enjoyed putting them together.

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Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

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CONTENTS RESMED’S QUEST FOR IMPROVED SLEEP HEALTH - Dr Peter Farrell - ResMed MOVING FAST, SAVING LIVES - ResMed FEEDING AUSTRALIA AND THE WORLD - Dr Peter Appleford - SARDI BRINGING ANZ THE BEST MEDTECH FOR 30 YEARS - Device Technologies AUSTRALIA'S TITAN OF TITANIUM - Titomic REIMAGINING THE BUILDING BLOCKS - Boral AUSTRALIA’S RECIPE FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH SUCCESS - Professor Doug Hilton AO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN AGRICULTURE: - Imran Ali CLOSING OPEN PIT MINES: DATA GAPS AND RESEARCH NEEDS - Dr Peter Cook MINING TRANSFORMATION FOR ENDURING VALUE - Dr Guy Boggs MINE CLOSURE PLANNING – A COMPLEX LANDSCAPE WORTHY OF EXPLORATION - Dr Isaac Dzakpata TAKING TIME TO LISTEN - CRC TiME INNOVATING FOR THE GREATER GOOD, INVENTING FOR A HEALTHIER HUMANITY- Merck A NEW WAY FORWARD - TechnologyOne PLANETARY HEALTH RESEARCH - Victoria University ELECTRO OPTIC SYSTEMS: THE POWER OF OPTIMISM PERTH TO THE PILBARA, THEN MARS - Lions Eye Institute UNTAPPING NATURAL RESOURCES FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE: THE OCEANS - Dr John Whittington ALERT TO OPPORTUNITY - The Alertness CRC WEAPONISING IMMUNITY - QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute HOW SCIENCE AND INNOVATION HAVE HELPED PROPEL AUSTRALIA’S WINE INDUSTRY - Casella

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Innovation in practice

LIFE-CHANGING INNOVATION, AT HOME AND ABROAD - Icon Group AUSTRALIAN PEDIGREE, ASIAN REACH - Spruson & Ferguson FINDING THE FLOW: COLLABORATING TO SECURE WATER - The CRC for Water Sensitive Cities SAVING POWER, MONEY, AND THE PLANET - The Low Carbon Living CRC AUSTRALIA’S GREATEST INNOVATION OPPORTUNITY: IT SOVEREIGNTY - Rupert Taylor-Price THREE CAMPUSES, A WORLD OF IMPACT - Southern Cross University PAVING A BRIGHTER FUTURE - Mark Middleton LA TROBE BUILDING THE UNIVERSITY CITY OF THE FUTURE - La Trobe University DISRUPTING HEALTHCARE: INTEGRATION OF MEDICINAL CANNABIS - Professor Ian Brighthope GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE UNDERPINS HEALTHY SOILS - Dr Michael Crawford INTERVIEW WITH HCF CEO SHEENA JACK A BETTER, FAIRER NORMAL - The Australian Technology Network AUTISM ACADEMY CREATING HIGH-VALUE EMPLOYMENT - Curtin University HELPING TO MANAGE $100BN OF INFRASTRUCTURE - The Central Asset Management System SA FIRE MAPPING TECH SAVING LIVES - UniSA Innovation and Collaboration Centre SMART ROBOTS TAKE ON THE RISK HIGH-TECH TEXTILES - HeiQ Australia THE FUTURE OF FOOD OFF-WORLD AND ON - Professor Matthew Gilliham THE INNOVATION ENGINE OF THE NATION - Department of Industry, Science, Energy, and Resources SOCIAL INNOVATION AND ECONOMIC SUCCESS - Seelan Nayagam OUR FUTURE FOOD SECURITY TIME TO TAKE CONTROL

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CONTENTS

CONT.

SMALL BUSINESS, BIG IMPACT: THE ORGANISATION EMPOWERING SMES - SBAA INNOVATION INSIGHTS FROM FORMER AUSTRALIAN CHIEF SCIENTIST CUTTING EDGE MANUFACTURING ON THE WORLD STAGE- ANCA THE SCIENCE OF GEOGRAPHY - Esri THE ULTIMATE AGRICULTURE ADVANTAGE: INTERVIEW - Dr Reece Clothier LINDSAY PARTRIDGE ON MANUFACTURING INNOVATION - Brickworks BRICK BY BRICK - Brickworks CONNECTING THE DOTS FOR RENEWABLES - TransGrid CHANGING WITH THE TIMES - The Elders Group MORE THAN A TOY - LEGO THE ELECTRIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA’S AGRICULTURAL FUTURE - Gary Northover GATEWAY TO WA - Bunbury LOCAL R&D, INTERNATIONAL IMPACT - Lockheed Martin THE INFORMATION AGE MEETS THE GOLDEN YEARS - Micro Focus / Mannacare DEFENCE INNOVATION: CATALYSTS FOR CHANGE - Dr Tony Lindsay INNOVATING IN MANUFACTURING - The Innovative Manufacturing CRC THE THREE PILLARS OF DEFENCE SCIENCE - Professor Tanya Monro SCALE, PARTNERSHIPS KEY TO DELIVERING IMPACT - Defence Science & Technology Group THE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF INNOVATION ECOSYSTEMS - Dr Lara Moroko A DESIGN DRIVEN CIRCULAR ECONOMY - Professor Ali Abbas BEST OF BOTH WORLDS - CDC Data Centres INNOVATION BOOSTING AUSTRALIA’S RED MEAT INDUSTRY - Meat and Livestock Australia

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MONEY AS A FORCE FOR GOOD - Australian Ethical WOLLONGONG ATTRACTING INVESTMENT PUTTING CUSTOMERS AT THE HEART OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION - Australia Post THE FORWARD MARCH - Pfizer SOCIAL IMPACT INNOVATION - Aspen Medical ROADMAP FOR ELECTRICITY NETWORK TRANSFORMATION - Energy Networks Australia. NO MODERN NATION CAN THRIVE WITHOUT ENGINEERS - Michael Julian van Balen T-SHAPED EXPERTISE DELIVERING INNOVATIONS FAR AND WIDE - FrontierSi AUSTRALIA NEEDS TO COLLABORATE AND COMPETE - : Professor John Bell AUSTRALIA, FROM INNOVATION CONSUMER TO INNOVATION EXPORTER - Sarah Adam-Gedge AN AUSTRALIAN FAMILY SUCCESS STORY - Casella Family Brands RETURN OF THE GEDI: A FORCE FOR GOOD IN AUSTRALIA’S MEDICAL RESEARCH SECTOR - AAMRI DIGITAL INNOVATION IN AUSTRALIA - Hewlett Packard BUILDING THE NEW AUSTRALIA - Aurecon Group RESEARCH TRANSLATION - WE MUST RISE TO THE CHALLENGE - Doron Ben-Meir 4TH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION - Rocky Scopelliti DROUGHT-PROOFING ASUNBURNT COUNTRY - Warwick Lorenz DIGITAL SERVICES - A NEW LEVEL ASKED FROM REGIONAL PROVIDERS - Information Professionals Group HOW CAN AUSTRALIA BUILD SMARTER CITIES? - Amazon Web Services SPONSORS LIST

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RESMED’S QUEST FOR IMPROVED SLEEP HEALTH ResMed founder and chairman Peter Farrell depicts the 40-year evolution of sleep apnea treatment, what’s next, and how well Australians sleep compared to the rest of the world.

ike paying taxes and death, sleep is something that affects all of us. But how would you rate the overall awareness and appreciation Australians have of sleep as, along with a good diet and physical exercise, one of the three key pillars for public health? Causal factors and solutions for improvement? PF: Compared to the rest of the world, I think Australians probably have a higher-than-average awareness of sleep and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) thanks to the far-reaching research that’s been conducted and promoted nationwide, celebration of Colin Sullivan, University of Sydney professor, who invented the nasal continuous positive airway pressure (PAP) machine in the early 1980s, and high visibility of ResMed, world leader in connected solutions for treating sleep apnea and an ASX15 company. However, in terms of where awareness should be, it’s still too low for Australians as it is everywhere else. According to Lancet Respiratory Medicine, over 936 million people worldwide have sleep apnea – including over 2.9 million Australians. Over 80 per cent are undiagnosed. We know that leaving sleep apnea untreated – the nightly toll these cyclical suffocations have on our body that should be resting – puts us at 2 to 3 times

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higher risk for heart attacks or strokes, impacts our daily energy, mood, safety while driving or at work, long-term mental health, and so on. Our sleep health is very much tied to every facet of our overall health and wellbeing. What is the relationship between sleep and the other two other pillars of public health? Has this been studied and reported on? PF: The links between sleep and the other two pillars – nutrition and physical exercise – are very strong. Simply put: You can’t optimize your healthy eating or your exercise goals without a good night’s sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep each night – common recommendations are 7 to 9 hours nightly for adults – you may lack the energy required to exercise as much as you’d like to the next day, as well as focus on work and other important tasks. Lack of sleep also affects how we eat. First off, if you are sleep deprived and lack energy, your body will likely seek more foods high in carbohydrates and/or fat than you may intend to eat because your body is seeking sources of energy to make up for the energy it didn’t wake up with. What’s

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worse is sleep deprivation could lead to overeating. A 2013 study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology found sleep-deprived people wake up with higher feelings of hunger and plasma ghrelin levels, which are linked to overeating. So not only does good sleep restore our bodily functions and refill our energy tanks for the day ahead, it also enables us to best tend to the other important pillars that help sustain our overall health. Why is sleep so important to Australia’s national interests and its “socio-economic scorecard”? How much do sleeping disorders hurt the national economy and society more broadly? (productivity, domestic violence, road toll, poverty, mental health, etc.)? PF: A nation’s collective sleep hygiene is key to this scorecard. Sleep deprivation is tied to work absenteeism, presenteeism – which just means you’re at work but not working to your full potential – workplace, and roadway accidents and deaths. Sleep is also key to our mental health: Sleep deprivation can negatively impact our moods, which can in turn affect the relationships we have with everyone around us. And there’s long-term implications for mental health, too. A 2008 Sleep Medicine Reviews study found sleep disruptions can increase your risk of developing depression. There’s a specific link between depression and obstructive sleep apnea: 1 in 5 people with depression are believed to have OSA, according to the U.S. National Sleep Foundation. There are profound benefits for individuals and whole societies in improving our sleep and collectively prioritizing good sleep – and huge risks not only to being sleep deprived but also not understanding the effects of that. Are Australians overall good sleepers? Are there reliable, current, statistics available on sleeping disorder prevalence? Is there a sleeping disorder epidemic in Australia or a risk of one in the coming decade with an ageing population? What is the current trend / dynamic?

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

PF: Australians get an average 6.8 hours per night, according to ResMed’s own Global Sleep Surveys taken in March 2022. Marginally below 7 to 9 hours per night, not all that bad. But there are two big caveats. One, “average” implies half of Australians are getting less or even far less than that amount, and I urge any of those folks to prioritise sleep and make time for it that can pay dividends in the short and long term for their health and quality of life. And two, it is estimated that at least 3 million Australians have sleep apnea, many of them undiagnosed and untreated. Those millions of people may think they’re getting 7 to 9 hours, when in fact their bodies could be waking dozens or hundreds of times a night to prevent mini sleep suffocations caused by their apneas. For these folks, the key to restoring and optimizing their sleep begins with diagnosing their condition and treating it at home. Does Australia as a whole invest much / enough into sleeping disorders relative to its prevalence and severity? How does this compare with other rich western economies? PF: The western world is ahead of the rest of the world and focusing on the importance of getting a good night’s sleep. However, there is still not enough focus on sleep in general. I’m heartened to see concerted efforts by ResMed and independent universities and researchers to boost general sleep awareness across Asia, Latin America, as well as in more established markets. What are some of the latest notable cutting-edge R&D findings, here and globally, related to sleeping disorders from cause, treatment, and cure perspectives? PF: Sleep apnea is an important component of chronic disease. If the sleep apnea is left untreated, many damaging conditions may occur such as hypertension, and eventually type 2 diabetes. There are many other connections between untreated OSA and chronic diseases. The bottom line is that OSA needs treatment otherwise one’s health will significantly deteriorate.

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How and where has ResMed expanded scientific knowledge of sleeping disorders in the last 1-2 years since your original article on this subject was prepared? What are some surprising or even shocking facts and figures? PF: We can now say that PAP treatment has helped people live longer. The landmark ALASKA study presented at last year’s European Respiratory Society Congress in France showed people with OSA who stayed on therapy were 39 per cent more likely to survive over a 3-year period than OSA patients who didn’t. There were over 176,000 people in this study – and the results held regardless of age, preexisting conditions, overall health, or cause of death. It goes

to show how important diagnosis and treatment of this disease really are. There’s more coming out of ALASKA and other studies ResMed conducts. We are truly leaders not just in helping the world treat these diseases but in understanding them – how common they are, their effects on other diseases and facets of our health, and what types of digital solutions and other interventions work best in terms of engaging people to start and stay on treatment. Since last we spoke, Lancet Respiratory Medicine had just published ResMed’s latest global prevalence of sleep apnea – almost a billion people worldwide. This is a staggering number. Some 3 million Australians are believed to have

Peter at an event in the early 1990s, when ResMed went by its original name “ResCare.”

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it. Since the study came out, it has become one of the most cited resources of prevalence, and people are becoming more aware of how big an issue this is if left untreated OSA is. ResMed invests around 7 to 8 per cent of company revenue into R&D to support future growth. What are some notable recent R&D findings? Is there more of a focus on incremental improvements to existing ResMed products or disruptive products? Why should sleeping disorder sufferers be excited about the next 5-10 years of innovation at ResMed? PF: R&D funds go into improving every aspect of the user’s experience. We continue to push the envelope on digital solutions designed to engage, motivate, and empower users to track and improve their own treatment. This is true

across much of healthcare, but ResMed has long been a leader in this space – today there are nearly 18 million connected ResMed devices on bedside tables across 140+ countries. Our latest PAP platform AirSense 11 features new digital solutions, one for helping guide new users onto treatment – in those first few days it’s vital for someone to have confidence in the treatment and embrace it. The other automatically checks in with users at 30, 60, 90 days, and so on to see how they’re doing and suggest advice if needed. And of course, we’re always striving to make the therapy itself smaller, quieter, more comfortable. PAP treatment just turned 40, and in four short decades we’ve made leaps and bounds – from a 10 kilograms machine the size (and noise) of a pool air filter to the ResMed AirMini, which has waterless humidification, runs off your phone, and itself is about the size of an iPhone – the world’s smallest PAP to date, weighing about 0.07 pounds or 0.032 kilograms. There’s much more to unlock; we’re not done improving on these technologies. Can ResMed’s historic and anticipated contribution to humanity be quantified/estimated? PF: First off, the last two years have been dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and during the past year, global supply chain challenges, and a major competitor recall in our industry. It is undisputed that the need for ventilators at the outset of COVID-19 was massive and critical, and I’m incredibly proud and amazed at ResMed’s – and frankly all leading ventilator makers’ – ability to produce what we did to meet the world’s demand and save countless lives. ResMed itself pivoted its whole business to make ventilators – it’s usually less than 10 per cent of our business – and set a record: hundreds of thousands of these lifesaving devices were produced in 2020 alone. Today, ResMed is helping fill an historic need for PAP devices in the wake of global supply shortages and a competitor’s recall. We’re talking with suppliers and their suppliers, in the supply chain to get the chips we need so millions of people worldwide can get the nightly sleep they require.

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M OV I N G FA S T, S AV I N G L I V E S ResMed, one of Australia’s most successful medical companies in history, leveraged a long history of fast-moving innovation to respond to a global shortage of ventilators in the early days of COVID-19. The extra capacity of life-saving machines allowed countries around the world to care for patients who may otherwise have succumbed to the novel coronavirus.

n early 2020, as the coronavirus was only appearing in significant numbers in Italy, China, and South Korea, ResMed was thinking ahead to the global implications of the yet-to-be-defined pandemic. The worst-cases were modelled, in which a rapid surge of the virus through populations would overtake hospitals. Ventilators, which function as breathing devices for patients, assisting the lungs to draw in and expel air, became the most highly-sought medical devices globally as doctors faced the ethical dilemma of which patients were given life-saving ventilators, and which patients went without. ResMed, the Australian-founded multinational that produces ventilator devices and positive airway pressure machines for sleep apnoea, was forced into a rapid rescale and mobilisation project. This involved working alongside governments and collaborating with new companies, all while maintaining supply to its chronic-suffering customer base. To accelerate its support of lifesaving efforts during the pandemic, ResMed had to innovate faster than the virus could spread, and coordinate a global effort with more

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efficiency than a once-in-a-lifetime novel pathogen. Moving mountains Even before the outbreak, ResMed was a topfive global producer of hospital-to-home ventilators, and a top-two global producer of bilevel positive airway pressure devices, both of which are used to treat respiratory symptoms of certain patients with COVID worldwide. In January 2020, the company shifted its manufacturing resources and aimed to triple its output of ventilators, and scaled up ventilation mask production more than tenfold. In the first half of 2020, ResMed manufactured over 150,000 devices, more than 3.5 times the output of that timeframe from the previous year. How did it achieve the seemingly impossible task? The first step involved securing the safety and health of its workforce before undertaking the rapid changes needed. Strict safety procedures and policies were created for the company’s manufacturing, distribution, and technical support staff, referred to by company leaders as "ResMed heroes". The

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effect of this was twofold: it protected the employee’s safety, and the company’s ability to keep building and delivering the devices as the pandemic evolved. It can be seen as almost analogous to the way successful nations dealt with COVID-19: strict social distancing and science-led guidelines, and understanding that the economic outcomes are tied to health outcomes. ResMed continued building as many of these devices as it could while global demand remained higher than supply. Brett Sandercock, ResMed’s chief financial officer, explains, “When we committed to tripling our yearly production of ventilators and increasing masks tenfold, we needed the parts to do it – by asking more from our traditional suppliers, seeking new sources for additional parts and sometimes the help of outside partners to do so, and sometimes applying new technologies.”

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

When hospitals in Europe needed more ventilator leak valves, the ResMed team moved quickly, and thought creatively as to how it could solve the issue. Its manufacturing centres were already beyond their usual limits, so how could they quickly secure that overspill capacity? A team of internal engineers designed a way to 3D print the valves in the company’s Lyon facility, by collaborating with a local 3D printing partner. As a result, the company’s European partners were able to secure critical parts on a faster turnaround, while letting the traditional manufacturing teams focus on devices that demanded a hands-on approach. In a world rocked by a pandemic, with trade routes suddenly insecure, and movements of goods stalling, the logistical challenges of this coordination cannot be understated. ResMed collaborated with governments worldwide to ensure it could

A ResMed Astral ventilator, intended for home and hospital use

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quickly receive parts for building devices and safe movement of finished products across national borders. Even after the ventilators arrived, however, there were legal challenges: getting approval for new or existing devices to treat new conditions is typically a years-long process, with various efficacy and safety trials proving beyond a shadow of doubt that they will help, not harm the patient. ResMed had to work across multiple jurisdictions and regulatory bodies to ensure emergency authorisations were given for clinicians to use its devices to treat specific symptoms of COVID-19. Sandercock explains, “This was in case the type of device usually used to treat such symptoms is ever in short supply at a particular care facility.” Leveraging a history of innovation How do ResMed’s early years continue to define its approach to innovation now? The company began with a simple idea. Sleep apnoea is an invisible productivity killer in society, with one in four Australians believed to suffer from the condition. It occurs when the walls of your throat come together while you sleep, blocking off your airways. This causes you to stop breathing until your brain notices

and sends a wake-up call. From waking up and opening your airway, you will go back to sleep almost immediately, with the process repeating hundreds of times throughout the night, causing a broken sleep. Sufferers will struggle to concentrate in the daylight hours, with more severe symptoms leading to an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. In 1981 Professor Colin Sullivan of the University of Sydney described and developed nasal continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), the first successful non-invasive treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). After publishing the successful results in Lancet, Sullivan, who had patented the technology, sought a partner, and in 1986 approached the Baxter Centre for Medical Research, and its then vice president of R&D for Healthcare, Dr. Peter Farrell. Dr. Farrell, on behalf of Baxter, invested in Sullivan’s technology to further evolve the CPAP prototype and undertake clinical trials on a group of patients with severe sleep apnoea. In 1989, Baxter decided to take the technology no further, and Dr. Farrell instead founded ResMed to buy the technology, and commercialise it for scalable production. From there, the company grew worldwide, listed on the Nasdaq in 1995, then the NYSE in 1999, with its ASX listing following shortly afterwards.

An AirFit N30 nasal CPAP mask, connected to an AirSense 10 CPAP device, helps keep a sleep apnoea patient’s airway open during sleep.

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Innovation in practice This appetite for risk and targeted investment after identifying opportunity has stayed with the company, which in recent years has purchased US$800m valued health SaaS provider Brightree, Korean medical equipment company HB Healthcare and US-based digital therapeutics startup Propeller Health, among others. It was early to pivot to investing in digital-health products, noting that the future of healthcare will be less hospital-centric than it is today. Digital health The overarching theme is ‘digital health, in which cloud-connected devices allow for better communication between doctors and patients, improved data collection for real-time monitoring, and higher levels of patient involvement in their healthcare. As the very first company to build cellular connectivity into each CPAP device, ResMed is now a global leader in daily remote patient monitoring, with more than 12 million cloud-connectable devices in our network, still growing daily. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, and while the company was rapidly scaling up all of its manufacturing globally, it continued to release new digital health products to provide high-quality care to sleep and respiratory patients in a socially-distanced world. A planned expansion for its AirView remote monitoring platform, due to be released in late 2020 was brought forward by several months to help clinicians easily track their respiratory patients’ therapy from the safe comfort of a desktop computer. Working across ResMed’s ventilators and bilevel devices, it now tracks data across Europe, the US, and worldwide with over six-and-a-half billion nights of sleep and respiratory data. By cloud-connecting its medical devices, ResMed notes that sleep apnoea patient treatment adherence rates have dramatically improved. From roughly 50–60 per cent on non-connected devices, the company now sees rates of 87 per cent for those who are remotely and self-monitored via cloud-based tools. It is not just a sensible investment to benefit patients as individuals, but building a larger pool of data that can be leveraged to learn about the condition as a whole. ResMed also released a digital tool for helping home medical equipment providers conduct

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

remote CPAP mask fittings with patients. Mask fit and comfort are both key to therapy success, as they are key to ensuring an uninterrupted sleep. These benefits will remain with customers long after the pandemic ends. As Sandercock notes, “This is being accomplished while managing rapidly changing health and political conditions across the more than 140 countries the company serves, while still maintaining its production of medical devices to help people manage their chronic conditions. “Our agility as a digital health and med device leader enabled us to shift tactics during the pandemic, but our mission, our guiding principle (to preserve and improve life), and our work ethic is the same before, during, and as we look ahead beyond this global health emergency. “Innovation is part of ResMed’s DNA. We consider ourselves a 30-year-old tech startup, always listening to what patients, healthcare providers, and payers need to help improve quality of life for millions, reduce the progression of chronic disease, and lower healthcare costs for individuals and whole systems.”

myAir, ResMed’s sleep apnoea patient engagement app, helps raise adherence up to 87%

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FEEDING AUSTRALIA AND THE WORLD Supporting sciencebased research and development in agriculture is helping Australia produce food for the world’s growing population. By Dr Peter Appleford

eeding yourself and your family is one of the most important responsibilities of an individual. By and large, modern communities have delegated this responsibility – and their food security – to a relatively small number of producers. As a result, farmers have an incredibly important role. They feed us, some warm us, and all are custodians of our landscape and ecology. Commercial agriculture and the science that supports it are now vital to society. The innovation challenge facing agriculture The challenge of feeding the world’s people is becoming greater. In 2016, 815 million people, or 11% of the global population, went hungry.1 Low and middle income countries account for almost half the world’s mouths to feed but only produce one quarter of global agricultural output. The imbalance is increasing, not improving.2 By 2050, with 9.8 billion people predicted to be sharing the planet,3 food supplies will be under extreme stress if we only maintain current rates of production. Against this 60% increase in demand, climate change, urbanisation and soil degradation are all reducing the amount of viable farmland. Adding water scarcity, biosecurity threats and pollution highlights the inescapable need for farmers to be more productive per unit of arable land and available water, and to grow food under previously prohibitive conditions. In short, if the global community wants to

maintain food security into the future, farmers need to innovate faster than ever. Global agricultural output must increase at more than 1.7% per annum to sustain our food, feed, fibre and bioenergy needs for the 2050 population. Farmers constantly innovate and adapt to maximise their yields. But they need the support of science to achieve significant changes. The importance of science In the 1950s and 1960s the adoption of scientific method and new technology led to the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ with higher yielding varieties of wheat and rice and widespread production uplifts. This approach has continued to deliver improvements, from the subsequent ‘Gene Revolution’ and more widespread applications of genomic research, to rapid progress in precision agriculture. Ultimately, last century’s far-sighted and sustained investment in science paid off with improved food security, reduced food costs, lower levels of global poverty and ongoing progress. While there will always be a need for such patient and persistent research, the new food security challenge also demands a fundamental shift in how quickly science can deliver real-world results. Advances discovered by ‘pure’ and ‘basic’ science will need to be progressed into more ‘adaptive and applied’ agricultural science faster than ever. The adoption of the Green, Gene and Genomics Revolution plus the adoption of ag technologies

“The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2017.” Produced by FAO on behalf of United Nations. The future of food and agriculture Trends and challenges, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Rome, 2017. 3 World Economic Forum. 28 Mar 2018 1 2

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the inputs they apply as a result, will all be delivered by agricultural science. In the past, a new crop variety or animal line was developed over several generations by the breeder. Now, agricultural science involves agronomists, crop physiologists, cell biologists, pathologists, molecular biologists and geneticists, as well as software programmers, computer scientists, statisticians and economists. These teams must work collaboratively with climate scientists (and other disciplines) to understand the conditions their new lines must be optimised for.

Improving agricultural output for a changing world Rectifying production constraints is a key focus for agricultural science today. Improving crop resilience to soil sodicity or acidity, water scarcity and disease can all help improve yields – especially on marginal land. Improving soil carbon can also increase productivity while helping sequester carbon to benefit the environment. The revolution in precision agriculture technology is delivering incremental yield improvements, as are scientific improvements in crop varieties, seed viability, nutrient management and animal health. In addition to these direct contributions, attention to ecosystem services such as pollination and erosion prevention can help increase and sustain productivity gains on farms. The powerful combination of specialised technology, best farm management practices, and attention to ecosystem services will be the key to supporting agricultural productivity growth, sustainability and resilience.

Helping Australian farming to evolve Agricultural production has remained central to Australia’s economy because we have developed and delivered new technologies through a strong research base. This has been crucial to sustaining and increasing productivity, even though we grow food in dry climates, in low quality soils and under continual climate variability. Our agricultural R&D capability ranks among the best in the world, as evidenced by our strong research sector, significant achievements and shared projects with overseas institutions. In South Australia, primary industries and agribusiness revenue amounted to $15.2 billion for 2018-2019 fiscal year including $3.79 billion from field crops and $3.17 billion from livestock. The state’s Food, Wine and Agribusiness Sector Plan aims to grow this revenue to $23 billion by 2030. Enabling and achieving this increase will see agriculture make a substantial contribution to the South Australian Government’s Growth State initiative for increasing gross state product by three per cent each year. It will also be vital to Australia’s NFF Industry Roadmap 2030, which envisions agriculture as the nation’s next $100 billion industry. A number of South Australian government-supported research and development projects are focused on improving the productivity and profitability of South Australian growers, and thereby contributing to the drive for improved global food production. The continued development and application of agricultural science will only strengthen our agricultural production, alleviate food security pressures worldwide and make a substantial contribution to the remarkable value of Australia’s farming industry.

The future of agricultural science The fundamental nature of agricultural science is already changing. We can expect biology, mathematics and engineering to become more and more intimately linked in the future. Satellites and the Internet of Things will provide more data on production systems than ever. Farmers will be capturing more data from increasingly diverse sources. They will be able to link genetic information with production data and sophisticated climate models to make decisions on what to plant, where to plant, when and where to add nutrients, how to protect crops and animals from diseases, and when to harvest. The tools farmers use to make these decisions, and

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and improved farm management practices, especially in high-income countries, has increased global agricultural output by 60% over the past 40 years, while global cropland has expanded by just 5%. This trend has started to taper off, but scientists globally – and here in South Australia – are rising to the challenge. Can we achieve these productivity gains again? We have to! It will be a far more complex challenge this time around, however we now have more tools at our disposal.

Dr Peter Appleford is Executive Director of the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI) – Department of Primary Industries and Regions (PIRSA).

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DEVICE TECHNOLOGIES: BRINGING ANZ THE BEST MEDTECH FOR 30 YEARS Partnership and innovation for continued success in the Australian healthcare industry and beyond.

evice Technologies has been a true pioneer in the Australian healthcare and medical technology industries. Device has been at the forefront of bringing the most innovative technologies into ANZ, the flagship being da Vinci® Robotic Surgery. Its 30-year history of accolades include an instrumental role in the establishment of the RPA Surgical and Robotic Training Institute in Sydney, the only one of its kind in the southern hemisphere. The company has re-defined the role of cutting-edge medical technology supply to include intensive product evaluation and recommendation to hospitals and specialists. Services and expertise extend to clinical education and training as well as managing regulatory requirements. Device has

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thus evolved to become a vital knowledge centre within the largest employing industry in Australia. Founders’ vision to source the best worldwide It all began in 1992 when four friends started operations out of a small garage in Seaforth, yet with a vision to distribute across ANZ the best medical devices from around the world. John McQuillan, Peter Ord, Kevin Ryan and Bill Walker had been working for large American companies in the 1980s and though they’d enjoyed a level of success, their shared goal was to provide medical specialists and hospitals access to first-class medical technologies from all parts of the globe. This vision has carried on over three decades. Today, the Device Business Development team

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continues to partner with world-leading manufacturers, while developing new relationships with innovative MedTech suppliers globally. Building long-lasting relationships with suppliers, hospitals and surgeons is cornerstone to the company’s operations, wherein the passion and tenure of staff organisation-wide remains key. A 360-degree approach This has developed into a symbiotic relationship with Device’s dynamic network of surgeons and healthcare executives, who are constantly interested in emerging and innovative technologies and procedures to ultimately enhance patient outcomes. After a new product or solution has been identified, a rigorous assessment involving due diligence, health economics studies and registration with the Federal Government’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) is conducted. Promotion, clinical education and training, and end-user feedback are subsequently undertaken. This pathway harnesses the skills and experience of a team comprising healthcare professionals, in-house product specialists, clinical educators, engineers and regulatory affairs officers. CEO Michael Trevaskis remarks, “Few Australians fully realise the sheer calibre of doctors and surgeons in this country. They are at the forefront of what is on the global medical technology landscape and it remains our privilege to work closely with them. We’re also proud of the complementary role we play advising on redesign of hospital infrastructure and procedures.” Pioneering Robotic Surgery The da Vinci robot is a state-of-the-art surgical robot, manufactured by California based company Intuitive. The partnership between Device and Intuitive since 2003 has been paramount to the integration of da Vinci platforms in ANZ, pioneering new capabilities in the operating room. This technology enables surgeons to perform minimally invasive surgery resulting in significantly improved patient outcomes. At present, 80 da Vinci Surgical Systems are in operation in ANZ. This hasn’t been Device’s only national first. When total artificial hearts and TAVIs were at the forefront in valve replacement and heart surgery, Device played a pivotal role in their introduction to Australian cardiac surgeons and cardiologists. In addition, Device has played a critical role in enhancing infection control in healthcare, partnering closely with customers. In more recent times, Device Technologies has worked closely with governments to ensure access to world-leading ventilators, intensive care supplies, PPE, rapid antigen testing kits and cleaning chemistries in support of the fight against COVID-19.

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Innovative Business Development New business development opportunities are being identified, explored and materialised by Device on a continual basis. States Michael, “In the 17 smaller companies we’ve so far welcomed to the Device Group, we’ve gained some of the best innovators and the best innovations and integrated them into our business. Through these acquisitions and partnerships, Device has diversified into areas such as Aged Care, Veterinary, and local manufacturing, including 3D printing. This capability, which will be vitally important to Australia in the coming years and decades, gives Device global credibility and differentiates us even further from multi-national subsidiaries.” Employment opportunities and a culture of fun Like most companies, talent management is an important part of the Device business philosophy. In fact, their graduate programs have an industry-leading rate of conversion from paid internships to permanent roles. For the last eight years, the Regulatory and Quality Assurance team has run an active graduate program. To date, 12 interns have completed the program, with six moving on to permanent employment. From the start in 1992, the goal has been to employ professional people and provide an environment in which they can grow and thrive. Says Michael, “The beauty of Device is that people can have fun, while also making a meaningful contribution. When people can be successful, feel safe (both mentally and physically), have a voice, love the business and love MedTech, then you’ve created a culture of success.” The company’s recent expansion into Asia has seen these benefits mirrored for staff now working there. Growth in Asia Heeding a comparatively under-developed healthcare industry, expanding the business into Asia had been the natural next step for Device for some years. Asia staff numbers have grown to over 50 in two years to complement the 920 staff members in Australia and 55 in New Zealand. In two years, operations have been launched in Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and recently the Philippines, with a commitment to attracting, developing and investing in local talent and skills. Beyond 30 years With a rich history and continued momentum, Device Technologies is on course to engage in an exciting future envisioned. Beyond entrepreneurial accomplishment, Device displays how companies which interact effectively with the burgeoning technology sphere can produce collateral benefits – in this case medical, community health and social. When it comes to passion for the business and a love for MedTech, this team is certainly in no short supply.

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AUSTRALIA’S TITAN OF TITANIUM

ASX-listed Titomic is building a manufacturing industry from scratch and incorporating 3D printing with Australia’s natural advantages.

eople often confuse innovation with invention, the lightbulb moment of clarity where all the pieces of the puzzle suddenly come together. In reality, innovation is process driven, focused, and works towards a specific purpose. Titomic is a great example, the company was born out of a goal to create an industry from a natural resource. Australia has vast reserves of titanium in its soil, a metal with properties that make it perfect for the growing aerospace, defence, shipbuilding, automotive, and mining sectors. Titanium resists corrosion, can withstand the high temperatures of atmospheric entry and re-entry, and is an incredibly hard material, making it suited for the defence sector.

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While it is the 4th most common element in the Earth’s crust, Australia has 24 million tonnes of it, which is 50 per cent of the world’s supply. This is why in 2007, the Government went out and asked: How could Australia build an industry around a natural resource? With funding from the Federal Government, Titomic worked with CSIRO and came up with a new way of using titanium powder in manufacturing, in a cold-spray process that came to be known as Titomic Kinetic Fusion. The metal additive manufacturing (colloquially known as 3D-printing) process uses "cold fusion" to blend materials, by making particles collide at supersonic speeds, with the resulting energy allowing them to fuse. The patented process renders the use of

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Innovation in practice heat superfluous, allowing the company to blend materials that would normally have different melting temperatures. Alongside titanium, Titomic can digitally manufacture metal parts and complex surface coatings of super alloys and dissimilar metals such as nickel, copper, scandium and alloys such as stainless steel, inconel, and tungsten carbide. With this ability, Titomic can manufacture parts that it says are unobtainable via other manufacturing methods, enabling it to exploit the mechanical benefits of multiple high-performance alloys simultaneously. Jeff Lang is the managing director of Titomic, and a fierce advocate for Australia’s sovereign capabilities, particularly in the manufacturing sector. Having seen Australia fail to capitalise on its resource boom in iron ore, he is trying to lead the way to ensure the country maximises the potential of its titanium resources. “It is important to understand that Australia is in a good position to maximise our economic opportunities. “We are resource rich, and will become important for a global supply chain. Australia does not yet understand the opportunity that comes with a global market. Australia is good at representing ourselves as pioneers, and we have an exploring attitude that makes us want to solve problems. We do not shy away from global problems. Australians are good at nutting it out and solving problems.” The young company already has a contract with Boeing to produce protoype parts for the company, allowing the aerospace giant to significantly reduce its lead times, and cut down from the 80% waste that comes with traditional manufacturing methods. As Lang explains, “At Titomic, we see ourselves as a solution provider. Companies come to us with technical problems and no idea how to solve it. We solve that with symbiosis. “Many traditional industries want to move towards digital manufacturing, but are unsure as to how they can do so, while being concerned about the disruption involved. “We offer digital manufacturing solutions which de-risk that move for them.” Using the past to predict the future Titomic is not averse to thinking in the big

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

picture, and planning several years ahead. Its grand vision is a fully-integrated digital platform that collects and collates all the information from the full manufacturing process, from mining, to transport, to production, and beyond. With a goal as large as Titomic’s, an interconnected hub of manufacturing around the globe, with centralised cloud-information optimising the performance of each silo, you need a purpose-built digital platform. The company approaches this is an orderly fashion, with teams working in concentrated bursts of activity over three-month periods, building pieces of the platform individually, scaling it up and integrating it. The end goal is to use the past to predict the future, where you start by collecting copious amounts of data. You draw information while mining the titanium, from the weather patterns in the region, the chemistry of the batch, through to the production of the parts for a submarine or aircraft from the powder. “There would be an existing data mould, covering the whole history of the material,” explains Lang. From here, you can trace the products’ performance in the environment, and then use AI technology to crunch the mass of data, making connections between seemingly disparate pieces of information possible.

Jeff Lang, Titomic’s Managing Director

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Once there are parallels drawn, Titomic can start to predict the performance of materials based on the information the company holds about their origin. “With smart technologies collecting the huge amounts of data available in the system we can do a lot more. It is about more sustainable manufacturing, lessening the waste of resources, with more efficient production,” says Lang.

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Super-bureaus training talent, growing business By building a digital platform for its technology, the Titomic manufacturing process is not limited by geography or location. With the commission of a 3D printer, the company can repeat its Australia operations elsewhere, by following the formula. As Titomic expands worldwide, it plans on creating 10–15 global manufacturing bureaus, able to produce repeatable parts year-in-year out, working with OEM manufacturers with a determined rate of return on the investment. One such example may be for an aerospace company producing a tooling system.

Then, there are its "super-bureaus", hosting 50–100 staff, including PHD students in training. Priced at $30m–$50m to set up, the company can then use the super bureaus as R&D hubs, producing new digital blueprints for parts, which can then be produced at any bureau around the world. The super bureaus also become training centres, where users can get certification on using the equipment. Titomic currently has a staff of 50, with a clear goal of 500 globally by 2024. The plan is to achieve a billion dollar market cap, moving towards a billion dollars in revenue. As Lang explains, “Everyone that works for the company is passionate about what we are trying to achieve and working towards it. “We have deliverables as a public company, but at the same time we are exploring what keeps the staff happy, what makes them want to come to work and give their best to the company.” Science-fiction applications While Titomic has already broken ground in

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its applications, creating the world’s largest titanium UAV (Unmanned Aerial Drone), with a diameter over 1.8m, it is also looking to the future. It is now looking into printers that would be able to print structures on the moon, and Mars, paving the way for the next generation of space exploration, with Lang pushing for Australia to be a major player. “One of the highest capabilities that humans can achieve is our ability to travel into space. Australia is in a viable position to be the leader. We could be the Switzerland of the space sector – a neutral country from which others can launch rockets and satellites,” says Lang. “We are the least threat to any sovereign state around the world, and have a good relationship with both China and the US. “Australia is at an interesting point in its history, like a teenager defining itself and learning to live independently of its traditional parents, the US and UK. “It is a maturity thing – we need to envisage what we want to represent, what we want to push out into the world.” Fighting tall-poppy syndrome The former professional athlete believes that Australia suffers from isolation at times, failing to properly realise its importance on the world stage. “We see ourselves so far from the rest of the world, we have siloed thinking. Combined with that is Australia’s tall-poppy syndrome, the cultural predisposition to want to heckle and tear down people who are successful, which has not worked well for the country. “How do we instead propagate the good things about being Australian? The pioneering spirit, the unique capability in how we approach problems? “We try to tap into that at Titomic. With our digital manufacturing platforms, there is no aspect of location. It is not constrained by borders or physical boundaries; it connects the world together.” This is where Australia needs to move its mindset in manufacturing: seeing itself as an important player on the world stage, offering an approach, attitude, and skill set that is desired by some of the biggest companies on the planet. It is about having the confidence

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

to take risks, define big, long-term goals, and have the audacity to give it a crack. Titomic has given a roadmap as to how it can be achieved, with a team of experts, including those with experience at NASA, and major corporations, bringing a diverse skillset together. As Lang puts it, “When you are out there providing viable solutions to government and industries no-one will push back. No-one asks questions when things are working, you just have to stand up and do it.”

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Cold fusion technology creates metal alloys with unique properties

Titomic’s Australian headquarters

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REIMAGINING THE BUILDING BLOCKS To build Australia’s low-carbon economy, you need low-carbon materials. Boral is accelerating the transition through strategic partnerships with academia, creating a pathway to commercialisation for novel low-carbon concrete.

nfrastructure and construction are a catch22 when it comes to building a low-carbon society. It is energy and resource intensive to build new structures, but stimulates the renewable economy, creating jobs both for blue-collar and white-collar workers. It also facilitates the transition to more energy-efficient societies, in which energy efficiency is a rule as opposed to extra, where green spaces are thoughtfully placed, helping to alleviate issues of urban sprawl eating into farmland. What if you could lower the carbon footprint of each individual building at the construction level? Boral has partnered with the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), to advance Australia’s transition to a low-carbon economy, laying out a practical pathway that delivers incremental and transformational steps to low carbon building and construction. The partnership gives the company access to specialist equipment, and allows UTS academic and technical staff to co-locate with Boral researchers at the UTS Boral Centre for Sustainable Building, the first of its kind in Australia. “We’re passionate about product innovation and sustainability because it represents our future,” said Dr Ross Harper, Boral Group President, HSE, Sustainability, Innovation and Operations Excellence. “It is strategically important to Boral in order to maintain its current position and respond to emerging trends, change and disruption. “We continue to invest in research and

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development with a focus on developing superior performing products and solutions for our customers that deliver a lower carbon footprint and use recycled content.” Eight research scholarships are funded by Boral between 2020 and 2021, and will be co-supervised by a UTS academic and a Boral R&D scientist. Concrete is the world's most consumed manmade material. It is second only to water in terms of global consumption. Boral is the country’s largest construction materials and building products supplier. In Australia, it supplies concrete, quarry products, asphalt, cement, roof tiles, timber and masonry to build infrastructure, residential construction and commercial buildings. As a result, Boral shifting to low-carbon products has the potential to make a large dent in Australia’s annual carbon emissions. Boral has already released one low-carbon concrete product to its customers, Envisia, which it says allows for half as much cement to be used in the concrete manufacturing process without impacting on performance. How does it work? Concrete is a high contributor to CO2 emissions due to the traditionally carbon intensive nature of producing it. Most of the world's concrete is built using "Portland Cement", first manufactured in the 1820s, and named for its colour matching Portland stone. In Australia, Portland cement is made using crushed limestone, mainly from Boral Cement’s

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mine at Marulan South in New South Wales. The crushed limestone is conveyed to a cement works where it is blended along with elements such as shale, iron ore and sometimes sand. The resulting "meal" travels to the top of a pre-heater where it falls under gravity through several cyclonic hot gas systems. This pushes the temperature of the meal to about 1000 degrees Celsius. Once at the bottom, the meal enters a rotating kiln and is further heated to 1450 degrees Celsius. Those high levels of heat require large amounts of energy from fossil fuels, increasing the carbon intensity of production. Conventional “green” concretes replace CO2 intensive traditional Portland cement with supplementary materials, that are not as energy-intensive to produce. Unfortunately, most low-carbon concretes have performance trade-offs: lower early strength gain (which slows down construction times) and higher drying shrinkage than the standard concretes. You can not cut corners on structural integrity when building crucial infrastructure like the Sydney Metro tunnel, or Gold Coast Light Rail, so Boral has created a concrete that

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

offers a low-carbon footprint, with no drop in performance. Importantly, it matches traditional concrete in early strength gains, allowing construction to proceed at the same pace. For shrinkages and creep, typical downfalls in low-carbon concrete, it outperforms conventional products. Boral’s research demonstrates up to 50 per cent reduction in shrinkage compared to conventional concrete. Already, Envisia is being used in projects such as the Barangaroo South precinct in Sydney, Australia’s first large-scale carbon neutral community, and The Stokehouse in Melbourne, a beachside restaurant rebuilt after a fire and designed to last for 100 years. The next step is conquering Asia and the world with Boral's unique low-carbon products, and capitalising on a global demand for low-carbon materials. Its collaboration with universities, alongside R&D investment, has allowed the company to create materials that have both a better life cycle, and lower environmental impact, positioning Boral to carve out a unique slice of the market.

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AUSTRALIA’S RECIPE FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH SUCCESS For scientists to make ground-breaking discoveries, they need to have the best opportunity to succeed. Professor Doug Hilton AO

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n 2021, the world is listening to science more than I can remember and perhaps more than ever before. With that intense interest comes more scrutiny and, as a leader, the pressure to deliver on community expectation. Medical research is a little different from other industries. At the heart of research is discovery – and you can’t discover something second. That pursuit of discovery; the thirst for a Eureka moment, small or large; that drive to gain an insight into how the natural world works and apply that knowledge to improve health is what motivates our staff and students – that ambition is palpable. Therein lies the main challenge for an institution like WEHI, for our leaders and for our scientists – how do we create an environment in which our staff can make remarkable discoveries in an intensely competitive global sector, at the same time as creating an inclusive workplace that allows people to flourish personally as well as professionally? While I don’t think we have everything right, I do think we are on the right track. One of WEHI’s secret ingredients is stable leadership. In WEHI’s 106-year history, we have only had six Directors, and most of those have come from within the organisation, allowing us to hold on to those elements of our culture that are special; for example, strategic rather than transactional collaboration. Previous WEHI directors, such as Nobel Prize winner Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, Sir Gustav Nossal and Prof Suzanne Cory, understood that solving difficult scientific problems requires years or decades of effort, not from a single scientist, but from teams of scientists with complementary skills. In 2021, the multi-disciplinarity of medical research is staggering. We need biochemists working at the level of the atom (one ten millionth of a millimetre), biologists working

with cells and organs, clinicians seeing individual patients and epidemiologists working with entire populations. We need mathematicians and computational scientists, chemists, physicists and engineers who can build and run complex microscopes. It’s not enough to have these scientists working in the same building, we have to encourage them out of their labs and offices and into the tearoom, around the water cooler and into seminar rooms, to have conversations and challenge each other’s thinking. When people with different skills come together, amazing things happen. Being able to build on the legacy of the past is an absolute privilege as a leader; however, I am constantly reminded of a wonderful piece of advice that Sir Gus Nossal gave me as

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I considered applying for WEHI’s top job back in 2008. Gus told me that I should not be constrained by history, that I had to make the job my own. I took that to mean I should build upon WEHI’s great strengths, such as our collaborative spirit, but be forward-looking and to ask where we could do better. One area where I think we struggled was drawing our talent from the broadest possible pool and making everyone feel like the Institute was a place where they could thrive and do amazing things. Historically, like many Australian organisations, we were a place where Anglo-Saxon heterosexual men could succeed, but it was much harder for everyone else. Throughout the last decade, we have made some big steps forward. We are doing much better with gender balance – during the last few years women have made up more than half of our new scientific leadership appointments, and our senior executive and board are gender balanced. We have also made it easier for parents to juggle their responsibility to their children while progressing professionally. This has been strengthened by the creation of a childcare centre at our main building in Parkville. I think this says a lot about who we are and what we value when the first thing a visitor sees when coming into WEHI is children playing, and the first thing they hear is children’s laughter. But we have more work to do. Like the rest of the Australian community, we need to make WEHI a place where people feel safe coming to work, a place free of bullying and harassment. I also think we have made great strides embracing and celebrating LGBTIQA+ diversity. Our WE-Pride group and the precinct’s Queers in Science collective have made the Institute and the sector a far more supportive, diverse and dynamic place than the heteronormative organisation I began my career in during the 1980s. Despite our progress, there are areas where we have struggled. Melbourne is a wonderful multi-cultural and multi-ethnic tapestry: it’s

what makes our city such an incredibly vibrant place to live. WEHI, and the medical research sector more generally, are not representative of our broader community. To make the biggest discoveries and to make the greatest impact in health, we need to inspire children across our city, from every background, to consider science. We need better pathways for indigenous children, for children from Africa and Asia, for children from lower socio-economic areas to make it in research. Children are inspired when they see people like themselves succeeding. In this area we still have a long way to go. After 12 years in the top job at WEHI, I often think about the one thing I would change if I could wave a magic wand. Right at the top of my list would be to overhaul the way Australia funds research. At the moment, my most creative and brilliant scientists spend about half their time applying for the money they need to do experiments. When only one in ten applications are successful, the time wasted is compounded by a massive erosion in morale. There is an answer – one that we can draw from amazingly successful private sector research institutes like Genentech, the AT&T Bell Labs and PARC, and international public institutions like the Francis Crick Institute in London – and that is block funding. In these organisations, individual scientists do not compete for money, rather, the Institution is funded as a whole and scientists can focus on what matters – making discoveries.

Professor Doug Hilton AO is the 6th Director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute – Australia’s oldest medical research institute.

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DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN AGRICULTURE: MAKING FARMING EFFICIENT, PRECISE & PRODUCTIVE By Imran Ali

Amid the rising uncertainty and volatility in agriculture, there probably is no better way for farming systems to survive and thrive than digital transformation – all important data at the farmer’s fingertips 24/7.

he global population is estimated to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, implying that agrifood demand will continue to rise worldwide in the coming decades. Specifically, a surge in the middle-class population among our neighbours in Asia bolsters the prospects for considerable growth in Australian food export. Meanwhile, our farmers continue confronting formidable challenges, such as increasing cost of labour, unavailability of skilled workforce, reduction in water availability, more frequent extreme weather events due to changing climate conditions, and fragmented value chains with asymmetric patterns of information sharing between trading partners. The COVID-19 pandemic has witnessed the weakness of traditional farming systems where empty shelves were seen in some supermarkets while, at the same time, surplus produce had to be dumped on farms. The country’s state governments’ health measures exacerbated the issues of labour shortage and excessive delays in farm operations. In the wake of these challenges, digital transformation – integration of digital technologies in business operations – was catapulted

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to the top of discussion to reinvigorate the current farming systems to prepare them for similar unforeseen events. Our research at CQUniversity examines the impact of digital transformation on agricultural operations. The analysis uncovers a significant difference in operational efficiency and productivity among the firms that adopt digital transformation compared to others that do not. We find that the performance and profitability significantly outweigh the costs incurred by digital transformation. Digital transformation substantially reduces labour dependency, input waste and the cost of doing business. The digitally connected farmers can receive real-time information on food demand, market dynamics and changing consumer preferences, lowering information asymmetries and transaction costs. The digital transformation thus revolutionises the farming systems in ways not previously seen. The following section sheds some light on the most popular digital technologies, and how they work to boost the efficiency, productivity, transparency, and profitability of farming systems. Internet of Things – The internet of things

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(IoT) describes the interconnected network of devices that contains sensors with data processors – constantly collecting, analysing, and transmitting data. The IoT devices can be controlled through an app on a smartphone. Farmers can constantly monitor the state of crops, soil moisture and nutrients, and exact need for fertiliser, pesticides, water, or livestock health and movement, among others. Monitoring of anomalies along the crop growth or livestock health allows farmers to reach optimal efficiency and reduce the risk of unexpected economic losses. At another level, IoT devices can be used to operate tractors for cultivation, spraying and harvesting. IoT-enabled livestock management systems help monitor the location, temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, readiness to mate, and grazing pattern of animals in real-time on a smartphone. A large amount of data, also known as “big data”, aggregated through multiple devices, can be utilised to predict diseases, pests, inputs, and yield, thereby making more informed decisions in a timely manner. For example, an apple and pear grower (Maurice Silverstein) in Shepparton East Orchard of Australia implemented the

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Internet-of-things (IoT) that connects all physical devices through the internet and the data between these devices are regularly shared. At Shepparton East Orchard, this IoT connected system supports irrigation efficiency by receiving real-time information on soil moisture, the need for irrigation in a specific part of the farm, and the need for fertilisers and pesticides, thus vastly increasing farm productivity and performance. A case study of Joe Loewith and Sons Ltd. Farms in Ontario Canada show that the application of IoT based smart farming technologies has significantly augmented farm productivity including tracking of animal health, digitally driven animal birth, timely disease control, and efficient crop management. Another case study on a rice farm in Suphan Burin Province of Thailand confirms the outstanding outcomes of IoT devices in rice farming operations. In greenhouse farming, IoT devices offer real-time information on temperature, lighting, humidity, soil condition, etc. which are difficult, if not possible, to receive manually. With IoT connected smartphone, a single farmer can manage a large field while sitting on the other side of the world. Given the recent issues of

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labour cost and availability, IoT implementation offers promising opportunities to Australian farmers for reshaping conventional business operations. Many farmers across the world, in countries such as the USA and the UK as well as Europe, have already started benefitting from IoT devices in farm operations. However, our research at CQUniversity shows that lack of investment, awareness, and training are among the key impediments to the adoption of this cutting-edge technology in the Australian farming system. 3D printing While our research could not find evidence of 3D printing in the Australian farming system, we believe that this technology could deliver tremendous gains to our farmers. While this technology has gained a place in the automotive industry, its large application in farming is yet to be established. Nonetheless, 3D printing offers a myriad of benefits for smart farming, for example, a farmer can manufacture small farming equipment and appliances on a farm with less cost. In a 3D printing machine, one needs to insert a prototype or map of equipment along with key ingredients. And, quite remarkably, with one click a piece of equipment can be produced. With rural Australia’s excessive exposure to natural disasters, 3D printing can greatly help Australian farmers recover and rebound by quickly producing damaged machines, appliances, equipment, medicines etc. The large 3D printers (which can be organised with government support) can also help rebuild the houses/shelters in a matter of days at a relatively cheaper cost.

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Blockchain Modern conscientious consumers demand the complete history of the food they buy and consume including where and how it was produced, what kind of and how much fertilisers and pesticides were applied, and how it was stored and transported. Blockchain helps answer all such questions in an effective and reliable way. Blockchain is a digital ledger accessed and updated by all members in a supply chain network. Ideally, each member is connected through an app on the smartphone and shares/traces all information from input suppliers to farmers to consumers. Each member of a network constantly uploads information, often in real- or near real-time, on routine operations which are being verified by relevant authorities and other members, reducing the risk of information tempering, price manipulation, and fraud. With the blockchain platform, farmers can directly sell their produce to buyers eliminating multiple layers of commission agents. In case of a complaint about the quality and safety of the product, its source can easily be traced, allowing for the elimination of such products from the food chain. That said, the blockchain is a perfect solution to deal with issues like the “pins in strawberries” stunt that occurred in September 2018. It can also facilitate regulatory bodies to trace a case. To enhance traceability, trust, and visibility in transactions, companies like Auchan retail, Walmart, and Carrefour Italia have successfully piloted blockchain in collaboration with farmers and other stakeholders. The blockchain has also been productively used by olive farmers in France and pork meat and horticultural farmers in China. In Australia, AgriDigital has successfully piloted blockchain in the Australian grain industry and is slowly moving to other industries as well. Nonetheless, our research at CQUniversity (interviews with managers in the Australian agrifood supply chains) shows that the pace of blockchain adoption in the Australian farming system is slower than in other developed economies. This is mainly due to the following impediments: deficit of strong collaboration and resource sharing among the trading partners (especially downstream supermarkets); low level of awareness among many farmers about the potential benefits of technology and how it works; and cost of implementation alongside a lack of sufficient financial support from the government.

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Drones Drones are amongst the most advanced Agritech for smart and efficient farming. Drones can perform multiple tasks that previously required labour force such as spraying pesticides and fertilisers. Aerial visuals taken through a drone can help identify the infected plants in the field of animal health quickly, providing specific remedies before the disease spreads and economic losses occur. It appears that the use of drones is much more cost-effective and efficient than fixed- and rotary wingaircraft used in farming systems. Drones with hyperspectral sensors can detect which part of a field is receiving too little water, allowing for irrigation adjustments. They can also identify water pooling in the field, reducing damage to sensitive crops. Farmers can receive all the information and related statistics on their smartphones. Drones can reach areas that are hard to access with other heavy machineries (e.g., tractors), such as too wet ground, steep terrain, and smaller areas requiring localised treatment. Given their repertoire of benefits, it is suggested to enhance the drone’s adoption in the Australian farming system. Robotics Automated robots are massively reshaping farming operations around the world. They help reduce waste and labour costs, thereby increasing operational efficiency and productivity. The use of robotics is increasingly popular in Australian farming practices and is currently found in seeding, planting, harvesting, loading, and grading. Our study at CQUniversity shows that the farmers who use robotics have better operational efficiencies, productivity and profitability compared to those who are performing tasks manually. In the dairy industry, robotic milking has gained huge acceptance in Australia. In our interactions with dairy farmers, it was reported that robotic milking systems offer better udder health and improve milk quality. With an ageing population and high labour cost, robotics serves as a great alternative to human labour and could ensure continuity of business operations in

case of unforeseen upheavals like the current pandemic. Concluding remarks The global digital agricultural technologies market size is rapidly growing and is expected to reach $3.2 trillion by 2025 compared to $320 billion in 2021. However, the speed of digital transformation in the Australian farming systems is slower compared to numerous developed countries. Nonetheless, digital transformation could offer a myriad of benefits to our farming systems and animal welfare, such as improved efficiency and productivity, cost-saving, waste reduction, enhanced quality, safety, and more control over internal processes. Several complex operations can be effectively managed with the smartphone alone, which is an exciting revolution of this era. The following measures could help speed up the digital transformation in the Australian farming system: technical and financial support from the government and NGOs to the business, particularly to the resource-scarce smalland medium enterprises; training and awareness campaigns; digital infrastructure; more collaboration; and resource sharing among the trading partners in the agricultural value chains. Growth in the industry will offer several economic, social, and environmental benefits which include, but are not limited to: GDP growth; more employment; increased access to food at optimum prices; development of the regional/rural businesses; and reduction in waste and greenhouse gas emissions.

Dr Imran Ali, PhD, MBA, BSc. (Hons.), is a lecturer in Operations and Innovation Management at the School of Business and Law, Central Queensland University.

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TRANSFORMATIONS IN MINING ECONOMIES Mutually beneficial relationships take time and understanding Australia is a global player in the mining arena that recognises the need to foster relationships built on respect and understanding. With over 40% of Australian mines operating on Traditional Owners’ land, working on Country collaboratively – walking and yarning together side by side – has never been more important. Employing robust, systematic communication with First Nations organisations, Elders and communities is particularly important when the mining projects being undertaken have potential to impact Indigenous livelihoods, health and wellbeing, cultural and ecological knowledge, or connection to Country. It is important that we make equal room to recognise, value and respect Stewardship, Ecological Knowledge, and Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property. Building mutually beneficial relationships with our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander colleagues is critical as we seek to develop new ways in which decisions are made about mine closure outcomes and opportunities that incorporate the interests and concerns of First Nations Australians in a co-defined and co-designed approach.

CLOSING OPEN PIT MINES: DATA GAPS AND RESEARCH NEEDS Australian scientists, as part of a major effort to improve post-mining landscapes, have identified a need to increase our understanding of how dewatering of open pit mines impacts the regional groundwater and how the groundwater recovers after mining ceases. 1MG Editors in coordination with Dr Peter Cook The Challenge Over the next 25 years, 50 per cent of Australia’s existing mines are expected to close. Further, Australia is on the cusp of another mining boom, driven largely by the world’s transition to green energy, that may rival the recent one. Post-mining landscapes will always be different to pre-mining landscapes. Can outcomes for the former be improved to look at least a little more like the latter? And why is this so important? What is the incentive to commit to effecting change? The challenge is to understand the impacts of mining activities on the natural environment and those people living in close proximity to the mine site and how they can be altered or ameliorated by management. A theoretical and empirically grounded platform is required to enable assessments of major environmental, economic and social impacts of mine closures that can inform options for post-mining use. With so few mines that have actually been properly closed and relinquished, there are not a lot of successful precedents to examine for lessons learned. Water issues and water management in open pit mines in particular present specific challenges when closing a mine and considering post mine risk and potential future use. Historically, water management at mines that are no longer producing has often resulted in significant long-term ongoing costs and/or environmental legacy issues. This has made it very difficult,

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if not impossible, for proper mine closure and lease relinquishment. This is especially true for open pit mines that extend below the natural water table and that have been dewatered for mine operation. Yet, pit lake water could provide a valuable resource rather than constitute a liability for regional environments, their communities and economic development in a post-mining environment. Realising the potential for this water resource would support orderly transition to relinquishment and facilitate successful transition to sustainable post-mining regional communities. Successful management strategies for pit lakes have to establish the resource capacity and quality under the local climatic and hydro(geo)logical conditions of the mine site. This forms the basis for considering post-mining land-use opportunities (e.g., tourism, recreation, aquaculture, agriculture, museums, training facilities, sanctuaries) while safeguarding water requirements for ecosystem protection and revegetation at the local and regional scale. Project Overview This project examined the potential to optimise water management and water use for environmental restoration and examine the potential opportunities and value of other beneficial water uses. It identified challenges and opportunities and the key follow up research needed to enable water management to achieve environmental,

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cultural and economic goals. This work was conducted by a team with expertise in groundwater and surface water flow, water chemistry and water quality and an understanding of mine operational requirements. This research synthesised the current knowledge base through a review of the open literature, identified best practice, challenges and knowledge gaps, outlined future research priorities, and built a strategic framework to inform future research. The project reinforced the lack of information in the general scientific literature across many areas of mining hydrology. Coming to terms with what is known and what is not known is difficult as there is a wealth of knowledge within mining companies, but very little in open literature. Where publicly available information exists, it is generally not easy to locate and is not included in common search tools. This project benchmarked current state-of-knowledge on water issues and water management in below water table open pit mines. The key knowledge gaps identified will provide a baseline for future projects in this area that will help manage water quality and quantity after mines are closed. This not only supports closed mines to protect social and environmental values but also promotes integrated mine closure practices that will reduce long term risk and identify post-mining use opportunities during operations. Key Findings • Water balance and water quality impacts are amongst the most important issues for mining and mine closure. • After mine dewatering ceases, groundwater levels close to the pit will begin to recover, but further

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from the mine pit, groundwater levels will continue to fall for some time. Detailed information on the aquifer system surrounding the mine is required to predict how the groundwater system recovers after mine closure. For pits that are not backfilled, pit lakes will usually develop. Predicting pit lake levels, water quality and backfilling rates is very complex and needs detailed research and improved modelling capabilities. Different strategies can be used to improve mine closure outcomes, and there is a need to evaluate which strategies are most likely to be successful in different environments This is critical to understand in what situations pit lake water could provide a valuable resource for regional environments, their communities and economic development in a post-mining environment Major mining companies are overall supportive of this research – and, while realising this is overdue, are recognising that planning needs to be built into the whole life-cycle of the mine from its inception.

Conclusion Open mine pits are becoming more and more common, and this project and those that will follow on from it are considered key to maximising post-mining landscape outcomes. Everyone with a stake in mining and communities impacted by mining, especially across regional Australia, should be excited by the promise and potential of where this research is heading with Australia having the opportunity to lead the world in improving post-mining landscapes.

Stockton Lake which is a repurposed open cut coal mine near Collie Western Australia

Dr Peter Cook is Director of the National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training (NCGRT) College of Science & Engineering, Flinders University, and the Lead for Project 3.3 at the Cooperative Research Centre for the Transformation in Mining Economies.

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MINING TRANSFORMATION FOR ENDURING VALUE

The Cooperative Research Centre for Transformations in Mining Economies, launched in 2020, is creating opportunities to bring Australian innovation in the emerging mine closure sector to the global market.

By Dr Guy Boggs

ustralia’s resource wealth is well known. From the first 19th century gold rushes in places such as Ballarat in the east and Kalgoorlie in the west to the iron ore driven ‘mining boom’ of the 2000s, our nation has prospered from this mineral wealth. This wealth has helped build our regions and cities, driven forward our society’s GDP and enabled investment in and development of other industries. Extracting this wealth from our mineral resources is a partnership between government, mining companies and the community and requires a finetuned set of skills, technologies and business acumen to ensure a profitable and sustainable sector. While the focus in the past has been on optimising the exploration, construction and operational phases of a mine’s life, it’s now becoming clear that it is just as critical that we ensure mines can close, be relinquished and transition communities, infrastructure and land for next use if we are to have a sustained resource sector. What is driving this transformation of the sector? While social license has long been recognised as important, recent challenges experienced by the sector have demonstrated this is one of the most significant business risks mining companies face. Public confidence in the sector’s ability to minimise the net social and environmental impact and deliver enduring value is critical. Confidence in the sector’s ability to close, relinquish and transition mines and their communities is central to social license. What’s more, this is driving decision making within the investment community and our

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ability to recruit the next generation into the sector. Transforming the sector to one that not only generates wealth during the operating life of a mine but one that leaves a positive legacy will be critical in attracting and building the workforce of the future. Australia has experienced a mining boom and it is inevitable that this will be followed by an increase in the numbers of mines going through closure over coming decades. Meeting this future demand creates significant opportunity for innovation and an expanded view of how we conceptualise the mine closure supply and value chains. A new way of thinking While mine rehabilitation is not a new topic, it is one that has been underpinned by a shared belief that after a mine finishes, it will be returned to a state that closely resembles what was there before. This belief has underpinned our policy development, mine planning and associated investment through the life of mine and is tightly connected to community’s social license for the sector. This approach fails to recognise that as mines develop, they build infrastructure, create communities and radically change the landscape. If we are to change from this ‘single path’, we will need a new way of thinking and ensure we have the skills, knowledge, technology, business settings and policy environment that will best enable a new vision of success in mine rehabilitation and closure. Our CRC has been developed to support and inform this new way of thinking. We are developing new tools that can integrate re-purposing opportunities at an individual site and integrate planning at regional scales to deliver net benefits beyond the mine that consider both towns and

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the broader regions in transition. Recognising that this requires the mining industry to connect with sectors driving post mine development, from conservation to tourism, agriculture and energy and the critical role First Nations people play in land stewardship, we are working with stakeholders that can help define a new vision of success in mine closure and post mine transitions. Without a new shared understanding of success, we will continue to see opportunities missed and conflict that will undermine the sector. Australia is incredibly fortunate to have an environment in which diverse stakeholders can come together and explore solutions and a program such as the Australian Governments Cooperative Research Centre Program that can enable this. Of course, a new definition of success has significant implications for how we plan, execute and regulate mines. The CRC is working with our partners to develop new ways that will ensure we incorporate short and long term, tangible and intangible risk and opportunity in decision making. This will deliver increased confidence in our ability to forecast and predict residual risk and how we make decisions from before a mine starts and throughout its life to ensure it’s positioned for a positive post mine transition. This brings important consideration of how we consider mine closure through a ‘whole of government’ lens and we are fortunate to be working with

policy makers from across government portfolios and multiple national jurisdictions to inform new frameworks and standards that can enable these transitions. The final piece of the puzzle is driving innovation in our technology to ensure we have capability to execute these visions. Our CRC will invest in innovation that directly addresses the key areas of risk and opportunity identified through new decision tools and recognition of post mine regional perspectives. This requires integration of water, landform and ecosystem design tools, delivery mechanisms that are cost effective, scaleable and fit for purpose and takes advantage of remote monitoring technologies that identify progress and inform future trajectories. With a mine closure ‘boom’ forecast over coming decades, the CRC platform will enable piloting and commercialisation of these technologies and will ensure Australia‘s Mining Equipment, Technology and Services (METS) supply chains are ready to meet domestic needs and positioned to capitalise on an emerging global market place. Change in the sector driven through advancements in technology, greater transparency and rise in the importance of ESG and social license expectation needs to be met with a new way of thinking. This is an exciting challenge and opportunity for the sector and one that our 77 partners are coming together to solve.

Dr Guy Boggs is the CEO of the Cooperative Research Centre for Transformations in Mining Economies (CRC TiME). Guy is committed to enabling a new vision for mine closure and positive post mine transitions through effective stakeholder engagement, research planning and innovative solutions. He has extensive experience providing leadership in innovation, actively working at the interface of industry and research.

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MINE CLOSURE PLANNING – A COMPLEX LANDSCAPE WORTHY OF EXPLORATION Pioneering research and a brand new approach to management shine light on a complex issue. Can the mining industry and its various stakeholders, by aiming for exemplary results, re-imagine and redesign Mine Closure Planning as a recognised future discipline in time for Australia’s next mining boom? By Dr Isaac Dzakpata with editorial support from Deborah Pienaar

ine planning (feasibility, production, or closure) involves effectively predicting the future (Brookwater, 2022), a challenge likened by world renowned management philosopher Peter Drucker to "driving along a country road at night with no lights while peering out the rear window." Mine closure planning (MCP) refers to the science and engineering aspects of envisioning and providing for the end state of a mining endeavour - a lifespan ranging from 5 to 70 years for new mines. Mining operators that have mismanaged closure historically have caused enormous harm and scarring to the natural environment. Australia is reported to have at least 60,000 abandoned mines (the majority of which are minor and the product of Australia's gold rush in the mid-1800s – before progressive rehabilitation became the standard). The biggest challenge for MCP in Australia today centres on the mining operation often outliving the tenure of those who originally planned them

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and, in some extreme cases, the companies who owned the mines from the very beginning. The overarching concern remains “planning for closure versus closure without planning”. But why is this case, what are the issues lurking, and could these problems guide towards new opportunities? In the recently published Foundational Project 2.2, ’Exploring the Issues in Mine Closure Planning’, the fundamental challenges and issues at the heart of MCP were identified. Following a thorough literature review, supplemented by surveys and interviews with select industry stakeholders, a comprehensive real-world model of the preferred MCP approach was formulated. Principles from complex adaptive systems theory were employed to account for the highly dynamic and interconnected MCP landscape as well as the limited value of reductionism. Three key findings are presented in the CRC TiME Report: (1) an industry operator knowledge gap was identified, largely caused by the MCP responsibility being traditionally outsourced to external consultants; (2) current MCP approaches do not consider specifics and/or variables such as expected mine lifecycle, extraction method, commodity (and potential diversification of commodities), and feasibility levels; and (3) MCP lessons learned and/or success stories across the mining industry are not being shared. A chief outcome of Project 2.2 is the development of an Integrated Mine Transition Framework (IMTF), newly created to

tightly knit all aspects of strategic mine planning and mining operations carried out over the lifetime of a mine. The IMTF will form the core of an integrated knowledge-based toolkit that affords the mining operator an advanced command and control capability during a MCP effort. Report 2.2 concluded that unless mining operators start taking true ownership of their MCP interests, the traditional crude approach we have witnessed for the last two centuries will persist. There is, however, much to be hopeful for. In recent years, for example, the balance is returning to valuing social licence both here and around the world. Mine operators are increasingly recognising that social licence is equally as important as shareholder performance for ensuring the industry continues sustainably into the future. CRC TiME Report 2.2 showed how robust record-keeping of each MCP update iteration throughout the lifecycle of the mine, as well as tracking changes in regulatory requirements, is a major albeit not insurmountable challenge. If achieved, both regulatory authorities and mine operators can prepare mine closure plans that meet the mining regulator's clearance requirements without relying heavily on external experts and consultants. The current situation, however, is that neither regulators nor mine operators have an integrated solution to manage and effectively regulate crucial input. Much more could be done right from the start of a mine’s lifecycle to envision an economically

Operating (left) and abandoned (right) mines in Australia. (Source: Vivoda et al., 2019)

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viable solution and garner commitment from a broader spectrum of stakeholder and interest groups. Germany, widely considered a world leader in MCP, can teach Australia a thing or two – such as their lignite operations in the North Rhenish regions of the country. An outstanding example of a post-mining land use that can inspire future MCP best practice is the well-known Eden Project located in Cornwall, United Kingdom, which saw a dramatic transformation of an abandoned Cornish China Clay Pit. The £141 million project, which was completed incrementally over two decades, culminated in the delivery of a world class eco-visitor attraction and was opened to the public on 17th March 2001. More informed dialogue is needed to shift attitudes towards improved MCP and encourage early participation and investment, particularly from those who stand to benefit from the eventual outcome. In the case of The Eden Project, this included environmentalists, botanists, and the tourism sector. Mining professionals, executives, community stakeholders and shareholders should pause for a moment and think what could be possible when a periodically updated and sufficiently rich mine closure plan is produced from the start. Australia has an opportunity to redefine what its own MCP success means. Industry leaders are now calling for a new shared understanding of this success, recognising that the mining industry needs to connect with the sectors now driving post-mine development such as conservation, tourism, agriculture and energy. First Nations people’s land stewardship plays a critical role in developing this shared understanding. Austra-

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lia is leading the world in building a culture of collaboration amongst diverse stakeholders with the unique cross sector partnership of CRC TiME working on MCP and driving innovation for positive mine closure. Australia and its regional neighbours have several MCP exemplars for the domestic mining industry to learn from. For instance, the sensible transition approach taken by ASX-listed metals exploration company Kingston Resources as it enters Papua New Guinea to redevelop the Misima Island gold project, which fell victim to the soft gold price era of the 1990s. Other success stories include Australian coal mining company Coal & Allied’s alluvial land rehabilitation in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales and the rehabilitation of American aluminium producer Alcoa’s mine of approximately 600 hectares each year at its Huntly and Willowdale bauxite mining operations in the Darling Range in Western Australia. Effective mine closure entails not only visualising and planning for the end of a mine’s life but, critically, also resolving the complexities around the ownership (or mandate) of the closure or transition from the very beginning.

Dr Isaac Dzakpata is the Project Leader of Foundational Project 2.2, a recently commissioned study by the Cooperative Research Centre for Transformations in Mining Economies (CRC TiME), titled “Exploring the Issues in Mine Closure Planning”. He is also Work Area Leader at world-leading research organisation Mining3

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TAKING TIME TO LISTEN A new report aims to lay the foundations for a deeper and more meaningful and equitable relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the mining transition sector. By Gillian Cumming

eveloping enduring and mutually beneficial relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is at the heart of a new report on creating a best-practice approach to transitioning mine sites across Australia. The Foundations for Effective Indigenous Inclusion report, undertaken by the Federal Government’s world-leading Cooperative Research Centre’s Transformations in Mining Economies program (CRC TiME), makes eight key recommendations on how to best serve the aspirations of Indigenous Australians whose Country supports mining communities in transition. Professor Stephen van Leeuwen, the report’s co-author and the Indigenous Chair, Biodiversity and Environmental Science at Curtin University in Western Australia, says paramount in the relationship between Indigenous Australians and other stakeholders is an acknowledgement of the right of First Nations people to self-determination. “It’s about relationships, and it doesn’t matter who the relationships are with, they require effort and time,” he says of the report findings. The report lists the building blocks for a best-practice Indigenous Inclusion Strategy as: • Awareness of the principles, practices, and protocols of relationships with First Nations people. • Creating ethical and moral systems that enable relationship building that values equality, equitability, respect, integrity, and reciprocity. • Recognising and enacting Indigenous Australians’ right to self-determination. • Recognition of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). • Recognition of Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP). • Acknowledgement of the holistic principle of “time” and how this influences relationships and research initiatives. • Investing time and allocating resources to build culturally safe relationships.

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Ensuring Traditional Knowledge and new knowledge are welcomed and valued.

A better understanding of Indigenous Australians’ concept of “time” and their connections to “Country” are two examples where mining industry stakeholders, including academic researchers and government representatives, can add value to the dialogue on change. While Western time is rigidly linear, with a past, present, and future, Traditional Owners perceive time in a circular pattern, existing in the past and present simultaneously, with the future holding no bearing – meaning that structured time is often less relevant. “Partly why non-Indigenous Australians don’t get it is because, for them, time is money. In the research world, academic world, and even corporate world, where money isn’t easy to obtain, it’s a stumbling block if they go into an Indigenous community and can’t talk to people because of ‘sorry business’,” says Professor van Leeuwen. “Getting that concept of time across to the funders of projects, including government departments, is vital so they will sufficiently invest in building relationships.” Similarly, Professor van Leeuwen says Indigenous Australians’ concept of Country is rooted in the land itself and extends to the sky and cosmos beyond. Song lines, totems, and women’s and men’s business represent intangible aspects of Country. “Country constitutes what can best be described as a sense of sacredness and spirit,” the report states. “At the crux of the relationship between Indigenous people and their respective Country is a sense of obligation to protect and sustain Country.’’ Realising the difference between Western and Indigenous perceptions of Country, along with adopting the other recommendations of the CRC TiME report, are crucial to building sustainable, equal, and equitable relationships.

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INNOVATING FOR THE GREATER GOOD, INVENTING FOR A HEALTHIER HUMANITY Harnessing the power of leading-edge science to save and improve lives around the world, Merck ANZ is helping humanity meet the challenges of today and prepare for the challenges of tomorrow.

ith more than 60,000 employees across 66 countries worldwide, German multinational science and technology company, Merck Group, is divided into three streams: Healthcare, Life Sciences and Electronics. Founded in 1668, Merck is the world's oldest operating chemical and pharmaceutical company. For more than three and a half centuries, Merck’s unwavering commitment to ongoing scientific exploration and responsible entrepreneurship have been key to the company’s long list of achievements in technological and scientific advancement, providing a solid ethical foundation from which it has consistently been able to innovate, invent, expand, and evolve. Locally, Merck ANZ employs over 250 people within Australia and New Zealand, Merck Life Science provides over 100,000 different products to all of the leading universities, research institutes and biotechnology companies in Australia, while the company’s Healthcare division provides oncology, neurology and fertility treatments to patients around the country. In 2021, Merck strengthened and expanded its commitment to diversity. While Merck has always been a diverse organisation – it recognises that the success of the organisation depends on an ability to foster an environment that promotes equity and cultivates inclusion. This approach is demonstrated by more than 36% of leadership roles globally held by women and at a local level with Josie Downey at the helm as General Manager and Managing Director, Merck Healthcare ANZ and Rebecca Lee, Head of Science

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and Laboratory Solutions and Managing Director of Merck Life Science ANZ. Mobilising Merck's Might To Fight The Pandemic Merck's commitment to supporting and strengthening human progress was clearly demonstrated in the organisation's response to COVID-19. “During these difficult times, Merck stepped up and was fully dedicated to actively contributing its substantial resources and significant expertise to fight what has become the biggest health crisis of the last 100 years, drawing upon its global scale and breadth of experience and talent to help humanity battle the disease”, says Josie. Merck’s contribution to the pandemic’s response includes product and service support for 80 Vaccine manufacturers, the use of Merck’s raw materials and services for over 35 COVID-19 test systems, while more than 50 Monoclonal antibodies, plasma products and antiviral drugs rely on resources and intellectual property provided by Merck. In October 2020, the Australian Government announced it had contracted CSL Behring Australia to manufacture approximately 50 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines in Australia for supply to the country, the first doses of which were rolled out in March 2021. In Australia, Merck’s teams collaborated intensely with CSL to ensure the vaccine, developed in partnership with the Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, was produced within the critical timelines required. Merck teams worked around the clock successfully enabling supply of all the necessary components to support

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manufacturing the vaccine in Australia during the height of the pandemic. Laying The Foundation For A Stronger Future Merck is pioneering systems and techniques of collaboration, innovation and engagement that will continue to drive human progress throughout the 21st century and beyond, through its commitment to enhancing sustainability and equity of access, as well as the implementation of practical corporate social responsibility programs that facilitate STEM empowerment and Reconciliation. “Sustainability is a key component of our organisational culture and an obligation we take very seriously and work to fulfill every day”, says Rebecca. Rebecca adds “by harnessing our global scale and 354-year history, Merck’s people across the world are continually striving to create long-term value for society, by fostering progress for more than one billion people, targeting climate neutrality by 2040 and actively working to significantly reduce our resource consumption and carbon footprint”. Importantly, Merck strives for complete transparency in terms of its progress in achieving these ambitious goals, proactively informing and educating stakeholders about its initiatives, programs and achievements, annually publishing a comprehensive report on efforts to maximise sustainability within the business and across the globe. Equity of access to healthcare and the miracles of modern medicine at a global level are also fundamental objectives for Merck. “Global healthcare spending is expected to reach over $10 trillion by the end of 2022, however, more than half the world’s population still lack adequate access to healthcare”, says Josie. “That’s why we decided to make equitable access to healthcare and medicine one of the company’s top priorities in an effort to address this global health challenge.” “At Merck, we actively leverage our extensive networks and depth of expertise to identify, develop and implement solutions for developing healthcare systems that serve patients, scientists and customers and achieve progress for people, communities and society”. Merck is engaged in addressing pressing issues and healthcare challenges that affect millions of people, helping to increase and improve health outcomes for underserved populations in developing nations by fostering local collaboration on projects of scientific innovation and technological significance.

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Identifying And Inspiring The Next Generation Of Innovators And Inventors A concerted, global effort to empower women and young people in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, is also underway. At a local level, Merck and First Nations Australian Charity, DeadlyScience, have signed a three-year partnership agreement earlier this year to help empower young Indigenous children in remote communities with culturally appropriate scientific knowledge by providing hands-on learning tool kits that connect them to the First Scientists of Australia – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. “Founded in 2019 by proud Kamilaroi man Corey Tutt, DeadlyScience has engaged with over 100 remote communities and often critically under-resourced schools across the country,” says Rebecca “The DeadlyScience and Merck project builds on these fantastic achievements by providing these children with experimental kits to promote interest and engagement of science during early learning and create pathways for up-coming scientists to emerge from these rural communities.” All over Australia, New Zealand and the world, Merck’s employees work every day to make a positive difference to millions of people’s lives by creating better, healthier and more sustainable ways to live. From fighting COVID-19 to laying the foundation for a better future for humanity, the Merck brand is ubiquitous and its impact within healthcare and medical science is undeniable. “At Merck, we drive pioneering solutions, partnerships and sustainable business models to address unmet needs across the health value chain, actively contributing to the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals,” says Rebecca. “In this way, we create shared value, impact for society and sustainable business value for our company.”

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Merck ANZ Managing Directors with the Deadly Science team.

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A NEW WAY FORWARD Companies need to rethink the risk/reward equation for the digital future, and shed ways of thinking born in the industrial era. TechnologyOne made a bold move 10 years ago to move to cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS), and has reaped the benefits since. By Adrian Di Marco

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echnologyOne started 32 years ago, and was one of Australia’s first innovation-led startups. TechnologyOne is today a top-150 ASXlisted company, with one of the largest software R&D centres in Australia. We have been one of the strongest performing companies on the ASX since we listed in 1999, with a market capitalisation now approaching $3bn. Our success has been driven by our aggressive innovation agenda.

When TechnologyOne started, we took a very different direction to the other software companies at that time. Up until then, software companies were focused on providing services. The products that existed either came from large multinationals such as MSA, McCormack and Dodge or IBM, or originated locally from custom software built for a specific customer, that was then ‘onsold’ to another customer. In all cases the software needed to be heavily modified to meet the specific requirements of each new customer. This was costly, time consuming and inherently risky. TechnologyOne’s idea was to undertake deep research and use this to build a new generation of software products, that did not need to be customised to meet a specific customer’s requirements. All customers would use the exact same code line, which would provide significant advantages, such as quicker implementations and reduced costs, and enable the customer to take new releases of the software product without costly re-implementations. To achieve this, TechnologyOne pioneered a concept called "configuration not customisation", in which the configuration sat outside the software code, in a repository, which told the software how to behave for a specific customer. The code wasn’t changed for each customer, but instead the configuration, which specified the accounting rules, workflows, policies, procedures, themes, etc. It was a

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Innovation in practice revolutionary idea, that has underpinned the company’s long-term success. To make this happen, we had to identify new and emerging technologies, such as a new way of storing and retrieving data based on a mathematical model, which subsequently became relational database technology. When TechnologyOne started 32 years ago, there was no venture capital industry, and banks would not lend to a startup with no assets, trying to pioneer a new idea of building software products that did not need to be customised, using unproven state-of-the-art technology. The fact that the company was based on undertaking deep research, which would need to be subsequently commercialised, was not something the banks understood. To fund TechnologyOne’s innovation agenda, I approached a past customer, Dugald Mactaggart, who owned a hides processing plant. Dugald was one of the first venture capitalists in Australia, and provided both the initial funding, as well as a shelf company from a previous venture called ‘Rent-a-Bull’, which was renamed to TechnologyOne. This would eventually become a partnership that lasted more than 32 years. It’s quite ironic that one of Australia’s leading software R&D companies started life as Rent-a-Bull. TechnologyOne’s success, as well as our continuing strong growth over 32 years, is due to our aggressive innovation agenda. The company has consistently invested +20% of revenue each year in R&D, making it a global leader in R&D. Over that period of time TechnologyOne has reinvented itself, and rebuilt our software products many times. Our first-generation products were green screen based on relational database technology; our second generation was Client/Server with a Graphical User Interface; our third generation was Internetbased; and our newest generation is Software as a Service. We have been continually at the cutting edge of new technologies, ideas and concepts. By rebuilding the company and our products every eight years, it has freed our thinking from the past and allowed us to bring in new ideas, new talent and new concepts. Our aggressive innovation agenda is underpinned by a set of guiding principles: • New and emerging technologies – To

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create new opportunities • Simplicity – To make life simple for customers using new technologies, coupled with new ideas and concepts • Leadership – Setting ambitious goals for R&D teams, and to work with them to navigate the "unknown path" to a new destination that no one has ever been to before • Failure – Accepting and learning from failures, which are inevitable when you are at the ‘cutting edge’, exploring uncharted domains. Having built an innovation-based company over 32 years, it is clear the Australian economy must move from its industrial past to a digital future; and we need to accelerate the creation of more innovation-led companies that can capitalise on the opportunities that lie ahead. To do this, the older traditional approaches that worked in the industrial past will not work going forward. We need to break through the past, and find a new way forward that is appropriate for the digital future. TechnologyOne has already made this leap. We decided 10 years ago to become a cloud company, rebuild all our products, and commit to seamlessly and easily moving all our on-premise customers to the cloud. When we announced this, as a public company, there was a lot of angst, as investors questioned why our customers, which are large government departments, councils and universities, would trust a software vendor to run their mission critical ERP software, as well as put their data into our cloud. They were concerned that we had no experience or track record building a cloud business, and we were committing hundreds of millions of dollars on this new direction. These were all valid concerns, yet as an innovation-led company we knew we could succeed because of our rigorous R&D-led approach. Today our global SaaS ERP solution is used by 500+ large government departments, councils and universities, and our SaaS revenues are growing by 40% per annum. There were significant challenges we had to overcome, significant risks we had to manage, and many mistakes made along the way, but today we have successfully delivered our global SaaS ERP solution, which is driving our growth going forward.

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Key to our success as an innovation-led company has been to think and operate differently, and to have a board of directors that can effectively oversee and nurture such a culture. Ours is not a typical ASX-150 board, in both constitution and how it operates. It is not a board scared of technological change, of moving fast, and heading into an unknown and ill-defined direction, nor of making mistakes. What we have is a board that clearly understands how to manage the risk and reward equation that is inherent in a true innovation-led company. Unfortunately, being an innovation-led company in the publicly listed arena is becoming increasingly more difficult, because of the risk averse approach enforced on public companies by the mandated "one size fits all" model of corporate governance. Public companies have been forced to embrace a common, unified and risk averse approach including: • majority of independent directors • independent chair • limitation on director tenure • propensity to recruit from the pool of existing listed company directors • segregation of CEO and chair roles • restrictive guidelines for executive remuneration Companies that do not comply to this mandated "one size fits all" model are identified and punished at AGMs by proxy advisors. Boards have been forced to embrace this mandated risk averse approach, limiting their ability to be different and to innovate.

Clearly there are arguments that could be made both for and against this mandated approach. That is not the issue here. Public companies come in all shapes and sizes, across a myriad of industries, with each company facing its own unique challenges, while at the same time having their own unique opportunities in the new digital world. To push all companies into a single mandated model will by definition push all companies to a standard "norm" and remove out performance. If there is one thing that nature has shown us, it is that diversity and evolution are among the most powerful forces in the universe. We should be embracing diversity and evolution in our public company space. We should not be afraid that companies will make mistakes, that some will fail, as this is part of the process for the survival of the strongest. We should encourage diversity of approach between companies, just like there is diversity in nature. Only through diversity do we find new, better ways, and create out performance. What is important going forward is transparency. Companies must be open and transparent about how they operate, and clearly identify to their investors if they differ from the "one size fits all" model, explaining why they are different. Investors can then make an informed decision on whether to invest or not. If we are to encourage more and more innovation-led companies in Australia’s publicly listed space, and if we to allow them to truly succeed, they cannot be hobbled by this risk averse, mandated model currently being promoted.

TechnologyOne’s Brisbane Headquarters

Adrian Di Marco is Founder and Executive chairman of TechnologyOne.

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PLANETARY HEALTH RESEARCH

Universities must look over the horizon and lead. Victoria University stands with its students, and together, they stand for planetary health.

ustralia’s 2020 began with unprecedented bushfires. As we emerged and began the long road to recovery, our communities were confronted with COVID-19. Never has the interdependence between the health and wellbeing of people, communities and planet been so clear. Victoria University (VU) has made a whole-of-university commitment to tackle planetary health across our research, teaching, campus management and community partnerships, building upon a strong tradition of social justice advocacy and collaboration in the west of Melbourne. Its research community is part of a global network dedicated to life-changing and world-changing solutions to complex planetary health challenges. The idea is that to create a sustainable future for our planet and for all peoples, we need to think global but act local. Wherever we are in the world, sustainable solutions must be locally anchored. VU’s "placebased" approach to planetary health emphasises the importance of context, of working with local communities, addressing local conditions to find sustainable solutions. This deep commitment to planetary health led the University to invest $1m to seed 25 planetary health research projects being undertaken by more than 80 researchers and research students in partnership with community. A team of Australian Indigenous researchers are exploring an Indigenous approach to planetary health, recognising that Indigenous people have been planetary health custodians on this land for more than 50,000 years. Another project connects Aboriginal women to country through local healing practices. Several VU teams are working closely with regional communities to address community and industry resilience following the 2019–20 bushfires, and in preparation for the next. Some are investigating rehabilitation of bushfire affected land, and methods of decontaminating soil and water. Others are assessing impacts on biodiversity, tourism and local businesses.

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The importance of living lightly on the planet has become a driver of innovation. There are coffee cups being turned into eco-bricks, agricultural waste being transformed into plastic packaging alternatives and construction materials being made from recycled plastic waste. Professor Corinne Reid, Provost (Interim) and Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research), Victoria University, notes, “In our laboratories there are researchers feverishly working on drugs and vaccines to combat COVID19. Others are investigating plant-based diets and the effects of exercise as a secret weapon in combating chronic health conditions. Research teams are also working closely with communities to strengthen health and wellbeing. Others still, are building outdoor laboratories, gardens, on our rooftop to support a climate smart campus – to walk the walk.” Looking upon this industrious hive of activity, stretching from laboratories into communities, there is a resolute commitment to a research-led COVID recovery. At VU, planetary health is a thread that connects the research community, inspires students and orients them to action. As Professor Reid explains, “Vibrant communities of practice give us a shared purpose as we forge partnerships across disciplinary boundaries. We have started our journey. Our commitment to planetary health has reminded us that we are more powerful together.”

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ELECTRO OPTIC SYSTEMS: THE POWER OF OPTIMISM The inspiring story of EOS – the Canberrabased, globally focused manufacturer of advanced tech systems – shows how far our innovation ecosystem has come. By Duncan Campbell-Avenell

or anyone with an interest in Australia’s national health, the CSIRO’s ambitious Australian National Outlook 2019 (ANO) report makes for compelling – and essential – reading. A detailed map of the here and now as well as a “roadmap to 2060”, the ANO was built on great mountains of data, sophisticated computer modelling, and the expert input of key players from academia, government, and industry, not to mention the CSIRO itself. One observer has referred to the resulting big-picture, bird’s-eye-view survey – which is available in full and summary forms online – as a “whole-of-society blueprint”. It’s perhaps no bombshell that the ANO identifies science, technology, and education as the three key drivers of potential innovation in Australia over the coming decades. More bracing is the systematic way in which the report links the health of our innovation ecosystem with that of the broader economy. An underlying assumption of the ANO project is that innovation – which the NAB Business Innovation Index defines, neatly, as the ability to do things “differently, more quickly, or more cost-efficiently” than before – is critical to a nation’s prosperity and prospects, and few

informed stakeholders would disagree. And, while it’s easy to bemoan the flaws in the current landscape – in fact, it’s possible to make a career out of it – the ANO’s verdicts are in, and they suggest that, while now isn’t the time to lose sight (through rose-tinted glasses) of what can be improved, we should be guardedly optimistic about the future of innovation in Australia – especially considering how far we’ve come. The latter point can be shown through a quickfire case study of Electro Optic Systems (EOS), a leading creator of specialised hardware for the space, communications, and defence sectors. Today, the Canberra-headquartered firm is an established, admired manufacturer and exporter of cutting-edge tech, with offices in the US, the UAE, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Germany and a raft of high-profile, high-value contracts around the world. But it wasn’t always thus – and the story of how EOS turned its intellectual capital into commercially viable, locally manufactured, export-ready products is instructive. Among its lessons is that Australia is much more receptive to innovation now than it was in 1983, when EOS was founded by Dr Ben Greene, who remains the company’s Group CEO.

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EOS’ point of difference then was the same as it is now: it made products that did things other products couldn’t do. The original hardware, which Dr Greene was deeply involved in developing, included advanced laser tracking capabilities that had enormous potential for a range of knowledge-hungry sectors, chiefly space, defence, and communications. EOS was also breaking new ground in its work on space-based sensors, laser range finders, and thermal cameras. From the start, they knew they were onto something. “There was no company in the world that could do this at the time,” Dr Greene notes – “and many still struggle with it.” With hot intellectual property like that, today’s overcaffeinated investors might call EOS a unicorn. But in the first decade or so of its existence, the company faced a series of major environment-related obstacles, many to do with how it was perceived locally at a time when the term “start-up” hadn’t entered the lexicon. The founders couldn’t find an Australian provider that would insure the fledgling business or an Australian bank that would loan them the seed capital they needed to get it started. They eventually found a willing insurer in London and a bank in California. Next, building from the ground up, they developed domestic production infrastructure that included an export capability, since the majority of EOS’ potential clients were (and remain) overseas-based. The hard work paid off. The products started to create a buzz in the relevant industries, and in the fairy-tale rise that followed EOS won a slew of major international contracts, including with the Australian and US governments, as the promise of its unique hardware was finally realised. As in all good fairy tales, new obstacles appeared, this time in the looming form of the major aerospace firms, which saw this new market entrant from Australia as nothing if not a ripe target. Much of the EOS’ intellectual property was duly – ahem – appropriated as various players did their best to cut the company down to size. EOS had been going along swimmingly, but now it found it had been in an aquarium full of sharks all along. It was a hard but needed lesson. In the ensuing rebuild, the company focused much more on patents and on protecting itself from outside attacks. “As each decade goes by, we get much better at protecting our IP,” Dr Greene says. As that IP was refined and added to, the major

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

contracts kept rolling in. EOS made a measured decision to go public in 2002, and in 2005 entered a major partnership with North American defence giant Northrop Grumman to exploit common technologies in the space and military sectors, further solidifying its place at the top of its field. Today, EOS’ land- and space-based products are used for all kinds of hugely complex applications, and the firm is a trusted provider to major clients from North America to Asia to the Middle East. It’s also often held up as a homegrown innovation success story – a far cry from when the founders had to fly across the world to find an insurer. One moral of the EOS story – especially when viewed through the lens of the CSIRO’s ANO report – is that there are far more options and helping hands available to young Australian innovator– entrepreneurs today than there were in 1983. A modern start-up can seek support from any number of sources – angel investors, government grants and funding programs, private-sector initiatives – that simply didn’t exist in EOS’ early days. Also, crucially, the culture at large – having watched such giants as Facebook, Uber, and Atlassian move from the basement to the boardroom – is now far more receptive to, and even hungry for, the ideas of young Australian entrepreneurs. That may be why when Dr Greene speaks of the current landscape, it’s with a palpable optimism. While acknowledging that more can always be done, he seems to see good signs in every direction he looks, whether in the form of positive developments in ag-tech and green hydrogen; the thriving Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) program; the discovery-focused Australian Research Council Centres of Excellence and Medical Research Future Fund programs; or the recent founding of the Australian Space Agency – a significant development for a domestic industry that EOS helped pioneer. The engines of our innovation culture, in other words, need a few tweaks rather than a full overhaul. Those tweaks include increased funding of R&D and ongoing development of policy that’s more favourable to innovation, commercialisation, and a fertile business environment. It’s meaningful, though, that Dr Greene’s durable optimism – which has its roots in an entrepreneurial mindset – remains entirely undented by the challenges that he and EOS had to overcome. “As always,” he reflects, “it’s what we do next that matters most.”

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PERTH TO THE PILBARA, THEN MARS Many causes of blindness are treatable, and preventable, if you have access to an eye doctor. For communities in remote towns in Western Australia, this treatment has been hard to come by. Lions Eye Institute has democratised access to sightsaving interventions, while a commitment to its science and research has produced new treatments, medical devices, and a potentially revolutionary way to measure brain fluid pressure.

he Lions Eye Institute has been travelling around Western Australia for the past six years in its purpose-built, Lions Outback Vision Van, bringing eye care and help to remote Indigenous communities. Identifying a lack of clinical care in communities around the Pilbara and Kimberley regions, from 2015–2019, it completed some 1800 surgeries, more than 15,000 consultations, dispensing close to 6,000 sets of glasses, and screening 23,321 people for diabetic retinothapy, an eye-disease related to diabetes. “The issue is that by the time you finish travelling, it is a year before you are able to revisit past patients,” explains Professor Bill Morgan, Managing Director, Lions Eye Institute. To solve the issue, Lions Eye Institute is now setting up a clinic in Broome, in what was formerly a backpackers hostel, donated to the institute. Starting the building process in February 2020, the team was treating patients by August, with the works expected to be completed in 2021. The long-term plan is to have a surgical theatre in the same facility, and convert it into a hub for eye-care teaching in a remote setting. As Professor Morgan notes, “It is often difficult to attract optometrists and ophthalmologists in rural areas. By undertaking the training in Broome, the plan is to attract people that are much more

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amenable to working in rural areas.” Rural medical schools have shown this to be effective, with Lions Eye Institute bringing that line of thinking to eye-care. The Lions Eye Institute is also a major partner with the University of WA for their upcoming optometry school. The Broome hub will be taking some students from Western Australia, along with its main Perth facility. Basic research, advanced output The major irreversible causes of blindness are macular degeneration, glaucoma, and diabetic retinothapy. Lions Eye Institute has recently commercialised a gene therapy for retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited eye disease in which the back of the eye (the retina) is damaged. Symptoms begin in childhood, and it is currently only treatable, not curable. With clinical trials expected to be undertaken in the next couple of years, it represents a possible breakthrough that could bring the privilege of vision back to those affected. Glaucoma is a disease where the pressure distribution at the back of the eye is altered, causing damage to the nerve fibres. Lions Eye Institute invented a glaucoma surgery in 1996, using a purpose-made gelatin stent. It involves inserting a 6mm tube into the eye with

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incredible accuracy, with both the device and technique created by Professor Dao Yi-Yu and the current Managing Director, Professor Morgan. The breakthrough came from its basic research using micropipette technologies to examine blood vessel oxygen tension in the retina, and pressure distribution in the optic nerve. From there, it gained the ability to manufacture and position the tubes in the eye using semi-robotic control systems made in its laboratory. It is now used worldwide with over 100,000 Xen stents having been inserted. It is the most common form of glaucoma surgery in parts of the developed world. Reading the brain through the eye The glaucoma research into pressure distribution also unlocked a surprising twist: intercranial pressure (brain fluid pressure) is a major contributor to pressure distribution in the eye. The only current viable methods of measuring brain fluid pressure involve drilling a hole into the skull, and putting a canula into the brain, or a needle into the spine, both of which are invasive and risky. Finding a link between the distribution pressure in the eye and brain has opened up a new method of measurement. For the last 10 years, Lions Eye Institute has been working with colleagues in neurosurgery and neurology to develop a system to non-invasively measure intercranial pressure. Using the properties of the retinal blood vessels, the veins, and how they pulsate at the back of the eye, it has invented a system for mapping that pulsation across the retina, and derived mathematical algorithms to take those pressure measurements to calculate the intercranial pressure. Thousands of people suffer from traumatic brain injuries every year. Idiopathic intercranial hypertension is a disease of unknown cause where brain fluid pressure spikes, causing trouble. Brain tumours and dementia are thought to be partly caused by changes in brain fluid pressure. By being able to measure brain fluid pressure without invasive surgery, researchers could undertake the measurements much more often, filling the gaps in the knowledge base for how those changes align to disease progression.

significantly, with significant, semi-permanent changes in the optic nerve. Most will need reading glasses upon returning, with the optic nerve remaining swollen for years after returning to Earth. While there are very few astronauts who spend several months in space at a time, solving the issue is crucial for future trips to Mars, which will take 10 months. Past research on swimming goggles, and their effect on the eye is now being adapted as a treatment for astronauts in space. The goggles allow them to mimic the normal pressure distribution experienced on Earth. Some questions remain unanswered, though: does it come on suddenly? Who is more likely to get it? Lions Eye Instute is now working on a portable, handheld system able to do the pulsation measurements, and calculate the intercranial pressure at any point in time. The end goal is to make it small enough to take into space, where every single gram is scrutinised. At the moment, Lions Eye Institute is measuring that pressure with a device the size of a hotel-refrigerator, in a process in which patients must remain seated. It is not portable, and cannot be taken into space. Making that device smaller involves solving issues of engineering, computer science, and physiology. Some 150 years ago, people could not measure blood pressure. Now, it is measured at almost every doctor visit, and Lions Eye Institute is hoping the device it develops may make the brain fluid pressure measurements just as ubiquitous.

Bringing WA research to NASA For astronauts in space for six months or longer there is a 40% chance that their brain fluid pressure will rise

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UNTAPPING NATURAL RESOURCES FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE: THE OCEANS The opportunities to grow Australia’s blue economy through offshore renewable energy and offshore aquaculture are vast. By Dr John Whittington

There are many definitions of the blue economy but central to most is the concept of a sustainable ocean economy that provides food, energy, transport of people and goods, and empowers coastal communities. The World Bank describes it as “the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth, improved livelihoods and jobs, and ocean ecosystem health”. Globally, the blue economy is made up of well-established industries such as marine and coastal tourism, oil and gas, fisheries and inshore aquaculture, shipping and ports, and defence. Additionally, emerging industries such as offshore renewable energy, offshore aquaculture, ecosystem services, and marine biotechnology. All of these activities extend from coastal to offshore areas, and across national and international borders. The global annual economic value generated by the ocean assets of the blue economy is estimated between USD1.5 trillion and USD2.5 trillion annually1, with the asset value of the world’s oceans estimated at USD24 trillion. The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development proposed 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets as an

action plan for prosperity, with a focus on sustainable practices. Remarkably, the blue economy has components that link to most SDGs, the most critical being SDG 14, which aims to “conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development”. The High-Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy unites 16 countries (including Australia) to facilitate solutions and develop an agenda for transitioning to an ocean economy which is sustainable. Five building blocks have been agreed as transitions hereto — (i) decision-making based on science and data; (ii) goal-oriented ocean planning; (iii) mobilisation of investments based on innovation and de-risking finance; (iv) stopping land-based pollution; and (v) changing the ocean accounting to reflect the true value of the ocean. Based on these principles, a recent report commissioned by the panel estimated that the oceans had the potential to sustainably generate six times more seafood (through aquaculture) and 40 times more renewable energy than currently. Australia’s opportunities to grow its blue economy are vast. This country has the world’s third largest marine jurisdiction with an Exclusive Economic

OECD. 2016. The Ocean Economy in 2030. Report. Paris: OECD Publishing

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Zone (EEZ) of 10.2 million km2. Much larger than its land area of 7.69 million km2, this includes tropical, sub-tropical, temperate, and Antarctic environments capable of supporting diverse aquaculture whilst also being home to some of the world’s best ocean energy resources. Australia’s blue economy is currently dominated by the offshore oil and gas industry contributing close to 50 per cent, and the tourism and shipping service sectors contributing close to 40 per cent to the blue economy output. By 2025, Australia’s blue economy Gross Value Added (GVA) is expected to reach AUD100 billion annually. Conversely, offshore renewable energy and offshore aquaculture are two sectors of Australia’s blue economy with significant capacity to grow, consistent with commitments to the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy and the UN’s SDGs. Australia’s EEZ has some of the world’s highest quality and abundance of marine related renewable energies. As an example, offshore wind quality in Australian waters is comparable to areas such as the North Sea where wind power is commonly used, and where this resource is undergirded by a well-established industry. A recent analysis of offshore wind energy resource was undertaken in terms of total resource, potential generation capacity, and capacity factors. The theoretical resource for Australia’s EEZ was estimated to be 27,369 GW, and the “technically accessible resource” - constrained to areas less than 100 km from shore, in water depths less than 1000 m, within 100 km of sub-stations and transmission lines, and excluding environmentally restricted areas - was estimated to be 2,233 GW. This is far in excess of current and projected electricity demand across the Australian electricity markets. In Australia, there are currently more than ten projects proposed with a combined capacity of over 25 GW, or 1 per cent of the technically accessible resource. The use of offshore renewable technologies in combination with other renewable exportable energy sources, such as green hydrogen, can support the decarbonisation of complete industry sectors in the near future as the engineering and regulatory challenges are addressed. Australia has a global reputation for quality, safe, and sustainable seafood. Yet its fisheries are relatively small by world standards, with Australia importing 72 per cent of its seafood. Currently, Australian aquaculture has a gross value of AUD1.6

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

billion per year, accounting for 51 per cent of the total fisheries related Gross Value of Production (GVP). While most of Australia’s wild fish stocks classified as sustainable, there is limited capacity to sustainably increase wild capture seafood - any significant growth in sustainable seafood production will need to come from offshore aquaculture. Realising the full potential for sustainable offshore seafood and energy production requires moving renewable energy systems and aquaculture into high quality yet remote and more exposed high-energy operating environments. This will require the development of new and more robust structures and production systems that require less maintenance with increased automation, systems able to withstand regular and extreme weather events while being safely and economically managed. Enabling these offshore industries will require new planning, including new regulatory, monitoring, and environmental accounting systems. This will provide the community with confidence that the operations are environmentally sustainable and socially responsible, while providing the industry and capital markets with the confidence to make long term investments. Solutions developed to grow the blue economy in Australia’s waters will have global application. Dr John Whittington is the CEO of the Blue Economy CRC, a Cooperative Research Centre established in 2019 under the Australian Government’s CRC Program.

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ALERT TO OPPORTUNITY The Alertness CRC was established to tackle the challenge of sleep disruption and sleep disorders and their impact on performance and safety. The unique consortium of 32 participating organisations has unlocked innovative solutions, created translation pathways for new research, discovered novel biomarkers for fatigue, and commercialised productivity-boosting product concepts.

he Alertness CRC was founded in 2013, and in seven highly-productive years has made strong advancements in the knowledge and technology base for sleep health management, the measurement of alertness, and the connection between lighting, scheduling, and performance. How can individuals manage their own sleep patterns to deal with irregular work hours? What are the benefits of lighting and scheduling changes on alertness? How can Australians better manage sleep disorders? How can science be used to objectively measure fatigue? While answering these questions, it carved out a space for Australian SMEs to undertake R&D that they would not have been able to complete otherwise, opening up new products and services,

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and directly growing businesses. With a focus on early career researchers, the Alertness CRC created new pathways for academics, supporting a total of 47 students and 28 postdoctoral fellows over the life of the consortium. Offering well-funded, targeted Masters and PhD programs, alongside industry based learning programs, many students successfully transitioned their skills to work with industry partners. As CEO Anthony Williams explains, “From our point of view, as with most CRCs, we are trying to bring the research culture together with industry to innovate. Researchers operate in a different dimension: adding to the body of knowledge, asking questions, developing the evidence base. “Putting industry priorities front and centre allowed us to focus on market opportunities.

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We have balanced the needs to put research teams together who are focused on outcomes for industry partners.” Science can lead the way to unlocking more productivity out of the Australian economy, and the Alertness CRC demonstrates the results achieved when research, industry, and funding are aligned to find solutions. The balance of light Consider Versalux Lighting Systems – an Australian company who, together with researchers at Monash University, investigated how exposure to blue light affects people’s sleep and internal body clocks. Blue light can come from electronic screens and energy efficient lighting, which people are increasingly exposed to while working night shifts. It suppresses melatonin secretion, the hormone that tells your body when it is time to sleep. Versalux has developed a range of lighting products – MelaGen™ – that use blue light strategically to boost productivity and alertness for those who need it, while cutting it out for those who need to sleep. In a hospital setting this may mean filtering out blue light for patients overnight, while keeping it present for the nursing staff who need to stay alert. It is a perfect demonstration of the work that the Alertness CRC facilitates: carving out a business opportunity that boosts productivity in the economy, and the health and wellbeing of Australians. Measuring fatigue The pressures of our 24-hour society have a major impact on fatigue in the workplace and in the community. The CRC has focused heavily on developing tools to better measure and predict alertness so we can better predict the risk of lapses in attention, and intervene before they affect productivity and safety. These tools include a blood test developed by Monash University and Metabolomics Australia, which measures certain metabolites that increase during sleeplessness. In addition, the Institute for Breathing and Sleep found that slow eye and eyelid movements, longer blink duration, and prolonged eye closure are reliable indicators of drowsiness and fatigue, and have developed a prototype device that can be used to test driver fatigue at the roadside. The Alertness CRC also worked with the

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

National Transport Commission to conduct a study of more than 300 heavy vehicle driver shifts both in-vehicle and in a laboratory, as well as 150,000 samples of retrospective data. This work was designed to directly inform a review of current government heavy vehicle regulation. Science-based scheduling CRC participant and Australian SME, Opturion, developed the AlertSafe® rostering software. It combines inputs including individual constraints/preferences alongside fatigue risks on individual, team and enterprise levels, to maximise worker health and safety and the productivity of the organisation. This is achieved by managing fatigue across roster building, roster management, human capital management, and time/attendance systems. Through a partnership with US-based Philips Respironics, the Alertness CRC also developed an individual shift work management tool that is driven by a sophisticated sleep wake management model. The algorithm is linked to a mobile application that gives individuals sleep/wake management recommendations, in the context of work and lifestyle constraints. It is not the only commercial outcome with Philips Respironics; together with the Alertness CRC, the company has released the SmartSleep Analyzer™ – an evidence-based sleep health assessment algorithm that diagnoses sleep complaints and recommends treatment options. The list of achievements for the Alertness CRC is long. A portfolio of AlertSafe® technologies and tools includes multiple applications, six major product concepts and over $90 million invested over the seven-year period. As Williams explains, “We have developed an enormous body of work across a range of alertness and sleep-related challenges. We will continue to work through the Sleep Health Foundation to promote the opportunities to improve the safety and productivity of our workplaces through better management of sleep health and alertness. Our academic and industry partners will maintain their commitment to collaborate and leverage the powerful research engine we have developed and the unique combination of expertise this powerful program has created.”

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WEAPONISING IMMUNITY From a humble start in a disused World War II army hut, QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute has grown to be a world leader in scientif ic research, developing ideas from the laboratory to the patient’s bedside.

nlike other bodies of knowledge, health and medical science research overwhelmingly benefits, extends, or improves lives when successfully commercialised, or put into practice. In Australia, QIMR Berghofer stands out for its multiple successes over its 75-year history. Its immunotherapy team is currently leading world-first clinical trials, treating patients with brain cancer, head and neck cancers, multiple sclerosis and post-organ transplant infections. This includes an international pedigree for research on skin cancer, malaria, and other mosquito-borne and infectious diseases, alongside its discovery of genetic risk factors associated with cancer, mental health and chronic disorders. However, discovering genetic risk factors is only the start. QIMR

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Berghofer is taking its knowledge to the next practical step: immunotherapy. Using healthy cells to treat sick cells Cancer touches the lives of most Australians. Chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery are the most common treatments but are invasive and not always successful. Immunotherapy instead uses the patient’s own immune system to fight the disease, either through cellular immunotherapies or immune checkpoint inhibitors. Cellular immunotherapies involve taking blood, either from the patient or a healthy donor, then increasing its white blood cell count, or modifying its killer T cells to target specific proteins on cancer cells, and then infusing this into the patient. Think

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Innovation in practice of white blood cells as your body’s security team: they recognise invaders, and destroy them. Killer T cells are a type of white blood cell that can specifically target cancers. QIMR Berghofer was the first medical institute in the world to use a T cell immunotherapy to treat an autoimmune disease, through a cellular therapy clinical trial treating multiple sclerosis. This was led by 20-year veteran Professor Rajiv Khanna AO, the founding coordinator of QIMR Berghofer’s Centre for Immunotherapy and Vaccine Development. Without any serious side effects, the trial group saw an improvement in symptoms, and quality of life. Khanna notes, “QIMR Berghofer has worldclass facilities to conduct ground-breaking translational research, which are only available in a few institutes around the world. It’s remarkable to have these facilities located in Brisbane.” QIMR Berghofer is also a leader in using genetically engineered immune cells in bone marrow transplantation to treat blood cancers, which affect more than 10,000 Australians every year. Bone marrow transplants can be the last hope for high-risk patients, but can cause a severe reaction if the body rejects them. QIMR Berghofer’s Dr Siok Tey led a clinical trial in which they inserted a “safety switch” gene into the immune cells that would kill them off if they caused complications. QIMR Berghofer’s Professor Mark Smyth

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

was one of the first researchers in the world to demonstrate the immune system reacts to the initiation, growth and spread of cancer. Things like sunlight, cigarette smoke and certain viruses can cause genetic changes in cells that lead to cancer. The immune system tries to detect and eliminate these rogue cells. However, they fight back by triggering immune checkpoints on killer T and natural killer (NK) cells, putting a break on the immune system. Immune checkpoint inhibitors that release this break offer a new immunotherapy for many cancers. Professor Smyth discovered a new immune checkpoint, a protein known as CD96, on the surface of the immune system’s T and NK cells. His team has shown that CD96 can be blocked, allowing immune killer cells to detect and destroy cancer cells. Early results show this immunotherapy inhibits the growth and spread of many cancers and might combine well with existing immunotherapies. Furthermore, QIMR Berghofer’s Dr Michele Teng has shown that it is more effective to have this immunotherapy before surgery rather than after. As is the case with most of our leading institutes, a number of QIMR Berghofer’s advances were only made possible with charitable funding. QIMR Berghofer is currently seeking donations from the public for its lifesaving work.

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HOW SCIENCE AND INNOVATION HAVE HELPED PROPEL AUSTRALIA’S WINE INDUSTRY Leading vintner and wine industry leader John Casella reflects on the history of science and innovation in our wine industry, often underappreciated. Applied innovation has been a key force in the sector’s success over recent decades. With research and insight provided by Master of Wine, and Casella collaborator, Nick Bulleid

nnovation and science have played an important role in the success of the Australian wine industry. Refrigerated fermentations, insulated wine tanks and inert gas cover, for instance, were introduced in the mid 1900s and have enabled Australian winemakers to prevent oxidation and retain flavours in their wines. By the 1970s, the adoption of greater clarification of white grape juices by cold settling, filtration or centrifugation reduced the incidence of coarse phenolics – most critically tannins – which otherwise would have rendered white wines more prone to oxidation and less delicacy. These developments and more sophisticated equipment were necessary to counter the hot regions where the renewed industry had largely found itself, a consequence of its history producing fortified wines that, for many decades, had dominated the wine market. Of great significance in this period was the release of the 1952 Penfolds Grange Hermitage. The wine’s creator, Max Schubert AM, took the revolutionary step of finishing the fermentation

of his red wine in barrels of new American oak. New oak was rarely used at this time other than to repair damaged barrels. While the target of early ridicule, bottle-age revealed the emergence of a classic that was to influence Australian winemaking. This would take on greater significance on global markets when in 1995 the influential American magazine Wine Spectator rated the 1990 vintage of Grange as its Wine of the Year. For around a century Australian varietal table wines were based on merely four grapes, Semillon, Riesling, Shiraz and Grenache, and even these were often labelled with generic names, such as “Claret”. Nevertheless, Chardonnay, Sauvignon blanc, Cabernet sauvignon and Pinot noir had been present since the 1800s but it took the growth of the local table wine market and the move to varietal labelling to bring these to the mainstream. Chardonnay is particularly noteworthy, with renowned UK commentators Jancis Robinson, Master of Wine, and Andrew Jefford declaring that many Australian Chardonnays were of French premier cru – first

Innovation in practice

growth – quality. Pinot noir, too, is internationally recognised, changing from the tough, leathery examples of early years in hot regions to the aromatic, finely balanced wines from cool regions. Three important examples highlight the variety of home-grown scientific research. Dr Pat Williams and colleagues at the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI) discovered in 1992 that some flavours in wines are present in grapes as flavourless precursors. This had great benefits in understanding the processes of primary fermentation which release these flavours. The spinning cone column, a process invented by CSIRO, has been used for making reduced or low alcohol wines, grape concentrates and for the removal of undesirable flavours. It is also used in many applications in the food and brewing industries. In 2001 Australian producers began a widespread move to screwcap closures to counter damage to bottled wine by cork taint and oxidation. While

this was strictly an adoption, ground-breaking research by the AWRI identified how screwcaps and other closures could be better managed for maximum consumer benefit. This research had worldwide ramifications. While new production techniques were bringing greater quality and consistency for the consumers’ wines, research, innovation and adoption moved from the winery into the vineyard. Agriculture and population growth have brought more pressure on water resources in our dry continent, prompting several approaches to mitigation. Regulated deficit irrigation (RDI) relies on accurate measurement of soil moisture, humidity and evaporation rate to restrict growth and crop, gaining quality while maintaining vine health. An alternative, partial rootzone drying (PRD) uses twin irrigation lines, one on each side of the vine row, supplying water or restricting it alternately to each side of the row. The roots on

the dry side send hormonal signals to the vine to restrict further growth, while those on the wet side nevertheless give the vines sufficient supply. Climate change has exacerbated the demands on water resources, with mitigation in vineyards following broadly two paths. Some companies are moving the centre of gravity of their vineyard holdings towards cooler regions such as Tasmania, adding to the shift in vineyard regions that began in the 1970s. The second option is to use the existing vineyard. Research is identifying the grape varieties that better suit warmer conditions when the time comes to replant. Alternatively, extensive studied are showing how existing vineyards can be better prepared for drier conditions with well-targeted irrigation and using new tools including apps on smart phones that can measure water or nutrient status and light penetration. This micro-sensing can also identify the extent of vineyard variability, which was studied on the macro scale by Rob Bramley and colleagues using remote sensing by satellites. This highlighted areas of higher or lower vigour and yield, allowing different sections of a vineyard to be managed and harvested either in different batches or on different dates, leading to higher quality. The warming climate has also increased the speed of ripening. Sugar levels, however, tend to race ahead of flavours and tannins, so that winemakers find they need to delay until grapes are fully ripe. This leads firstly to increasing alcohol levels but also, with increased heat, grapes are ripening earlier and in warmer months, exacerbating the problem. Brilliant research by Victor Sadras and colleagues at SARDI found that hotter weather decoupled the onset of sugar and phenolic development forcing the latter to lag. This showed sound physiological evidence for what winemakers had been struggling with. Growing concern for the environment by the public and the wine industry has concentrated effort on reduced inputs and sustainability. Changes include reducing fuel use in vineyards by grazing sheep during vine dormancy; using mulches to reduce evaporation, vine stress and herbicide use, retaining moisture and using less fuel for irrigation; mulching prunings to retain organic material and carbon; and using composts, including composted grape marc. Nitrous oxide, a strong greenhouse gas, is released from soils, but changing fertiliser practice in vineyards is reducing its emissions. Research was boosted by the formation of the

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Wine Innovation Cluster (WIC) in 2008. Based at the Waite Institute in Adelaide, this is a group of universities, national and state research organisations providing synergy on many projects. Some have been completed while others are continuing, including identifying clones for climate change and grapevine rootstocks to reduce environmental stress; developing irrigation strategies to combat dry winters; and understanding fungicide resistance in viticulture. Another project within the WIC is defining the regional variability and uniqueness of Australian Shiraz. Research to practice, a strong part of the Australian wine industry, is continuing to bring results to industry through seminars, workshops and published technical papers. Winemaking continues to focus in research, notably sequencing the DNA of yeast and malolactic bacteria strains to improve microbial performance and make sounder, more flavoursome wines; the identification of rotundone, the compound responsible for the black pepper aroma and flavour in wine, and its importance in Australian Shiraz wines; and understanding and avoiding “brett”, an unattractive horse-stable or medicinal plaster taint in wine which is disliked by consumers. And the consumer is the most important person to please. Like wine production, wine itself complex, but many wine lovers look for just simple enjoyment. It was satisfying this need that challenged me. Casella needed to escape the crowded market, make our own rules and create a brand that had breathing space to grow. Our way to differentiate was to make a wine that wasn’t traditional, but was good fun and easy to drink. Within 14 years we had a top-selling brand in Australia and took [yellow tail] to 51% of Australia’s share in the US market. We’re now successful in Asia too. Other market opportunities are being explored. The country’s winegrowing regions are increasing in number, bringing more cellar doors to please visitors and increasing the diversity of our regional offerings, particularly on-premise. Australia has also further diversified its varietal mix, most importantly with vermentino, pinot gris/grigio, prosecco, viognier, sangiovese, tempranillo, petit verdot and nebbiolo. Ultimately, research alone is not enough. Disseminating the findings to vineyard and winery is essential as is the need, even the challenge and courage, to the meet consumers’ expectations.

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LIFE-CHANGING INNOVATION, AT HOME AND ABROAD Icon Group is working at the vanguard of the healthcare sector to improve the quality of life and treatment outcomes of people with cancer – wherever they are.

nnovative organisations identify areas where “the way things are done” could be improved, and then, by improving them, create a better status quo for everyone. A model case is Icon Group, which is changing the face of cancer care both in Australia and, increasingly, overseas – and improving countless lives in the process. The Brisbane-headquartered Group was established in 2015, via the consolidation of several organisations that had amassed deep experience in the cancer care space over several decades. With sure-handed CEO Mark Middleton at the helm, it has risen quickly to its current position as Australia’s largest provider of dedicated cancer care services. The organisation is animated by a simple utilitarian proposition: that people, no matter where they live, should have access to world-class cancer care when they need it. To that end, Icon’s core competency is creating integrated, state-of-the-art cancer care centres that offer patients bespoke, end-to-end cancer treatment – all under the one roof. The Group currently operates 47 such centres across Australia, New Zealand, and Asia, and more are in development as it steadily expands its footprint domestically and abroad. Icon caters to the full range of patients’ needs, giving access to multidisciplinary cancer specialists; health screening, radiation oncology, haematology, and infusion services; and chemotherapy compounding and pharmacy services. The Group also administers extensive research, training and education programs, including Australia’s largest cancer clinical trials program. Icon’s operational model is powered by a highly interconnected global network of clinical leaders and specialists – and, crucially, the efficient sharing of knowledge across this network.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

By leveraging clinical talent across the network and virtually applying it in regional, remote, and overseas locations where it is hard to attract specialist skills, the Group ensures patients get the benefit of “the best eyes” planning and virtually assisting in their treatment – and that patients receive the same high-level care whether they are in regional China or, say, Sydney. It also means Icon staff are continually upskilled by “the best of the best” in cancer care. This model has helped Icon to excel at addressing unmet needs. Many of its domestic cancer centres are in regional communities – Warrnambool, Mackay, and Toowoomba, for instance – where the demand for cancer care has historically exceeded the local supply of the relevant services. Icon’s egalitarian approach has improved the quality of life and treatment outcomes of rural and regional patients who had previously been forced to invest significant time, money, and energy into travelling to and from metropolitan centres to access the care they needed. The Toowoomba centre, for example, has saved over 51 million kilometres in travel for patients who had formerly been accessing care in Brisbane, a 300-kilometre round trip away. Icon has found great success in exporting its proven model overseas – in particular to Asia, where the incidence of cancer is rising along with an ageing population. It currently operates nine cancer care centres in Singapore, along with three in Hong Kong, one in New Zealand, and four in Mainland China, and it has built fruitful partnerships with local organisations in Vietnam. The organisation is well positioned to ramp up its overseas operations further. Innovation provides the greatest social value when it addresses problems that affect society in general – and so the realisation of Icon Group’s vision of broad geographic access to best-in-class cancer care is an unequivocal good-news story.

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AUSTRALIAN PEDIGREE, ASIAN REACH Intellectual property firm Spruson & Ferguson is one of Australia’s oldest companies, with a rich history following its founding in 1887 by Wilfred Spruson. Today, it is an IP powerhouse in the AsiaPacific, with its hub model allowing the company to file patents and trade marks across the region.

eing one of the oldest IP firms on the planet brings recognisable benefits: pedigree that comes from longevity and trust that comes from delivering consistently over time. When your business is over 120 years old, with clients that have stayed on for 100 years, it is more than a company, it is closer to an institution. Boasting over 400 employees, and 120 IP professionals with expertise in their industries, Spruson & Ferguson services over 25 countries across nine offices, and filed one of Australia’s most famous patents: CSIRO’s WLAN breakthrough for WiFi. Thinking ahead Being at the forefront of Australian ingenuity, and coming into contact with novel technologies and processes every day, makes a company think internally about how it can improve its service model and delivery. For Spruson & Ferguson, this has meant innovating its business model, taking into account the rise and future growth of Asia. When Singapore adopted its Patent Act three decades ago, Spruson & Ferguson made the decision to open up its first overseas office and has since built a network of colleagues and offices based in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore. This allows the company to offer a unique service model through which customers can file patents and trade marks in multiple countries, dealing with only one office, one representative, and as little as one email. For clients based in IP powerhouses like the US and Germany, having a single Australian representative operating in an Asia-friendly time-zone,

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achieves significant savings. This leverages the shared business culture between the US and Australia, with many of Spruson & Ferguson’s American clients seeking comfort in the familiarity and level of customer service that the Australian firm brings. Benefits for companies large and small For large multinationals, the ability to file patents and trade marks in multiple jurisdictions through one Australian office offers a clear benefit. But what about smaller start-ups, which are on the edge of disrupting entire industries? When clients’ cash flow and funding is an issue, Spruson & Ferguson is able to negotiate with its Asian partners for special fee arrangements. Given that they work under the same banner, it is far simpler than the process of negotiating a discount with a competing company. This allows companies to build from one base and expand. Leading food processing and packaging solutions provider tna has been with Spruson & Ferguson for close to 40 years, since its founding. From a single patented invention written on a coaster in 1985, it is now a certified-multinational, with manufacturing centres across Australia, Asia, the USA and Europe. Holding hundreds of patents, enforced around the globe, it employs over 500 people, across 30 offices, and has installed 14,000 systems worldwide. It all started from a single patent registered with Spruson & Ferguson.

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FINDING THE FLOW: COLLABORATING TO SECURE WATER The battle for sustainability will be won or lost in cities, which are home to a majority of the world’s population. In Australia, the driest continent on the planet supporting life, there is no more valuable resource than water. The CRC for Water Sensitive Cities operates from a simple assumption: the way we manage and plan urban water influences almost every aspect of our environment, and quality of life.

ow do you transform cities, towns, and communities, and ensure scientific measures make a positive impact? The Water Sensitive Cities Cooperative Research Centre (CRCWSC) has made a splash both domestically and internationally for its collaboration-focused approach. The CRC’s research demonstrates that Australian cities and towns need to develop a different approach and break from tradition to accommodate a growing population and brace for increasing impacts of climate change. The country will need to embrace integration, decentralisation, and innovation to secure water for its people and ecosystems. Towns around the nation remain chronically vulnerable to an uncertain climatic future, with both extreme floods and droughts to consider. The problems will not be solved with a one-sizefits-all approach, nor by spending our way out of it with isolated projects. The CRCWSC calls for an embrace of all water as precious resources, including rainwater, stormwater, groundwater, desalinated and recycled wastewater, and building the infrastructure needed to

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

integrate these water sources to be utilised on a fit-for-purpose basis. In so doing, flood hazard reduction, protection of the ecological health of the water environment, and creating healthy liveable landscapes are complementary outcomes to securing a reliable water supply to support a growing population. Both the built and natural environments need to be managed for the best, most sustainable results, alongside engaging and empowering communities to transition to a new, more sustainable and resilient paradigm. This is what it means to live in a truly Water Sensitive City. But transformation is never a simple process: previous aspirational approaches to water management have been left at the wayside following a lack of proof-of-concept, static institutions, and a failure of parties to accept a collective ownership of the shared risks and benefits associated with significant change across both public and private stakeholders. The CRCWSC has been breaking through the inertia with a three-pronged approach: Research, Synthesise, and Influence. First, undertaking

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world-class inter-disciplinary research, then synthesising the research outputs across multiple disciplines to deliver cohesive, place-based solutions. Then, the CRC influences policies and practice to upscale water sensitive practices. In the past eight years the CRCWSC has directed over $43m in cash and a further $50m in in-kind, into urban water research and development, leading to more than 1,500 IP assets; assisted 80 organisations across the public, private, and community sector; published close to 1,500 guidelines, factsheets, case studies, and technical papers, and delivered $7.3m in commercial income while building pathways to market for SMEs. Significantly, the CRCWSC has supported policy reform and high-level strategy development in New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria, and Western Australia, and in a number of cities internationally, bringing lasting, legislated change. The work the CRC has completed will have countless benefits to society, while generating a return on investment. Using the Commonwealth Impact Tool, a February 2019 calculation on the value of the CRC’s first four programs, shows that an expenditure of $99m (cash and in-kind) resulted in $600m in anticipated benefits, a benefit/cost ratio of 6.18. This is even before the proofs-of-concept are mainstreamed and upscaled. Excellence in research is demonstrated by the CRCWSC work published in prestigious journals such as Nature and Science. Professor Zhigao Yuan was awarded the Clunes Ross Medal in 2015, also being named for the Australian Laureate Fellowship in 2017, and received an Order of Australia award in 2019. The CEO of the CRC, Tony Wong, took home the IWA Global Water Award in 2018. Innovation in action The success of the CRCWSC is best measured in its extensive influence on government and corporate policies and the millions of dollars in urban development projects. Throughout its first six years, the CRCWSC has continually ensured that research outputs and insights are translated, synthesised and adapted to meet industry challenges. In the last two years, the CRC has pivoted to applications of its research and synthesis. Consider the Aquarevo case study: a water sensitive housing development in Lyndhurst, Melbourne. After a former wastewater treatment

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plant was decommissioned on the site the owners of the utility, South East Water, worked alongside the CRC and Villawood Properties to develop a water-sensitive precinct. Some 460 residential homes across 42 hectares were planned at the precinct level, allowing for the use of on-site treated stormwater, and wastewater in homes. The results? An expected saving of potable (drinkable) water use by 70 per cent, compared to a new home. The wider community benefits from a reduction in the water footprint, while the home owners achieve significant savings on their water bills over time. The advantages of water planning go beyond conservation, and add to the character and prestige of the community. The stormwater is also routed to wetlands and water bodies in the neighbouring estates. Through planning and landscaping, many properties now boast waterfront views, increasing their value on the market. As a measure of its market success, the first land release sold out within a day. Typically, selling 44 lots would take three months. The solution goes beyond the original problem: the framework of water sensitive cities considers the environment as a whole. Water management can become a showpiece for a community, not just a need to be filled. Transforming cities Perth is a city toiling under the stress of a changing climate, with an expected population of 3.5 million by 2050. From 420 billion litres of water running into dams annually in the 1970s, it now gets 25 billion. The decline of rainfall has also reduced groundwater levels by 1.8m since 1988. Without urgently addressing the problem, Perth would become unsustainable. The CRCWSC drove the development of the Perth Water Sensitive Transition Network, providing a framework for delivering, monitoring, and reviewing the process. This is the strength of the CRC: providing sound research, including case studies and results of state-of-the-art pilot programs, to provide a roadmap to achieving Perth’s goals. Perth uses the CRCWSC benchmarking tool to measure its progress, and has formalised a “Waterwise” approach to water management, the state’s take on Water Sensitive Cities planning. International success The CRC has been active in Asia, with pilot programs across China, India, many of the

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countries engaged through the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and the International Water Association. Working together with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trading (DFAT), the CRC is completing water sensitive designs for the new capital city of Amaravati, and redesigning the city of Vijayawada. This in turn has created opportunities for Australian SMEs associated with the CRC. In China, water sensitive cities are called "sponge" cities. Kunshan, a city in Jiangsu Province, has worked extensively with the CRCWSC, with more than 30 projects completed. For the CRC, it has been an opportunity to prove solutions at scale, while Jiangsu benefits from best-in-the-world water management. So far, Kunshan has seen the first "Sponge City Brain" Internet of Things platform, which optimises water management and city planning objectives, and the Sponge City Innovation Park. Now, the CRC is validating real-time control of water cleansing, stormwater harvesting, and flood management, which will directly benefit Australian projects that integrate digital technology. The CRCWSC has also adapted its research and proofs-of-concept of water sensitive practice to support the revitalisation of informal settlements in the developing countries. In doing so it is tackling seemingly intractable water supply, sanitation and flood protection issues where centralised methods will take decades to deliver,

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

and decentralised approaches are piece-wise and narrow in their functions, thus not providing a holistic approach to the multi-facet water challenges affecting the health and wellbeing of these communities. The Revitalisation of Informal Settlements and its Environment (RISE) project is delivering proof-of-concept to radically transform how traditional essential water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services are provided to poor and vulnerable communities in the developing world.

Constructed wetland in Kunshan. Photo: Frank Chow

Long-term application While the CRCWSC is due to wrap up at the end of June 2021, it has already started planning for its next step: the Water Sensitive Cities Institute. The goal is to work with public- and private-sector partners and SMEs, delivering strategic, bespoke solutions using its research synthesis platform to fully harness the vast potential of the IPs developed. Mainstreaming and upscaling is its new trajectory, having now demonstrated proof-ofconcept and value proposition of the integrated approach to urban water management in urban environments. It is clear that the research, networks, and partnerships built in its 9-year term will reverberate around the globe. It will continue to positively affect the lives of millions, and will no doubt save communities from extinction as the effects of climate change ramp up.

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SAVING POWER, MONEY, AND THE PLANET The Low Carbon Living CRC was founded to reduce carbon emissions in Australia’s built environment. From a goal of 10Mt in emissions reductions, the CRC achieved 12.8Mt in savings by 2020, and is predicted to save 100Mt by 2027. The message from its research is clear: low carbon living provides benefits far beyond emissions reductions.

he Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that the population will rise from 25 million to 30 million by 2030, and potentially come close to 50 million by 2066. All of these people will need somewhere to live. Simultaneously, climate change demands that Australia rethinks the way it builds and designs infrastructure and housing to deal with increased heat, less rain, and new energy sources. The Low-Carbon Living CRC spent almost eight years, starting in 2012, and finishing in 2019, solving both problems simultaneously. It has helped the nation meet its international emissions reduction targets, driving new policies and building methods, and materials.

“There’s really no reason for future residential developments not to be zero-energy homes. More work is required to educate the public, the industry and governments to make this business as usual, not the current approach” – Dr. Deo Prasad, CEO, Low Carbon Living CRC

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Importantly, it has driven innovation in the sector through a creative approach to problem solving. The figures are astounding: an independent audit of the CRC’s work sees a $1.1bn economic benefit to Australia by 2021, a benefit/cost ratio of more than 9:1 from a total investment of $116m. With a founding goal of $684m in economic benefits, it has smashed its expectations. The Low Carbon Living CRC achieved this through pilot projects on net-zero emissions housing, databases of the carbon footprint of individual building materials, and resources for home owners on the benefits of renovation vs. demolition. Broadly, the CRC’s researched focused on three key areas: integrated building systems, low-carbon precincts, and engaged communities. Its research reverberated internationally, with a global network of partnerships, including the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden; Tongji University, China; and Concordia University, Canada. The CRC also developed the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Guidelines for Sustainable Cities and Communities and Greening Universities Toolkit, and is also the only Australian member of the Global Building and Construction Alliance. Scientia Professor Deo Prasad AO, the CEO of the CRCLCL, has highlighted the levels of measured success of this CRC, including the levels of

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evidence created to underpin policies and design and planning within the built environment. The success of this CRC has led to a much higher level of industry engagement on innovation in the built environment. To reduce carbon, you need a baseline measurement. The preparation and design stages are the phases with the greatest potential to influence sustainability, circularity and carbon emissions. This is why the Low Carbon Living CRC created the Integrated Carbon Metrics database, giving developers the carbon footprint of individual building materials. From there, the CRC developed its Embodied Carbon Explorer, and Precinct Carbon Assessment tools to help designers, manufacturers, planners and developers calculate embodied carbon emissions during the planning stage. Its evidence-based policy proposals call for a shift in the building codes to would unlock energy/power bill savings for homeowners, and ensure better long-term return on investment for developers. Reaching net-zero Australia, as a signatory to the Paris Agreement in 2015, is obligated to reach net-zero on emissions by the second half of the century. This means that the total amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere (through energy generation, fossil fuels, agriculture, land clearing, etc.) has to be balanced out with carbon being removed from the atmosphere. According to the CRC, the construction, operation and maintenance of Australian buildings accounts for 25% of Australia’s emissions. Net-zero homes and buildings, which do not add to Australia’s total carbon emissions, are a legal, mathematic, and economic necessity if we are to meet our goals. The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Energy Council has a plan in place for that crucial 25% of emissions: Trajectory for Low Energy Buildings, a national plan created with the findings of the CRC. Net-zero homes are already a reality. Relying on research from the CRC, SJD Homes built Australia’s first net-zero energy home, which uses a combination of insulation, double glazed windows, solar panels, LED lighting, draught proofing, and an optimised physical orientation to keep the house cool in summer but warm in winter. For consumers, there is the dual benefit of lower power bills and increased comfort throughout the

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

year. It is a clear-cut example of innovation in practice, a novel idea put into practice that the market is willing to pay for. Importantly, it is a demonstration of what is possible with the technology of today, not some future idealisation. The Low Carbon Concrete program has also delivered new building materials that Australia can manufacture and export globally, including produced a patent for a geopolymer concrete with 50% less emissions than its traditional counterpart. It is now being used in a world-first geopolymer trial on a Sydney road, following trials with Sydney Water and NSW Ports. It is helping businesses navigate a low-carbon focused economy, with research papers like preparing your business for the zero-carbon circular economy providing planning pathways for materials suppliers, trades and contractors, transport companies and architects, engineers and other design firms. Of course, replacing all of Australia’s buildings would result in a massive carbon emissions spike, which is why the CRC has resources to help homeowners and tradespeople to retrofit to existing stock. Building the future The doors of the CRC have now shut, but its work has laid the foundations upon which Australia’s low-carbon housing future will be built. Business, communities, and researchers will reap the benefits in the years to come, alongside individuals living in low-carbon housing. By all measures, the CRC has had an incredible impact, saving money, power, and the planet.

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AUSTRALIA’S GREATEST INNOVATION OPPORTUNITY: IT SOVEREIGNTY Fostering innovation in our local technology sector can only lead to a safer, stronger, more prosperous Australia.

Rupert Taylor-Price

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he COVID-19 pandemic has woken up Australians to our vulnerability as an island state that is heavily dependent on global supply chains for everything from video-conferencing capabilities to vaccines and personal protective equipment. We are in an excellent position to drive innovation and commercialisation of our domestic capability and uplift local industry, but urgent action is required across government investment, policy, legislation, and tax reform. We must better prepare ourselves for such macro events, be they future pandemics, geo-political warfare or the impact of climate change. Bolstering our local IT sector is critical not only for economic growth but also our national security. Cyber is the new frontier of warfare and Australia’s fleet is quite small compared to other countries. Imagine if foreign bad actors were to gain control of our power stations or aviation systems? It could make COVID-19 look quite trivial in comparison, and these are real and growing concerns.

A tremendous economic opportunity The technology sector is equivalent to Australia’s third biggest sector, just behind mining and banking, contributing $167bn to our GDP (around 8%). Jobs in the sector have grown twice as fast as average employment over the last decade, making tech a critical pillar of our economy. However, while Australia ranks well for technology ideation and adoption — for example, most Australian businesses now use cloud services such as Vault Cloud – we are seriously lagging behind when it comes to innovation and domestic production. A report by Accenture for the Tech Council of Australia into the economic contribution of Australia’s tech sector found that Australia ranked 36th out of 38 in the OECD for its ICT trade balance. We can certainly do much better. Historically, there has been a tendency to look overseas, even when the Australian solution is actually

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better. We don’t seem to embrace our local technology, despite the fact that our procurement arm is enormous, and this has stifled innovation. Government investment in the industry seriously lags behind other nations at only 8%, compared to over 80% in the US. The industry would like to see 30% as a minimum benchmark. Building Australia’s Silicon Valley We have all the right ingredients to be a global powerhouse when it comes to IT innovation – an advantageous geopolitical position, a well-educated and relatively affluent population, political stability, and a skilled and creative workforce. There is absolutely no reason why Australia shouldn’t have its own Silicon Valley, with all of the economic growth that would entail. Furthermore, it would secure our ability to attract the best international talent into the future, rather than risk losing our best people to overseas opportunities. A growing number of Australian companies have developed beyond the start-up phase to become internationally competitive while supporting economic growth and jobs at home. Among these success stories are well-known companies such as Atlassian and Afterpay and emerging firms such as Willow, Culture

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Amp and AgriDigital. Many more are waiting in the wings for their chance. The answer lies not in blocking global innovation and technology – such as in the case of Huawei – but in lifting up the capability of Australia by proactively addressing challenges. So, how do we do this? What’s required is leadership, capital, tax reform, legislative changes, policy making, and the proactive use of government buying power. We need to better balance the needs of our sovereign capability with leveraging the benefits of global innovation. While all these represent major challenges, bolstering innovation in the Australian technology sector is pure opportunity. It can only create a safer, more prosperous Australia that has greater domestic capability, more jobs, and a booming economy. Success follows success. Rupert Taylor-Price IS Founder and CEO of Vault Cloud. Founded in 2012, Vault Could is an Australian Signals Directorate certified cloud service provider to government agencies, supply chain and commercial enterprise.

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THREE CAMPUSES, A WORLD OF IMPACT Southern Cross University is driving insights across marine science, conservation, and the origin of the human species, from three uniquely-positioned campuses: Lismore, Gold Coast, and Coffs Harbour. Across NSW and Queensland, the regional university is f inding new solutions to complex problems.

olving global problems requires global collaboration, and best practice research in the regions where humans can gain high-levels of understanding of the natural environment. As explained by Professor Mary Spongberg, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Research, at Southern Cross University, “The wicked challenges facing our planet and our communities demand a different way of thinking. We should not shy away from the complexities of climate change, nor the challenges of environmental degradation and the impact human activity has on ecosystems. “Because there is hope. It is a hope inspired by the very real action of teams of researchers threading together a collective understanding that is making substantial contributions to saving the planet.”

Excellence in marine science For Southern Cross University, access and expertise in the Great Barrier Reef has enabled it to deploy underwater robots to deliver to millions of coral larvae. Led by SCU’s Professor Peter Harrison, the robot has been deployed to the Great Barrier Reef and on degraded reefs in the Philippines, in the pilot of a new technique to help restore and recover coral reefs. The Australian endangered White’s seahorse, also known as the Sydney seahorse, has seen population declines of up to 97% at sites in Port Stephens, with habitats spoiled by increasing number of boats mooring, and sand moving into the estuary. Southern Cross University’s David Harasti has been working alongside researchers from the University of Sydney, and University of Melbourne to build "seahorse hotels", temporary residences to

Project leader Professor Peter Harrison using a larval cloud to resettle coral. Photo Gary Cranitch

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Innovation in practice host them while natural habitats recovered. Inspired by discarded commercial fish traps that had become heavily covered in sponges and corals, the seahorse hotels became a hotbed of marine life, with the Sydney seahorse using them to hold off currents and waves. It also allowed the researchers to tag and trace the community, getting a better indication of numbers. Some seahorses even used them to breed, with 13 males living in the hotels found to be pregnant. Finding natural, renewable resources Marine molluscs and snails have long been used in traditional medicines. Southern Cross University’s Associate Professor Kirsten Benkendorff has been studying an Australian sea-snail, Dicathais orbita, also known as the common dog whelk, for its potential anti-inflammatory capabilities. In particular, Benkendorff has been examining its effects on acute lung inflammation, with better results than her team had. “These snail extracts – the brominated indoles – effectively inhibit all inflammation or signs of inflammation in this mouse model,” Benkendorff explains. “So this is really exciting for the potential development of a pharmaceutical, a new anti-inflammatory agent from the brominated indole or a potential nutraceutical from the snail itself. If we want to sustainably develop this snail as an anti-inflammatory nutraceutical we will need to look at aquaculture of the snail, but I think this holds really good potential for the development of a new, exciting Australian resource.” Unlocking the origins of humanity Southern Cross is at the forefront of research into the understanding of human evolution, including how homo sapiens overlapped with its cousins before becoming the eventual evolutionary winner. Southern Cross University’s Dr Renaud JoannesBoyau is part of an international team of scientists that has dated the skull of an early human found in Africa, potentially upending human evolution knowledge with their discovery. Joannes-Boyau’s research suggests that human evolution in Africa around 300,000 years ago was a much more complex process than first understood, with the co-existence of different human lineages. SCU was also involved in the dating of the earliest known skull of Homo erectus, the first of our ancestors to be nearly human-like in their anatomy and aspects of their behaviour. The new dating placed

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

homo erectus in existence 200,000 years earlier than previously understood. The Geoarchaeology and Archaeometry Research Group (GARG) at Southern Cross University was able to place the remains in a geochronological context, allowing them to understand the contemporaneity of the different species.

Renaud Joannes-Boyau

Regenerating healthy environments for communities Research, at its best, should give back to society. For Southern Cross, a deep commitment to the health of the Indo-Pacific region can be seen in its ongoing honeybee research project, led by Associate Professor David Lloyd and PhD researcher Cooper Schouten. Guided by the Bees for Sustainable Livelihoods (B4SL) research group, it supports profitable, productive and sustainable beekeeping for indigenous communities throughout the Indo-Pacific region. The B4SL group works to help reduce poverty among rural beekeepers and provides opportunities for marginalised groups, including women, to participate in and benefit from beekeeping activities. The four-year project, a partnership with key stakeholders from the beekeeping sectors in Fiji and Papua New Guinea, has support from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. It is a demonstration of how research with the right motivations can make a demonstrated positive impact. In Professor Spongberg’s words, “It is not abstract. It is right here, right now, working genuinely and in collaboration with people all over the world to solve the big problems facing us all. That is research at its best.”

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PAVING A BRIGHTER FUTURE Australia’s healthcare industry must continue to employ rapidly evolving technology and innovations in the pursuit of a world less burdened by cancer By Mark Middleton OAM By 2040 the number of new cancer diagnoses globally is expected to rise by 29.5 million annually, and cancer continues to be one of the leading causes of death worldwide.1 So how can we change this sobering statistic, and what does the future look like? Over the last few decades oncology has seen vast evolutions in the advancement of cancer treatment, many of which have been attributed to Australian researchers. In the early 1990s the clinical antibody Herceptin was developed from an international study involving Australian oncologists. Herceptin is now regarded as a revolutionary immunotherapy treatment for breast cancer. In 2006, an Australian research study led to the TGA approval of the HPV vaccine Gardasil, which provides protection against two types of HPV that cause 70 per cent of cervical cancers. Today, the national HPV vaccination program has seen a 77 per cent decrease in the number of women with HPV.2 Similarly, in the last decade the field of radiation therapy has progressed in leaps and bounds. 1982 saw the invention of Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT), a highly precise technique that delivers high doses of radiation precisely to cancer tumours. Taking this a step further in 1995, Stereotactic Radiation Therapy (SRT) was developed, shortening patient treatment regimens through the delivery of higher doses of radiation across one to five treatments. Patients diagnosed with multiple brain metastases are continuously seeing better quality of life through new evolutions in stereotactic radiosurgery. This technology is eliminating the severe side effects and often poor outcomes of whole-brain radiation, allowing clinicians to precisely target multiple tumours in the brain. Today, with this cutting-edge technology radiation oncologists are targeting as many as 20 metastases in one treatment plan and are continuing to see an

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increase in the total volume of tumour that can be treated at any one time, giving new hope to thousands of palliative patients. Most recently, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is allowing oncologists to adapt, replan, and optimise radiation delivery in real-time, accounting for daily changes in tumour shape and normal organ movements. This use of AI-based algorithms is revolutionising precision treatment and improving patient outcomes. These breakthroughs can’t happen without investment in clinical trials. Over the last four years the growth of clinical trials in Australia can be credited to high-quality research clinical practice guidelines, government investment in specialised infrastructure, streamlined regulatory and ethics approvals, and Research and Development (R&D) Tax Incentives.3 The R&D Tax Incentive is allowing companies to innovate and grow and has created a cost competitive environment positioning Australia as an attractive destination for clinical trials. It is these strong investments that will place Australia at the epicentre of future advancements in cancer treatment. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that we mustn’t stand still. We must continue to eliminate barriers through innovation and deployment of technology. The pandemic saw every industry adopting video conference calling and changing how we do business. Evolutions in technology are making healthcare more accessible, and the pandemic accelerated their utilisation. There has been a necessary increase in tele-health, tele-trials and video calls, alongside the use of wearables and virtual reality technology to provide ongoing clinical training, education and consultation in a closed-border world. So where to from here? The next step in oncology lies in focusing on the notion that we can potentially predict the future, modify molecular structures, and continuously

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Innovation in practice uncover the mysteries of genetics. Medical oncology is exploring targeted therapies such as immunotherapy to amplify the body’s immune response. CAR T-cell therapy is an emerging immunotherapy treatment that modifies a person’s T-cells to attack cancer cells. Currently being used on certain blood cancers, this treatment has the potential to be applied to other cancers. CAR-NK cell therapy is another promising cellular immunotherapy that teaches the body’s natural killer cells to find and target “invisible” cancer cells. The field of radiation oncology will only continue to thrive in a tech-focused future. The promising use of theranostics is seeing the implementation of radioactive drugs to identify tumours and deliver therapy directly in the tumour cells, limiting damage to surrounding healthy tissue and organs. The use of AI is in its infancy, but medical physicists and engineers are continuing to see benefits across industries and apply these within radiation technology. The machines are getting smarter, and clinicians are pushing the limits alongside these developments. Precision medicine is another emerging approach for several common diseases, including cancer. By focusing on genetics, environment, and the lifestyle of each individual patient, precision medicine uses genetic, genomic sequencing, and biomarker testing to enable better predictions of disease progression. This highly personalised approach to treatment can affect change across multiple common disorders, including heart disease; improve newborn screening; and even control infectious disease outbreaks, which are predicted to remain a part of the world we live in. However, as with all new discoveries, genetic testing needs funding. The global roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines proved that accelerated change is possible, but a successful future will require greater collaboration and investment. There needs to be more emphasis on public and private partnerships; investment in knowledge and resource sharing; and projects to accelerate breakthroughs. Governments and private sectors must work together to achieve greater access to world-class care, increase efficiencies, and foster multidisciplinary advancements in cancer treatment. Cancer rates are not

slowing down, so innovation needs to move forward. Funding research and multi-sectorial collaboration will allow us to fast-track the future far closer to tomorrow. Australia has been able to be at the forefront of healthcare through long-term public–private partnerships, a national healthcare insurance scheme, and strong primary healthcare networks – but we can’t rest on our laurels. If we are to be a world-leading nation that is known for healthcare innovation, then long-term investments must be signed. Today, what the world once thought impossible is now far closer to the reality of the future. Australia is a lucky country, well-resourced and well equipped to lead advancements in medicine. We have an opportunity to pave the way forward by investing in research, technology, and collaboration to make history and lessen the burden of cancer. References 1 International Agency for Research on Cancer. WHO Global Cancer Observatory. https://gco.iarc.fr/. Accessed 4 October 2021 2 Euro Surveill. 2018: 23(41): 1700737. doi: 10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2018.23.41.1700737 3 MTPConnect. Clinical Trials Sector Reports 2021. www.mtpconnect.org.au/reports/clinicaltrialsreports2021. Accessed 27 October 2021

Mark Middleton is the global Chief Executive Officer of Icon Group, one of Asia Pacific’s largest providers of cancer care, with a presence in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Vietnam, Mainland China, and Hong Kong.

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LA TROBE BUILDING THE UNIVERSITY CITY OF THE FUTURE Universities cannot simply adapt to shifting trends in industry and society. They need to aim larger, and set higher goals for what Australians can achieve.

rtificial intelligence, machine learning, and Industry 4.0 interconnectivity are upheaving entire industries by forcing the world to re-evaluate the nature of work. With this, the role of qualifications is changing, while the pace at which universities must develop and translate ideas to commercial outcomes is increasing exponentially. “There are new expectations of how we should contribute to the generation of economic activity and employment,” says John Dewar, ViceChancellor, La Trobe University. For graduates at La Trobe, employability is the University’s major focus. Digital technologies are rendering traditional approaches to qualifications and pedagogy obsolete, while the shelf life of skills and qualifications acquired through formal education at university is quickly reducing. For La Trobe, the solution is to create a lifelong relationship with its students by offering

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on-demand learning in multiple modes called "study-flex" learning. This allows students to top up skills during their working life, and to study when and how it suits them. “Stackable short courses and micro-credentials are becoming a big part of our business,” says Dewar. By involving employers in course design, La Trobe is more confident that its students are developing the skills and attributes sought in the workplace. The University is also aware that some students will want to create their own business rather than work for others after graduation. La Trobe has established an Accelerator Program to help interested students develop entrepreneurial skills and bring their start-up ideas to life. La Trobe calls its Career Ready program industry-leading, and gives students workplace skills to supplement classroom learning so that they are work-ready when they graduate.

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Innovation in practice The program also gives students real-life work experience at the University in its CoLab workshops, which provides an opportunity for operational areas of the University to work in partnership with students to generate new ideas, and solutions to issues at La Trobe. Shaping research Having intelligent, forward thinking people is not enough in a modern university. You need to build a sophisticated research infrastructure to develop university research into commercial outcomes much more quickly than was possible in the past. It is this thinking that underpins the current transformation process at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, as it embarks on a 10-year, $5bn campus transformation to become the "University City of the Future". The transformation of La Trobe’s 235-hectare North Melbourne campus will create 20,000 new jobs and $3.5 billion in gross regional product (GRP) over the next decade. To turn its Melbourne campus "inside out" it is inviting both industry and the community in, with the incorporation of a Research and Innovation Precinct to stimulate new ideas and translate them into genuine commercial outcomes. With the new precinct La Trobe is playing to its strengths in three key research spaces: agribioscience, health, and digital technologies including cybersecurity. The Research and Innovation Precinct complements the well-established, cutting-edge research centres at La Trobe, such as the Centre for Technology Infusion. Over the last 10 years the Centre has completed some of Melbourne’s most ambitious programs to directly benefit Victorians. This includes the technology build for Australia’s first zero emission house, the world’s largest technology trials for rail crossing safety, developing AI-based signal technology for Melbourne’s iconic tram network, and work on Victoria’s first fully autonomous shuttle bus deployment. Importantly, the team delivers field ready technology projects for government and industry, helping to immediately address the challenges that arise from increasing urbanisation, and Melbourne’s rapidly increasing population. In response to these and other trends, La Trobe University is evolving into a new type of

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institution different to the traditional university that existed in the last century. “Our new philosophy is to be outward looking, deeply connected to industry and the communities around us, and committed to serving the needs of our students. This new approach means we are being innovative on multiple levels. For example, we are redeveloping our campus so that we can interact with industry and the surrounding community in new ways,” explains Dewar. “We are changing how we develop and deliver teaching and learning for students. And we are running programs that simply were not offered by universities in the past, such as our accelerator program to support start-up ideas. Finally, we are being innovative in the way we do research.” The University’s accelerator program is fostering start-up businesses and entrepreneurial ideas through co-working spaces, professional services, specialised workshops, mentoring, and pitching and networking opportunities for 70 teams in two years. The new accelerator program helps to engage students with industry, making a huge difference to La Trobe’s capacity to help creative people develop their ideas and launch commercial start-ups. Between its employability focus for graduates, and new approach to formalising innovation through commercialisation, La Trobe is positioning itself to be the university of the future, not only responding to trends, but anticipating and planning ahead.

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DISRUPTING HEALTHCARE: INTEGRATION OF MEDICINAL CANNABIS

Professor Ian Brighthope built an integrative medicine empire, and has now created a global cannabis company, pushing to be at the forefront of the Australian export market.

edicinal cannabis is on a stratospheric rise globally. For most Western nations, legalisation is now a question of when, and not if. In Australia, the ACT has already decriminalised the growing, possession, and recreational use of the plant. Considering Australia’s ideal climate and skilled agricultural workforce to grow cannabis, there is a massive market opportunity that awaits domestically, and as an export product. For Prof. Ian Brighthope, the founder of Nutrition Care Pharmaceuticals, Biocentres Clinics and the post-graduate Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental

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Medicine, the real opportunity lies in cannabis as a complementary medicine. A local industry could tap into massive Asian market, which has a huge appetite for herbal remedies. Few in the complementary and nutritional medicine space have the credentials of Ian Brighthope. Nutrition Care was the first Australian exporter of health care products to China, and also exports to Indonesia, Thailand, Poland, Singapore, Malaysia and New Zealand. Having sold the company to Chinese investors, though staying on the board, Dr. Brighthope has moved on to his next endeavour: Entoura, a medicinal cannabis company.

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Innovation in practice Ancient cannabis, modern morality Medicinal cannabis has a long history, particularly in ancient China. The Chinese word for cannabis, Ma, is the oldest known word for the hemp plant in human language. It was used freely as a herbal remedy and anaesthetic, while some historians have claimed that it was also used for its mind-altering and spiritual properties. Similar stories and findings have been unearthed across the ancient histories of Greece, Egypt, India, and the Netherlands. While there had been scattered prohibitions of the plant throughout the past 500 years of human history, it was not until the US crusade against the plant in 1937, banning it in an attempt to demonise the recent influx of Mexican immigrants, that the tide truly turned. The Mexican people used the plant culturally to relax, and while Americans were often prescribed cannabis tinctures from their pharmacists, the word ‘marihuana’, as the Mexican people called it, was foreign to them. When the ban was ruled unconstitutional, US President Richard "War on Drugs" Nixon made it illegal under the Controlled Substances Act, putting it in the most restrictive category, Schedule I. This was supposed to be a placeholder while a specifically convened panel made a recommendation. When the Shafer Commission delivered its verdict, that cannabis should be decriminalised, the Nixon administration ignored it. Now, the US is finally moving back in the other direction, with 47 states having made the plant legal for medicinal purposes, 11 legalising it for recreational purposes, 15 others decriminalising it. As a result, the US is in a significantly advantageous position to export both plants and medicines around the world, whereas Australian companies face massive legal and logistical challenges. As Dr. Brighthope explains, “If the Government wants Australia to be the biggest and best in this space, we are 20 years behind the rest of the world and remain severely obstucted by government.”

As he explains, “When China opens, we will have a ready made market, as we are the only market in the region that can do so. China respects Australian products as we have extremely rigorous standards for herbal medicine manufacturing.” Combined with Brighthope’s knowledge and passion for nutritional and integrative medicine, the company is set to take a highly-focused approach to the plant. While approving products for pharmaceutical use is an extremely long, expensive process, selling herbal remedies is much simpler. By incorporating the best parts of the scientific method, while removing the rigidity of drug development, Entoura aims to get products and services to market faster, while constantly researching and improving it. As Dr. Brighthope explains, “Medicinal cannabis will positively affect many industries, the health of humanity, and the planet. It is a potential sink for carbon, as a rapidly growing crop that can be used to produce bricks, roads and many other materials that are stronger and less combustible than plastics. The products are Generally Regarded as Environmentally Friendly (GRAF). “Cannabis is far safer than opioids, paracetamol, aspirin, and is a safer anti-inflammatory than cortisone. It is also not addictive. “There is a very wide range of medications

Making a mark Dr. Brighthope’s new company, Entoura, is set to leverage his long history and connections in the region to break into the market, with Nutrition Care Pharmaceuticals having been selling medicines to China for decades.

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being replaced by cannabis. In Canada there are good records for the reduction in the use of alcohol, tobacco, and many pharmaceuticals. “It is a real disrupter, especially in areas such as chronic degenerative disorders, where medicine is a failure.

“The future of healthcare and disease management is at the molecular level, with preventive, predictive and personalised healthcare.” “I have seen a lot of change in healthcare practices over 40+ years as a healthcare professional. I am hopeful that younger generations can adopt some of the positive changes occuring in terms of nutrition, exercise, and looking after themselves and the planet.” Cannabis is a complicated plant, with over 400 compounds. The most well known are THC, for its psychoactive effects, and CBD, for its anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving effects. Dr. Brighthope says Entoura will be looking at every aspect: from the genetics of the seed, to the genetics of the patient, and the patient’s disease. “This means examining their specific cancer cells, which can have many different

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individual genotypes. Quantum computers will be required to look at the relationship of the cancer genes, their microenvironment and the epigenetic influence of the expression of the genes of the plant. This is truly highly personalised medicine. “Natural therapists, and traditional Chinese practitioners have been doing this for eons. We want to take into account the energetic effects of the plant’s components, including all the cannabinoids, terpenes, soil composition and light … everything involved.” Cannabinoids provide most of the health benefits, but terpenes and flavonoids help enhance those therapeutic effects, as well as providing individual health benefits. Terpenes have been shown to have analgesic or anti-inflammatory effects, while flavonoids also benefit the immune system. Entoura says the total composition of the cannabis plant is also responsible for what has been called the "entourage" effect, whereby the individual components work together to enhance and multiply their respective benefits. From Brighthope’s perspective, “We do not need to reinvent the wheel. Pharmacologists will extract single molecules and expect them to do the same as a complex medicine with multiple molecules. This doesn’t work well. We need to apply the best clinical science of herbal medicine. “We cannot wait for decades until the researchers prove everything we may ideally want to know about the plant. There is an abundance of high quality evidence to support the safe and effective use of medicinal cannabis now. We cannot leave people to suffer and die prematurely when millions around the world are using it. “It is one of the safest herbal medicines, and something which doesn’t cause addiction, violent behaviour or death.” As an integrative medicine practitioner, Brighthope believes that diet, exercise, and looking after yourself are equally important as medicinal products when treating patients. In his words, “Complementary medicine doesn’t mean very much to me – ‘complementary’ comes from the word ‘complete’, and if you don’t complete your treatments with a patient then you’re practising in a negligent fashion. ‘Integrative’ means integrating all healthcare practices and medical practices

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that are proven, safe, effective, inexpensive and ethical. And that means using not only Western medicine and the usual medications, but also incorporating nutritional medicine, scientifically-based herbal medicine, physical medicine and physiotherapy, chiropractic therapy and acupuncture, amongst other modalities. “We incorporated all of this into our practice, and the best word to describe it was ‘integrative’. I had a business called BioCenters Integrative Medicine, and when the College of Nutritional Medicine had issues with regulators, we set up the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association (AIMA) in the mid 1990’s. Subsequent to the formation of AIMA, the term ‘integrative medicine’ went global. “Germany has been writing on the importance of exercise for cancer patients in years: shorter hospital stays, better blood results, and improvement with patients’ wellbeing. “This has been known since ancient times; if someone was sick they were given certain exercises to do. There is nothing new under the stars, but researchers are now ‘discovering’ these things all the time. It is confirming what has already been known.” Calling for change For innovators and entrepreneurs like Ian Brighthope, Australia’s laws are behind the zeitgeist, and stifling the potential of individuals, and industry. Australian politicians call for innovation but actively suppress any realistic innovation. This occurs frequently if it is not in the pecuniary interests of the mainstream. “According to one of my colleagues, it is easier to buy a gun in Australia than it is to get legal cannabis. He has sarcastically noted that the levels of security applied to medicinal cannabis access is greater than the levels applied to prisoners breaking out of jail.” It will take a monumental, global shift to force the politicians in Australia to move faster to open up access to medicinal cannabis, according to Brighthope. If the United Nations were to de-schedule it as a prohibited narcotic, we may see CBD -only products on Australian shelves within two years, and THC containing compounds within the next five years. The commercialisation process is most advanced in Victoria, where there has been a hard push for policy change.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

There are five million Australians suffering from chronic pain. Brighthope notes that many are addicted to opiates that result in addiction, invalidism and premature death. The other issue will be de-criminalising the driving of motorcars for patients using medically prescribed cannabis. “Medicinal cannabis is the solution for most of these people, who, by the way, don’t have a voice,” says Brighthope. “How can you be prescribed a medicine, then be convicted and lose your license for taking it? Taking medication should not be considered a crime, especially when there are so many prescribed medicines, such as the opiates and tranquillisers that cause driving impairment.” Undoubtedly, without a viable Australian market, it will be overseas patients who stand to benefit from Australian knowledge and ingenuity.

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GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE UNDERPINS HEALTHY SOILS Science and innovation continues to play an important role in ensuring Australian farmers are internationally competitive, whilst managing their soil resource for long term sustainable productivity. By Dr Michael Crawford

oil is responsible for more than 95% of the food we eat and it underpins Australia's important agricultural sector. Soil provides us with a range of ecosystem services including water filtration and storage, carbon sequestration, nutrient recycling and a habitat for organisms, big and small. In many cultures, including Australia’s Aboriginal culture, soil also provides a rich cultural and social heritage. However, whilst soil is a resource that provides us with many benefits – economic, environmental and social – it is often unrecognised. Australia’s soil resource is also facing many challenges including erosion, compaction, pollution, acidification, waterlogging, loss of soil biodiversity and salinity. These all negatively affect the soil’s ability to support plant life and grow productive crops and pastures. Inherent soil constraints such as sodicity, low fertility, various toxicities, high density, hydrophobicity and low biological activity often present themselves and create challenges. This is particularly the case in Australia, where by world standards, our soil resource is comparatively poor in its productive potential. Many aspects of soil management have been explored in various branches of soil science for years and are well known. The fundamental concepts of soil physics, soil chemistry and soil biology have been known for decades and underpin good soil management by farmers and by other land managers. Driven perhaps by necessity, Australia’s soil scientists have long

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been recognised internationally as leaders in the field, and have consistently published at a rate higher than the global average. Nonetheless, Australia’s future soil-related challenges will require new breakthroughs and innovations in science, and this will require broad collaboration and the contribution of discipline expertise from well beyond the normal soil science disciplines. The Cooperative Research Centre for HighPerformance Soils (the Soil CRC) was established in 2017 with funding from the Australian Government and in-kind and cash contributions from its 40 participant organisations. It is the largest collaborative soil research effort in Australia’s history. Over its 10 year funding period, and hopefully beyond, the Soil CRC is undertaking ambitious soil-related research to give farmers the tools and knowledge they need to improve their soil management and increase their productivity and profitability. A distinctive feature of the Soil CRC is the way it brings together different scientific disciplines across research institutions from across Australia. Progress in soil research will come from the various sub-disciplines of soil science working together with analytical chemists, material scientists, molecular microbiologists, data analysts, electrical engineers, biogeochemists and information scientists. The interactions of these various disciplines ensure that the latest breakthroughs in other

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disciplines are soon adapted and applied. The Soil CRC is distinctive in the way farmer groups work closely together with scientists in developing proposals, implementing research projects, interpreting results and developing conclusions to ensure that all research is enduser focussed, ensuring that the best science is put in the hands of farmers as soon as possible, and in a manner that is relevant to their needs. As in all areas of endeavour, the ability to measure and monitor performance accurately, rapidly and cheaply is highly valued. Farmers and their advisors typically measure soil fertility by taking a soil sample, sending it to the laboratory and waiting one to two weeks for a result. Whilst this approach will still be the gold standard, Soil CRC research is looking to develop cheaper methods that can give a result in close to real-time and at a price that makes it economically viable. For instance, researchers at the University of Newcastle and the University of Tasmania are collaborating to develop an affordable fieldbased tool kit for farmers to quickly determine soil chemical properties on their farms. They are developing a disposable and affordable ‘lab-on-a-chip’ device that can simultaneously determine multiple key soil chemical indicators in the field, using colourimetric methods in a 3D printed microfluidic device. By using this device, soil solutions can be measured directly in the field with a mobile phone, without the sample preparations required of other on-site analysis methods. At the University of Southern Queensland, scientists are developing hand-held sensor technology that can be used in the field to enable a detailed measurement of soil nutrient status and supply. The sensor technology and algorithms being developed in this research will enable farmers to monitor the distribution of nutrients through the soil profile — enabling a step-change in soil management practices for both profitability and environmental sustainability. Farmers often intuitively assess soil by smell. The fingerprint of gases emitted from soil may be able to reveal the composition and activity of the microbial community that relates

to soil health. Currently, there are no fieldbased sensors to diagnose soil health using aromas. An ‘electronic nose’ offers a solution to this problem. The prototype eNose is being co-developed by scientists at the University of Tasmania and farmers to ensure that the technology is useful, usable and provides relevant information that is easily interpreted and understood by farmers themselves. Being able to do this will mean that farmers can make the right management decisions to improve crop performance and yield, especially in poor soils. The eNose prototype has been developed and is currently being tested with farmers, with more testing to come. Other areas of research in the Soil CRC include the development of new products for soil fertility and function, using nanotechnology and organic chemistry to develop viable alternatives to conventional soil fertilisers and amendments, and the development of farming practices and systems that can reliably sequester soil carbon and build soil organic matter to help offset greenhouse gas emissions and improve soil health. Science and innovation continue to play an important role in ensuring Australian farmers are internationally competitive, whilst managing their soil resource for long term sustainable productivity, and the Soil CRC is making a critical contribution to this outcome.

Dr. Michael Crawford is the CEO of the Soil Cooperative Research Centre

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INTERVIEW WITH HCF CEO SHEENA JACK Our world is beset by growing health needs, rising costs, and blessed by rapid advances in treatment. What role can a health insurance company play in this increasingly complex landscape? In a revealing interview with Ms. Sheena Jack, CEO of the largest NFP Private Health Insurer, HCF, our editors discovered a surprising amount of social and technical innovation. HCF is a not for profit competing with other large, for profit private health funds. What differences, if any, come about due to your NFP status? SJ: Having no shareholders enables us to have an undivided commitment to our members’ health. We believe, that the private health system is a very important, a really vital part of Australia’s health care system as a whole. Being a NFP inevitably has a positive Influence on our decision making. We take a member first mindset in all our decisions and we can take a long term view on investment, well beyond the next market reporting cycle. This sets us apart from our for profit competitors. How does the Australian Health system stand internationally? SJ: Extremely well. According to a number of metrics we would be number one globally. Such as? SJ: There are various ways to measure this. Specific studies and measures which analyse patient outcomes show Australia rates toward or at the top. Health care cost as a percentage of GDP is also competitive. That pushes the question toward a look at the high costs in, say the U.S. which are widely commented upon, often in the negative.

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SJ: It is very complex to easily compare one system with another. A better way to look at this is through the Australian example. We have the benefit of a mixed system, public and private, which is reasonably well balanced. The US is significantly private and the UK predominately public. Can you be more specific, please? SJ: Yes, both the predominantly private and predominately public systems of the US and the UK have well published issues, arguably much greater issues than Australia. Our balance of public and private really encourages the system as a whole to leverage the best of both worlds and the outcomes demonstrate this. Take elective surgery as one case. Two thirds of elective surgery is performed in the private system. Elective surgery procedures are really important to improve quality of life. Ready access to elective procedures is a good measure of universal health. And therefore, HCF is an enabler of access to desirable but not critically needed surgery? SJ: Yes, but “elective” can be a bit of a misnomer. These procedures – joint replacements, cataracts - can really impact a person’s quality of life. How critical is being able to mobilise without pain or see clearly? Access to these procedures, as well as really great mental health

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facilities and preventative diagnostic procedures through the private system ultimately improves the health and access to health services for the whole nation by taking this demand pressure off the public systems. What role, if any do you have in influencing government policy? SJ: Maintaining the sustainability of the private health care system and it’s role in symbiosis with the public system is critical. A big part of this is ensuring costs are at their most efficient and health outcomes are at their best. Our health system is large and complex. The private system plays a critical role in taking pressure off the public system. Government policy is central to the way the whole system functions and hence working with Government to help support and inform the best outcomes is very important. How active are you in research in things like patient care and outcomes? SJ: We are particularly proud of a research partnership with the University of Sydney led by Professor Elshaug, on studying what is known as “low value care". This is defined as any intervention where clinical evidence suggests there is very little benefit to patients, or the risk of harm exceeds the benefit. This kind of research is valuable for both the private and public health sector and we’re very proud of the impact this research has had. In particular this research was an important input into the recent Medicare Benefits Schedule review. This sounds like a form of ongoing research which must lead to improvements, or innovation. And we understand you have a more direct form of spurring innovation in the med tech field. SJ: Yes we started HCF Catalyst, the first corporate backed health tech accelerator 5 years ago. And how does this work? SJ: We have an application process which is rigorous and it attracts some brilliant people. Successful participants take part in a 12 week program that really helps these entrepreneurs acquire the skills needed to build their ideas into real businesses that solve real problems in the health system. So essentially you are doing first stage, pre-funding incubation?

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

SJ: Yes, that would be a reasonable summation – but it goes further as we can provide broader support. When the products eventually commercialize we are able to recommend or publicize them to our loyal customer base of 1.6 million, and we believe that is an important boost for many young companies that are looking to disrupt the health system to drive better outcomes. In some cases at least that might be more beneficial than just giving cash. SJ: Yes that’s right Another activity of HCF which is of interest is your Research foundation. SJ: This was founded in 2000, and it is devoted to health services research. Each year we attract hundreds of applicants and narrow these down to a handful of the highest quality to whom we issue $1-2M in funding in total. Topics vary from year to year but we’re really interested in research that is translatable and can be used practically in the health care setting. Treatment for back pain, for example has received a lot of attention recently and we have funded research in this area. We want to apply the learnings to broad settings and ensure the findings are disseminated to the health care professionals where it will make the most difference, regardless of public or private, member or non-member. We’re interested in working towards better health outcomes for all Australians.

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A BETTER, FAIRER NORMAL The Australian Technology Network of Universities (ATN) brings together five of the most innovative and enterprising universities in Australia: University of Technology Sydney, RMIT University, University of South Australia, Deakin University and Curtin University. By Luke Sheehy

here were signs of disruption in Australia’s economy well before the word "pandemic" entered our lexicon. Industries like manufacturing on which our economy was once built were dying. New industries were springing up. Large swathes of the workforce had embraced digital and flexible work in a new "gig economy". Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups developed new products or services, delivering jobs in new industries we had never imagined. Our economic and social structures were changing at a pace unparalleled in our lifetimes. Even pre-pandemic there was genuine concern that our economy lacked productivity and market diversification, posing challenges for policy makers and education providers. Amid all this rapid change, universities were working hard to drive a stronger future economy. The ATN universities – Curtin University, Deakin University, RMIT University, the University of South Australia and the University of Technology Sydney – led the way in collaborating with the outside world to help to underpin this new economy. Our researchers and academics were mentoring this next generation of industry leaders. We were connecting entrepreneurs to important players in big business who provide the necessary capital to make these businesses grow and create new jobs. Then the pandemic struck. Universities adapted quickly to the pandemic’s

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challenges. ATN’s five universities developed 31 new, six-month online short courses across seven disciplines, all in just a few short weeks in March and April 2020. Students and staff were moved off-campus, and our researchers turned their focus to tackling the effects of the coronavirus in shaping a new world. Not only did we need to adapt to these challenges ourselves, we need to support others to do the same. The economic reality Australia faces at the start of the recovery, such as high levels of unemployment and under-employment and high levels of government debt, all point to the same place: innovative and collaborative solutions through partnerships between governments, business and educators. Universities stand ready for the task of revitalising Australia’s economy. We recognise that, if anything, the recovery from this pandemic will amplify and accelerate the change Australia has already been adapting to. In both the pandemic response and broader economic shifts, research will drive economic and social revitalisation, creating new ideas, products, jobs, and sometimes whole new industries. Our research profiled in this supplement focusses squarely on supporting Australia – and the globe – to develop solutions for a fairer "new normal". We want to see a world where everyone gets a fair go, where work is secure and meaningful, where technology enables opportunity rather than takes it away, and where industry drives a more productive, prosperous society. Our research will help achieve that better, fairer normal.

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AUTISM ACADEMY CREATING HIGH-VALUE EMPLOYMENT Curtin University is developing employment opportunities for people living with autism, creating industry linkages for pathways to employment, empowering job-ready trainees, and harnessing the talents of people living with autism to address technology industry challenges.

esearch shows fewer than one third of autistic adults have paid employment, with more than half never having held a paid position. Autism affects around one in every 100 people. In 2016, Professor Tele Tan from Curtin University’s School of Civil and Mechanical Engineering launched the Autism Academy for Software Quality Assurance (AASQA). It is a flagship outreach program of the Curtin Autism Research Group (CARG), whose research facilitates independence and autonomy for people on the autism spectrum. Professor Tan and colleagues recognised that many young people with autism have potential skills in the challenging field of software analysis. AASQA is an initiative that combines a software inspector training academy with a social enterprise that creates employment opportunities in this area of growing market demand. In 2018, AASQA was further complemented by the addition of a Neurodiversity Hub in collaboration with global technology services company, DXC. This program creates more work experience opportunities for neurodiverse students and links them into DXC’s global network of neurodiverse-friendly employers, including SAP, Westpac, ANZ Bank and the Australian Government. By the end of 2019, the Academy had trained 250 people, all of whom moved into high-value jobs. Another 180 are enrolled for 2020, growing to 400 in 2021. In addition, 36 trainees

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

transitioned into tertiary education, 12 have completed their studies and another 36 have participated in high-value internships. AASQA has broadened its reach, developing strong partnerships with commercial, state and non-profit entities, including BHP, BankWest, Planit Testing, rerisk Pty Ltd, the WA Department of Training and Workforce Development and the Autism Association of WA. This model harnesses the talents of people with autism for the collective benefit of individuals, industry and the wider community. It creates pathways into valued, long term employment for those who may otherwise struggle to achieve the dignity of independence and work.

AASQA Founder and Director Professor Tele Tan (L) receives award from Business/Higher Education Round Table President Susan Bannigan (R)

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HELPING TO MANAGE $100BN OF INFRASTRUCTURE

The Central Asset Management System (CAMS) developed by RMIT’s School of Engineering in collaboration with 15 local councils delivers a scientific solution that saves costs and provides safer, more resilient infrastructure.

ustralia’s infrastructure assets are valued at around $100 billion. The management of these assets, including public buildings, roads, and bridges, is a costly but essential financial and safety obligation for local councils, government agencies, engineering companies and infrastructure operators. RMIT’s Central Asset Management System (CAMS) helps local councils collaborate with researchers, while providing industry experience for university students. Drawing on her research interest in the lifespan of public buildings, Professor of Civil Engineering, Sujeeva Setunge, initially partnered with six local councils and the Municipal Association of Victoria in an ARC Linkage project aimed at developing a new building asset management system. The partners took a whole-of-lifecycle approach to building management, incorporating social and environmental considerations, deterioration forecasting, best practice management practices and real-world building inspection datasets to develop an asset management model. RMIT’s Melbourne city campus was used as a living lab

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to test the model. Once it was proven, the team worked with a software development company to translate the model into user friendly software that was initially rolled out to four councils. RMIT student teams gained valuable practical industry experience using CAMS to perform asset inspections for councils, and their findings contributed to further enhancements of CAMS. The result was a tablet app that enabled council building inspectors to collect data more easily and accurately, upload it on location, and dispense with paper records. It optimises decision making for asset managers regarding risk, maintenance and budget forecasting. CAMS has been adopted by ten Victorian councils, who report an increase in building user satisfaction of 60–90% and a 30–40% reduction in the cost of on-site inspections. Partners now include Melbourne Water and VicRoads. New opportunities are under development to assess the condition of roads, bridges and stormwater infrastructure, as well as an Asian Development Bank-funded project in Sri Lanka.

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SA FIRE MAPPING TECH SAVING LIVES The University of South Australia’s (UniSA) Innovation and Collaboration Centre was crucial to commercialising and developing fire mapping tech FireFlight, enabling it to reach the world.

ireFlight is an airborne fire mapping system that provides real-time fire maps, and post-fire hotspot maps to fire managers, fire agencies and other relevant stakeholders. Developed by volunteer firefighter Dr Paul Dare, the software was commercialised through the University of South Australia. In January 2020 FireFlight mapping was used during the Kangaroo Island fires to help the relief and recovery teams from the Australian army and other fire agencies to plan and execute their operations. FireFlight’s aerial mapping system was deployed in a single-engine Piper aircraft flown over the fires at 3000m. Using specialist thermal imaging cameras, high-precision GPS and advanced data processing software, FireFlight’s fire mapping system provided realtime maps of wildfires as well as details of post-fire hotspots, underpinning a strategic and efficient plan to fight the fires and aid recovery. Founder and CEO of FireFlight, Dr Paul Dare, himself a volunteer firefighter, pilot and aerial imaging specialist, began developing the fire mapping technology 15 years ago. He credits the Venture Catalyst Space program at UniSA’s Innovation and Collaboration Centre (ICC) with enabling him to commercialise it. The tailored six-month incubator program gave FireFlight access to funding, training and workshops, one-on-one mentorship, a modern co-working space and cutting-edge world class technical resources and tools. FireFlight’s collaboration with the ICC is a prime example of the role universities play in rapidly accelerating exceptional ideas or

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

projects onto the world stage to solve complex global problems. The FireFlight system is now achieving its global potential. The systems are shipped from Australia and operated by local pilots in fire danger regions worldwide. Cheap to deploy, it is provided to end users as a service, leaving these emergency responders to focus on fighting fires, while FireFlight operators provide real-time fire intelligence. This is more cost effective than the traditional use of large aircraft assets and world demand is growing in line with increasingly intense wildfires across the globe.

Aerial view of the Sherwood fire through FireFlight

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SMART ROBOTS TAKE ON THE RISK A collaboration between the NSW Roads and Maritime Services and the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) has led to the development of infrastructure scanning and repairing robots that maintain the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

teel bridges and infrastructure are maintained through abrasive blasting to remove rust and scale, a market estimated to be worth $A1.2 billion globally. However, it is physically demanding and dangerous work, with deadly risks to worker safety from falls and exposure to dust and lead-based particulates. In 2006 the NSW Roads and Maritime Services and UTS collaborated to design robotic solutions to the Sydney Harbour Bridge’s annual A$18 million maintenance bill. Over six years, UTS researchers developed two autonomous

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grit-blasting robots, purpose-built to perform condition assessments on the steel girder bridge and to grit blast old paint and corrosion in preparation for repainting and repairs. Led by Professor Dikai Lui, the UTS Centre for Autonomous Systems created a new field of infrastructure robotics, which has huge potential to shape the future of global infrastructure maintenance by delivering productivity and safety gains, with cost savings. In 2013 UTS and the NSW Government established SABRE Autonomous Solutions to commercialise the technology and create production quality systems suited to a range of tasks. The partners, now also including Burwell Technologies, have developed an intelligent climbing robot known as CROC, inspired by the movement of an inchworm. The machine can climb vertical steel walls, avoid obstacles and pivot through confined spaces inside bridges and other steel structures such as ship hulls and oil rigs. Along the way, it can collect and record inspection data and compare it with data from previous visits. The team has also perfected autonomous underwater robots for cleaning and inspection of bridge pylons, replacing a system that required potentially risky manual inspections. With more than 270,000 steel bridges in the US, Europe and Japan alone and enormous potential in the oil and gas sector, SABRE has attracted investment from Shell’s Gamechanger program. It will soon establish a US presence as part of global expansion.

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HIGH-TECH TEXTILES HeiQ Australia uses innovative materials with extraordinary functionality to develop smarter products and f ight COV ID-19, with partner-centric researchers who take a nimble approach to meet industry needs.

eiQ Australia is focused on the research, development, and commercialisation of novel materials for modifying the properties of textiles. Its parent company, HeiQ Materials AG, was co-founded in Switzerland in 2005 by Australian scientist, Dr Murray Height. HeiQ supplies textile makers with specialised treatments that are applied onto the surface of textiles during their manufacture. Its unique products add functionality, such as adaptive cooling, odour control, antimicrobial properties and moisture management, to everyday apparel produced by over 200 global textile brands. Attracted by Deakin University’s novel technology to produce short polymer fibres that offer a unique platform for functionalising surfaces, Dr Height established HeiQ Australia, which became one of the first tenants in ManuFutures in 2018. The company works seamlessly with a cross-disciplinary team of researchers led by Associate Professor Alessandra Sutti at Deakin’s Institute for Frontier Materials, including researchers from the ARC Industrial Transformation Research Hub for Future Fibres. A partner-centric approach that meets HeiQ’s industry requirements and tight commercial time frames has seen the team successfully develop and share new technologies such as HeiQ Real Silk, with HeiQ’s global operations in Switzerland, the US, China and Portugal. Developed over six years, this symbiotic relationship between Deakin researchers and HeiQ has fostered a nimble research structure that has allowed the company and the research to pivot during the COVID-19 pandemic. Together, the team is helping to further advance the HeiQ Viroblock textile treatment technology. When the pandemic began, HeiQ expedited production of HeiQ Viroblock, which combines silver

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

antimicrobial technology and vesicle technology to rapidly destroy enveloped viruses, including coronaviruses. Testing indicates that HeiQ Viroblock achieves a virus reduction of over 99.9% relative to the control. Since March 2020, this product is being used to treat face masks with anti-viral and anti-bacterial properties, and is manufactured in Europe, the US and Victoria for global markets. The team is working fast to extend the capabilities and applications of HeiQ Viroblock. The development of textiles and surfaces that are virus and bacteria-resistant is one aspect of helping to address the current pandemic emergency, as well as future pandemic threats. HeiQ Australia and Deakin researchers are also continuing to collaborate on new starting mate-

rials for novel textile treatments to improve sustainability, including waste materials from agricultural or food processing and recycled textiles. Future product applications and topics being explored include home furnishings, uniforms, and scope for increased Australian-based manufacturing capability.

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Collaborating for greater goals: HeiQ Australia with industry partners

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THE FUTURE OF FOOD OFFWORLD AND ON Agricultural research supports long-term space habitation possibilities, while accelerating sustainable food production research for Earth.

By Professor Matthew Gilliham

n the next five years there will be a new space station orbiting the moon, by the end of the decade a crewed lunar base will have been established, and by 2040 humans will have stepped onto the surface of Mars. These are the aspirations of Earth’s space agencies and, whilst the propulsion systems to reach our off-World targets are well-advanced, critical technologies that will ultimately enable remote human habitation lag far in development. In particular, the challenge of providing the adequate and varied diet to ensure healthy space explorers is one of the greatest obstacles for mission planners. This is because mass and volume restrictions prevent enough food being taken on the voyage to Mars, and resource resupply from Earth is not a viable option; furthermore, even if enough food could be sent in advance, food stability of essential vitamins and nutrients for longer periods of time is not yet achievable. Space and Mars missions provide the ultimate microcosm environment in which we will need to achieve sustainable food in a closed loop system. Everything must be supplied from the outside making waste a luxury that cannot be afforded. As such, the lens of space provides the ideal laboratory in which we can innovate to provide new opportunities for achieving sustainability on Earth. It would be remiss to not deploy the enabling technology

needed to achieve this for space, here on Earth, long before humans step onto Mars surface 20 plus years from now. In light of this, the goal of supporting long-term space habitation is an opportunity to accelerate the research needed to reach sustainability on Earth. There is a strong rationale for plants to be the ultimate base material for food production in space due to their autotrophic nature – requiring carbon dioxide, light, water and a minimal set of nutrients to produce nutrients and oxygen to support human life. In return, humans use the carbon fixed by plants as energy and complete the cycle by respiring carbon dioxide. Additionally, the intricate metabolism of plants can provide a platform to produce complex flavour molecules, nutrients, and even biomaterials such as plastics. The innovation required to provide the nutrition and biomaterials to sustain long-term space habitation, and to deploy this technology here on Earth to improve sustainability, is an area where Australia can claim to have the critical mass that would be capable of providing global leadership. The research needed to sustain human life in space will produce nutrient rich, highly efficient plants, nutritionally fortified plant-based foods and space-ready functional materials and pharmaceuticals – all readily translatable to Earth markets. Developments in modern gene technology and zero-waste plant production in controlled environments will also result. These breakthroughs in the emergent field of plant processing would firmly establish Australian competitiveness as a leader in high-value sustainable agricultural production, as well as enabling the moonshot of the 21st Century.

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Innovation in practice

SOCIAL INNOVATION AND ECONOMIC SUCCESS

he use of the word ‘innovation’ in literature has been increasing exponentially since the 1960s, coinciding squarely with the invention and commercialisation of the metal-oxide-silicon transistor in Northern California. We have seen such incredible advancements in technology since then, that many children now have more sophisticated devices in their pockets than some of the world’s brightest engineers could even dream of at the time. While technological innovation is important, if we are to continue building upon our prosperous and equitable way of life, Australian businesses must also look for other ways to innovate that can more directly benefit society at large. We can call this ‘social innovation’. Businesses in Australia should look for pathways to provide access to opportunities which enable social innovation and provide greater access to the benefits of technological innovation. One overlooked, and often excluded, group in society is those on the autism spectrum. Despite their unique strengths, almost one in three autistic people are unemployed – this is triple the rate of people with other disabilities, and nearly six times higher than the rest of the population. With this in mind, the DXC Dandelion Program was launched in 2018, designed to give neurodiverse individuals an opportunity to build valuable information technology skills and careers. The Dandelion Program hopes to reach this large population of potential employees and harness their skills, while ensuring a holistic employment experience that prepares them for the future. Specifically, it focuses on providing tertiary students on the autism spectrum work experience to improve their employability, and help develop their self-advocacy and self-determination, as well as social and technical skills. Of course, this is not the only form of social innovation organisations are embracing today. Supply Nation is another fine example of a nonprofit initiative that was founded to connect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses with government agencies and corporations. The organisation operates a program which certifies

businesses that are at least 51% owned and controlled by Indigenous Australians, with businesses undergoing regular auditing for any changes in company structure. In 2017, Supply Nation worked with local Indigenous businesses to develop ‘JumpStart’, an app designed to connect indigenous businesses with skilled volunteers and address the lack of access to professional networks and mentorship that Indigenous businesses disproportionately face. Upon launching, the app was successfully signed up 90 Indigenous businesses, and has been gradually rolled out to more than 450 of Supply Nation’s certified Indigenous businesses around the country. Another group of individuals needing greater support are returning defence personnel, who may find it challenging to transition back to civilian life. Solider On is a non-profit organisation founded to help ease that transition, by connecting Australian Defence Force veterans with health and wellbeing services, learning and reskilling initiatives and employment opportunities. At the time of writing, more than 170 companies around Australia have pledged to support Soldier On with opportunities where veterans can apply skills they have developed in their defence careers within the workplace. Corporations around Australia have initiated activities aimed at helping society for some time now, but many of these are considered extra-curricular and are viewed as an investment in goodwill alone. The next step will be for corporate Australia to develop dedicated programs that can connect underserved people and communities with opportunities that have historically been inaccessible. Such initiatives will help Australian businesses get more deeply and meaningfully involved in their communities, and Federal and State Governments across the nation have certainly been supportive of such programs. Social innovation has the potential to become an even greater contributor to Australia’s future growth and success. Those in a position to create new opportunities for all Australians benefits people, communities, society, and the nation, and doing so is also good for business.

By Seelan Nayagam

Seelan Nayagam is Managing Director, Asia Pacific, DXC Technology State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

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THE INNOVATION ENGINE OF THE NATION Innovation can come through collaboration, finding the unknown spaces between people and organisations with different sets of skills, knowledge, and thinking. Top-level direction can create these bonds, focusing resources and energy where the economy needs them most. The Department of Industry, Science, Energy, and Resources drives economic growth, helping to create the jobs and opportunities of the future.

s the Australian economy realises and expands its role in a globally integrated marketplace, the private sector is increasingly embracing a digital and technology driven economy. Where once Australia suffered the tyranny of distance in its export market, this means little in a digital world. A fast-moving technological and global regulatory landscape means the bonds between business, entrepreneurs, employees, the science community, government, regulators, and international partners have never been more important. This is how living standards are increased and growth achieved. It is where innovation occurs, the spaces between disciplines, knowledge bases, and demand. Driving this on a national scale is the Department of Industry, Science, Energy, and Resources (DISER). Though two additional Government bodies and portfolios have been rolled into DISER, its three purposes remain unchanged. First, supporting science and commercialisation, by helping the development and uptake of new ideas. Second, DISER aims to grow business investment and capability; through the development of a diversified economic base able to

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identify new markets and adapt to emerging opportunities. The third key plank supports numbers one and two: simplify doing business. The goal here is to facilitate competitiveness (and innovation) by making it easier for businesses to interact with government, reducing the cost of doing business in Australia. On a broad level, the government has invested over $11.9bn to help drive innovation in Australian businesses. In the past financial year, some 12,393 organisations registered with DISER, 87 per cent of which were small to medium sized companies. DISER’s Entrepreneurs Programme helps approximately 3,400 businesses to grow, innovate and commercialise every year. Through tailored advice, capability development, networking services, and matching grants, there is both a financial and a technical skills investment that directly boosts the economy. The key objective is for more accessibility and streamlining, allowing more businesses to access support through DISER. One early example is IP Australia’s recent administration platform upgrade, which has simplified trademark applications, better enabling companies to monetise and protect their innovation investments.

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While the rules of the free market call for the survival of the fittest, DISER plays a role in ensuring all companies have the resources and information needed to be potential disruptors. AusIndustry provides Australian businesses with advice allowing them to innovate, grow, and compete, connecting them to specific government assistance programs. Centre for Defence Industry Capability (CDIC) The CDIC supports Australian businesses in the defence industry. It operates as part of a push to promote Australia as a major exporter of defence systems, with $200bn being invested. The CDIC provides advisory and facilitation services, matched grants and industry resources to Australian businesses with fewer than 200 employees who want to enter or grow in the defence market. Adelaide-based medical laser company Norseld worked with CDIC to grow their capabilities and be part of the Joint Strike Fighter F-35 program. After designing an industrial laser that produces a diamond-like carbon film, Norseld realised their technology could be useful in the defence market. The CDIC worked with Norseld, helping to align its capability with a contractor’s requirements. After accessing a Capability Improvement Grant, Norseld is now part of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter supply chain.

is Voxon Photonics, an Adelaide start-up that was inspired by the hologram chess match in the original Star Wars. Inventors Will Tamblyn and Gavin Smith are now selling a world-first 3D volumetric display. The Voxon VX1 allows images and animations to be viewed in 3D without goggles or glasses. Beyond replicating what they first saw on screen, their 3D display can seamlessly transition between two to three dimensional images, with potential applications across engineering, architecture, medical imaging, communication, museums, big data visualisation, bio-chemistry, and gaming. Venture capital programs Commercialising innovation can be high risk. Venture capital programs help mitigate this risk by giving early-stage companies access to highly-experienced people, in addition to vital funding. Through DISER, the Australian Government has a range of venture capital programs designed to attract domestic and foreign

Connecting companies: Norseld moves into the defence industry with CDIC support

Research & Development (R&D) Tax Incentive The R&D Tax Incentive is the Government’s single largest investment in business innovation and is a vital part of the effort to support growth and new opportunities. The economic benefit to Australia from investment in R&D leads to increased employment and export income, higher paying jobs and greater knowledge transfers. Over 13,000 businesses in nearly every sector of the economy benefit annually from the program and the support it provides in offsetting some of the costs of undertaking R&D. Innovative businesses are more profitable, productive and competitive. R&D underpins innovation, and can help business develop new products and services, improve processes and efficiency, and solve problems. The gap between science fiction, science, and market reality can be bridged with R&D support. A great example of this through DISER

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“The R&D Tax Incentive really put us on the runway. It has allowed us to bring our product to market faster and push the limit of our technology. It’s given us more money to spend on R&D – on continuous improvement and continuous drive for innovation. We have more R&D to do and much of that will happen in Australia.”

Taking the guesswork out: An app created by CRC for Sheep Industry Innovation gives breeding information for farmers

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investment. This investment is vital to help Australian businesses commercialise technologies, moving beyond R&D into commercialisation, and the realm of true innovation. DISER supports private venture capital fund managers and domestic and foreign investors in choosing to invest in eligible businesses through four tax concession programs: Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnerships, Venture Capital Limited Partnerships, Australian Venture Capital Fund of Funds and Eligible Venture Capital Investors. These programs provide flow-through tax incentives to venture capital funds and investors. Benefits may include tax exemptions on an investor’s share of a fund’s income and tax gains.

Venture Capital Limited Partnerships (VCLPs) are pooled funds of over $10 million that provide eligible foreign investors with an exemption from capital gains tax on their share of a fund’s returns from eligible venture capital investments. Early Stage Venture Capital Limited Partnerships (ESVCLPs) are also pooled funds in which fund managers raise between $10 and $200 million of private capital to invest in eligible early stage venture capital investments. Eligible domestic and foreign investors receive tax exemptions on their share of income and gains from eligible early stage venture capital investments, and from disposing of those investments. Investors also receive a non-refundable carry forward tax offset of up to 10 per cent of the value of their eligible contributions. For people wishing to invest in a portfolio of registered venture capital partnerships, there is the Australian Venture Capital Fund of Funds (AFOFs), which encourages investment in a portfolio of ESVCLPs and VCLPs. Investors benefit from the AFOF’s flow-through tax status as the AFOF itself is not taxed. AFOFs also provide diversification and flexibility for the fund and its investors. Through this model, investors, innovators, and emerging industries all stand to benefit. The Government also invests alongside fund managers in co-investment programs, including the Biomedical Translation Fund

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(BTF). This joint Australian Government and private sector fund of $500 million provides companies with venture capital through three private sector fund managers to develop biomedical discoveries into tangible products, services and outcomes. The role of DISER is significant from both ends of venture capital: from helping to stimulate venture capital investment, to guiding early stage companies seeking to grow through an injection of capital and support. CRC Programs The Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) Program is a competitive, merit-based grants program, supporting industry-driven and multi-year research collaborations. By bringing together researchers and industry, there is a focus on identifying and solving problems, guided by market gaps that lend themselves to commercialisation. Beyond creating a direct economic boost, CRCs also

produce graduates with hands-on industry experience. This is an investment in the future: creating a highly-skilled workforce. As at the end of March 2020, there were 28 Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) in operation, with just over $1bn in Commonwealth funding allocated to them over the course of their life spans. You can read about the outcomes of several of those programs in this book, including the Low-Carbon Living CRC, Water Sensitive Cities CRC, and the CRC for Alertness, Safety, and Productivity. What makes the CRCs so valuable to the Australian economy and research community is the diverse range of experts they can bring together to solve single issues. The Fight Food Waste CRC includes 43 industry partners, eight universities, and eight state agencies, working together to achieve a meaningful result over a 10-year term. Unconsumed food wastes money, productivity, energy and finite resources. It is particularly unjustifiable

Inspired by Star Wars: Voxon Photonics created a holograph that can be viewed without additional equipment

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when there are Australians experiencing food insecurity. CRC Projects (CRC-Ps) are short-term industry-led collaborative research projects designed to benefit small and medium enterprises in particular. CRC-Ps are smaller collaborations than CRCs, operating on shorter project timelines (up to three years) and smaller budgets. As at the end of March 2020, there were 111 CRC-Ps operating with over $240 million in funding committed to them. Industry Growth Centres (IGCs) The people best equipped to help advance

an industry are its leaders. Only when experience is matched with government support, industry collaboration, and a focus on future opportunities can a sector achieve cultural change. This is the thinking that underpins the government’s six IGCs operating across manufacturing, cyber security, food and agribusiness, medicine, mining, and energy resources. Broadly, they share the same goals: increasing collaboration and commercialisation, improving international opportunities and market access, building up workforce skillsets, and identifying opportunities for regulatory reform.

Creating stretchable sensors to monitor senior’s sleep health: Dr Sumeet Walia, Professor Sharath Sriram and Professor Madhu Bhaskaran from RMIT University

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Targeting growth businesses: Howard Leibman, co-founder of the Microequities Venture Capital Fund •

•

The Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre (AMGC) supports projects to commercialise innovation in manufacturing. It helps companies move their technology from a proof of concept, to proven to work under expected conditions, and now has 1000 members. The Australian Cyber Security Growth Network was established in 2017 to support the development of the local cyber security sector, enhancing future economic growth in a digitally enabled global economy. The Food Innovation Australia Ltd (FIAL) works to grow the share of Australian food in the global marketplace. It shares knowledge with industry through market reports, technical insights, case studies, and celebrating local innovations. FIAL holds events and workshops to grow the skillsets of all within the industry. The Medical Technologies and Pharmaceuticals Growth Centre (MTPConnect) is establishing Australia as a regional hub in the sector. Through the $32m Researcher Exchange and Development within Industry (REDI) initiative, MTPConnect will be driving workforce training across researchers,

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

clinicians, industry, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem. • The Mining Equipment, Technology and Services Growth Centre (METS Ignited) helps commercialise emerging innovations by Australian companies in the sector. Mining is becoming an increasingly digital, automated sector, improving safety for workers and profits for businesses. • National Energy Resources Australia (NERA) helps to accelerate energy production and extraction technologies, from Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), of which Australia is a top three exporter globally, to new fuel sources. There is no government body that drives the nation’s innovation engine to the same capacity as DISER. Between its CRC programs, CDIC, Industry Growth Centres, and the R&D Tax Incentive, DISER directly supports nation-building. By creating the environments, support networks and collaboration opportunities that innovation thrives on, and aligning resources to industries and markets with growth potential, DISER ensures a growing economy, with future-proof jobs for Australians.

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OUR FUTURE FOOD SECURITY: TIME TO TAKE CONTROL Technological advancements for the space industry have delivered wider innovative solutions to humanity for nearly 75 years. Now Controlled Environment Agriculture is handing Australia a socio-economic opportunity on a platter. By Nadun Hennayaka

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pace missions have long required innovative solutions that have proven valuable here on Earth too e.g., microwave and digital cameras. Now, thanks to a SpaceX-led renaissance of human-crewed space flight, dropping launch costs by 95 per cent, fresh-food solutions are required for deep space missions to fuel long-haul missions. Perhaps serendipitous, this coincides with an emerging urgent issue here on Earth: widespread reduced food security due to climate change. Australia is not immune to this impending danger, as recent and ongoing events around the country continue to highlight our vulnerability. So, the question is, should Australia be invested in this race to grow food in space? Australia’s agricultural sector is in a unique position, as it provides food security for its residents while generating significant export income given surrounding nations’ dependence on a steady food supply. However, unpredictable weather reduces our food output yearly because our crops are primarily unprotected and at the whim of the natural elements. Additionally, finite inputs are surging in price, creating further financial pressures on farmers. This is no surprise for farmers, as they have been exploiting strategies to mitigate these issues for more than two centuries, but further innovation driving new technologies is needed to lessen these pressures and increase food security. Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), which includes food production methods such as vertical farming, is a technology-based approach that protects crops from the elements, reduces inputs to a minimum, and maintains optimal growing conditions. For the last few decades, Australia has already been using space

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technology and satellite imagery to aid on-theground practices on farms, but now we have an opportunity to test this emerging disruptive technology in the demanding environment of space to produce robust on-world solutions for the nation’s agricultural industry. CEA has been part of space missions since 1984, with small projects proving plants can be grown in space. Now we must build on those early missions and maximise their true potential at larger scales. By Australia getting involved in this AUD400 billion space industry, and allowing collaboration with world-leading space-engineers, we can optimise our agritech intellectual property and guarantee our food supply. This is a unique moment for Australia to become leaders in a technology that will help humanity while solidifying us as a CEA hub rather than a laggard. Viewing this situation as a nationally important opportunity should motivate investment in space technologies in order to ensure future success in achieving sought outcomes. Australia hasn’t previously invested heavily in the USD58 billion CEA industry (compound annual growth rate of 12.5%), which experts estimate will be worth USD147 billion by 2030. Australia shouldn't miss this fleeting window to help our farmers prosper in the long run as, if we don't engage with CEA now, they will pay a premium for the technology later on. Nadun Hennayaka is Founder and CEO of Gaia Project Australia Pty Ltd. Gaia Project Australia develops and applies advanced technologies, such as machine learning, to produce sustainable food cultivation technologies.

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SMALL BUSINESS, BIG IMPACT: THE ORGANISATION EMPOWERING SMES The Small Business Association of Australia is dedicated to supporting SMEs, acting as their voice to government and helping them connect, grow, and prosper well into the future.

icro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of Australia’s economy. They make up an astonishing 98 per cent of the nation’s 2.4 million actively trading businesses, employ some 5 million people, contribute 32 per cent of GDP, and help drive global innovation. These unsung economic heroes face complex headwinds: high inflation, rising costs, difficulty accessing finance, excessive red tape, staff shortages, and supply chain issues. For every start-up that reaches the fiveyear milestone, there is one that doesn’t. But they have a powerful ally: the Small Business Association of Australia (SBAA). Founded 13 years ago, the SBAA champions SMEs, acts as their voice at government level and on boards, and supports its members to connect, grow, and prosper. Founder and CEO Anne Nalder, who has 30 years’ industry experience, says the SBAA is blazing an innovative trail into the future. “A major initiative is the Small Business Charter of Australia, a ‘living’ document which was presented to the Federal Government in 2023. It will guide policymakers to ensure fairness, security, and opportunity for SMEs,” Anne says. The SBAA also operates a think tank, hosts major events including an annual International Small Business Summit, and leads international trade delegations. “Our expertise and global connections bring great

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

minds and ideas together, nurture cultural and economic relationships, and help businesses grow,” Anne says. Membership is a way to support the SBAA so the organisation can continue to deliver value to SMEs. “There is a lot of work involved in advocacy – reports, research, and meeting with various bodies, leaders, and policymakers. It all costs money; membership helps us have breakthroughs on behalf of small businesses,” Anne says. Membership also offers benefits at the individual business level, including advertising platforms, B2B connections, support during adversity, and access to professional advice in areas like legal, industrial relations, and taxation. SBAA members can also access educational resources to help them stay abreast of the latest ideas, tap into consumer trends, and capitalise on innovation. “An example is using technology to streamline your business, and making sure you’ve got the right advice, the right pricing, and the right tools to do that effectively,” Anne explains. Anne’s vision is for an Australia where SMEs get the recognition they deserve. “Small business should be seen as a career pathway. It is still the best option if you want to create wealth, be creative, put your mark on things, and be involved in your community,” she says.

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INNOVATION INSIGHTS FROM FORMER AUSTRALIAN CHIEF SCIENTIST 1MG interviewed Professor Robin Batterham AO, former Australian Chief Scientist and also a former Rio Tinto Chief Technologist, to explore his views on how Australia can lift its innovation performance, promise and potential this decade and the next. 1MG: How would you score Australia’s productivity currently? RB: It’s no secret that productivity in Australia is going backwards in many ways. No one seems to be too bothered by this, which is a concern. That this is not a daily topic of conversation is perhaps because it is well recognised, but not something that can be changed easily. It requires greater desire to change, with an increased entrepreneurial activity. Achieving these two things needs effort, encouragement and incentives at all levels, e.g., in primary and secondary education, at undergraduate and graduate levels, let alone in industry. There are many initiatives here ( perhaps too many), so the question is, how do we get more focus? 1MG: When it comes to innovation, can we afford to be apathetic or even lazy? Can we afford to not take it seriously? RB: Australia is seen as the “lucky country” and we consistently are a high performer on the United

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Nations’ Human Development Index. We also do well in terms of many Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) indicators. The question is how to enliven the interest and then the activity in doing more, especially when it comes to matters of ESG. Can we build on the experience and lessons learned during the recent COVID-19 pandemic to speed up innovation? We have just witnessed a massive acceleration of technology in the vaccine program. What universally relevant principles of this success can we bring to bear in how we treat carbon emissions, in how we change our supply lines, and in how we are more inclusive of the wider society? 1MG: What does a “more innovative Australia” mean to you? RB: Much of Australia is highly innovative (e.g., retail and banking) and many Australians are wellpaid because of this. Mining, biotech, and agriculture are also highly innovative. It’s not a general problem. The real question is how do we do more of the

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Innovation in practice “invent the new here”? Do we understand why some sectors do so well and others not? I don’t have the answer but it probably comes down to people and their capabilities. We have to focus our education on setting up people who are not just more entrepreneurial but who are solution oriented. Finding solutions and ways to do things better needs certain capabilities, especially the ability to think about the basics of any process or situation. What are the drivers, what are the ways of changing these drivers or of doing things differently? I find the fall off in secondary school of interest in “specialist maths” a sign that we could be doing better. 1MG: Australia’s exports still mainly concentrate on agricultural and mining products rather than more sophisticated products like computer software. What are some strategies to cultivate the latter? RB: One approach to cultivate a wider spectrum is to recognise that in the future, as Prof Ramesh Mashelkar has recently highlighted in the Monash University Sir Louis Matheson Lecture Series on Science, Technology and Innovation: “The post pandemic Next Normal has 3Ds that will shape humanity’s future: digitalisation, decarbonisation, and democratisation”. I agree strongly with Prof Mashelkar and note that an obvious approach is that now we expect that roughly 1/3 of the population goes to university. They should experience the elements of digitalisation (e.g., computing and code writing) and the elements of decarbonisation (e.g., energy storage, micro-grids, etc.), no matter what they are studying. A more general approach to education - even at university level - is a key answer to living with the three D’s. 1MG: How would you rate Australia’s startup culture? RB: Startups are a key component of the Australia’s innovation identity. We are fortunate that CSIRO is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. All of our universities have their incubators, their accelerators, and their active approach to commercialisation, particularly via startups and spin offs. This is great and to be encouraged. However, more is needed to give the startup community what it needs. Looking at the income universities receive from royalties or their equity positions in startups and spin offs, with the occasional exception, the percentage of income from these sources is less than 5 per cent. And without more income, we will see even less R&D. So what is the alternative? The answer is clear: concentrate on research with high impact for which there is someone who values this impact enough to pay big dollars. That someone might be from philanthropy, from

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

governments, from well capitalised companies, or various combinations, but it won’t be from “angel” investors. This will to want to match impact with high level funding is a mindset change for many researchers who, rightly or wrongly, and irrespective of the stated policies of most universities, are driven by the need for high impact publications. 1MG: How does a nation actually encourage the population to innovate? RB: Firstly, R&D is not the same as innovation. Most R&D contributes to knowledge and may ultimately support innovation. Very rarely does R&D lead directly to innovation, i.e., a change in the marketplace. Encouraging innovation is actually about encouraging different products and processes in the marketplace. It doesn’t matter whether they are first in the world, in Australia, in a State or region, or even in a company, what matters is that it is a change for the company concerned. Innovation by companies needs to be rewarded by the government (e.g., through taxation rebates) as it is not just that the said company benefits through its bottom line. A successful innovation can (and generally does)create a public good as it teaches others that the improved product/service is doable, while encouraging competitors to do even better in the knowledge that certain directions can be successful. This is the same argument that we use to justify public support for R&D, visualising that the knowledge generated is useable by a much wider audience than just the researchers who generate the knowledge. 1MG: Are there any other ways we can make a real difference to the health of Australia’s innovation economy? RB: One is attitudinal. At the R&D end we tend to overvalue intellectual property. Our research institutions are renowned for this. Sometimes I almost wish that some of the success stories should not have happened, as then we would be under no delusions that the linear model of R&D, commercialise, and then sit back and watch the royalties roll in, is rare indeed and not the main way of generating funding for R&D. Instead, try embarking on R&D that potentially has great impact in an area in which those already in the marketplace can utilise the development to deliver an innovation. 1MG: Where do you consider there to be particularly high-end innovation occurring across the economy, and what are some of your personal favourites? RB: There are many examples in the mining and agriculture area, e.g., autonomous haul trucks and precision agriculture. Conversely, other parts are not

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focused enough. Could we make more of our defence spending, for instance? Over the years we have tried various alliances. Can we make something in the dual use innovations that benefits from our approval processes being so much more streamlined than some of the other countries we work with? There is a different way of doing it. Again, as stated above, tax breaks on innovation rather than on R&D. As ever it will be almost impossible to have such a tight definition of “eligible innovation” that the system doesn’t get rorted, but there is the possibility to limit the total government

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outlays and year on year, to improve the definition of what specific innovation qualifies. Alternatively, 3 or 4 target areas can be declared per year, and the total concessions can be limited to say $5 Billion per year, with a first in, best dressed approach. 1MG: Anything else? Any other specific ideas? RB: It’s more than just “we need to get better at creating more innovative widgets”. We need to commercialise them – more “Cochlears” developed, for example, and more predictions of volcanic eruptions and El Niño weather events. There

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is absolutely no shortage of ideas. The challenge is to have more incentives in place that would enable those with the ideas to target first and foremost end-users willing to fund turning the ideas into an innovation. Turn the recipe on its head, why not? Doing R&D and contributing to the discipline through publication does not in and of itself lead to much in the way of innovation anymore. We’re lacking the energy and focus to do what ought be done – namely opportunistically develop things for the world that don’t yet exist. We have CSIRO, but it’s not enough. We need to be braver which means tackling attitudes, tackling paradigms. There is no shortage of funding for research that will lead to high impacts and real innovation.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Professor Robin John Batterham AO is a former Australian Chief Scientist. He was also Chief Scientist at Rio Tinto and CSIRO for a number of years. Robin is currently a Kernot Professor at the University of Melbourne.

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CUTTING EDGE MANUFACTURING ON THE WORLD STAGE ANCA took an early view to look beyond Australia’s shores whilst developing advanced manufacturing technologies now viewed as ‘business as usual’

hen Pat Boland and Pat McCluskey first started Melbourne-based company ANCA in 1974, the fax machine was beginning to revolutionise communication and prompting a step change in how businesses viewed global expansion opportunities. Now ANCA are using their own servo technology to design and build a machine capable of manufacturing at a resolution of nanometre at their Australian headquarters. Unlike many of their manufacturing peers, the co-founders decided at the outset the future of their company lay in exporting to the world. Fifty years later, ANCA is a globally recognised advanced manufacturer of precision tool and cutter-grinding machines, motion controls and sheet metal manufacturing equipment and software. Simply, ANCA make machines which manufacture cutting tools. Their high-quality tool and cutter grinders are used by most major cutting tool manufacturers around the globe supplying sectors such as the aerospace, automotive, electronic, medical and other technologically advanced industries. “We started with the view of delivering a highly sought-after product with a point of difference and realised early on the importance of being globally local – a good local support structure and sales team have been key to our success,” Boland explains. ANCA now exports to over 50 countries, with the biggest markets in Europe, Asia, China and USA. ANCA’s longstanding global interaction has also resulted in a significant contribution to the local economy and those in our region. “A significant contribution has been apprentice training centres in Melbourne and Thailand, which has resulted in a steady flow of apprentices into the sector. “Through the years we have also collaborated with Australian universities and provided PhD scholarships, of which many of these graduates now work within our company in R&D and managerial roles. ANCA is rare locally in

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offering a chance for talented & ambitious people interested in advanced technology to contribute to world-leading manufacturing innovations.” Over the decades, ANCA has also been forward-thinking about its environmental impact. It was, for example, an early adopter of wind power to power factories in Melbourne and has installed solar on factory roofs. With over 1200 staff globally and an annual turnover of $300 million, they also have a rich history of world firsts including the first to introduce a modem for the support and diagnosis in a computer numeric control tool and cutter grinder. Boland and McCluskey have shown that an Australian company can compete and innovate on a global scale with dozens of patent applications globally in the fields of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and software. Boland is particularly proud of a patent for the balancing of grinding wheels which differentiates ANCA from its competitors. Another recent patent registered in the USA controls the temperature of the spindle thus improving the stability of the machine. “Any temperature change will cause dimensional change which affects the accuracy of the final product produced.” In 2022, Boland and McCluskey were inducted into the Honour Roll of the Victorian Manufacturing Hall of Fame for their service to the industry. "It is great to get recognition from our peers and formal recognition is important to put the spotlight on what local innovation is capable of which helps to inspire the next generation of innovators,” Boland says. Looking to the future, ANCA is actively pushing for digitalisation of the factory shop floor. Already most of their machines are equipped with robots to load the parts. Next, they will deliver automation of the whole process, from the material and information flow into the machines, and the measuring systems.

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THE ULTIMATE AGRICULTURE ADVANTAGE: INTERVIEW WITH AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATION FOR UNCREWED SYSTEMS PRESIDENT DR REECE CLOTHIER. We recently interviewed the President of the Australian Association of Uncrewed Systems (AAUS) Dr Reece Clothier to learn about the latest developments in aerial drones and their promise and potential for Aussie farmers. How would you describe the uncrewed systems market in Australia today? RC: Agriculture, photography, aerial inspection, and infrastructure management are probably the largest commercial use cases for uncrewed systems, which includes aerial drones, in Australia today. A recent Deloitte study, commissioned by the Australian Government, estimated the agricultural market for aerial drones to grow to AUD1.1B by 2030, and those farming and agricultural applications would deliver further efficiency and cost savings of almost AUD3B. But it is not coming, it is already here. More and more pioneering Australian farmers consider drones as indispensable farming equipment. With so many near term applications and a relatively low

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

risk operating environment – Australia’s farming and agriculture sector will be the one of the first industry sectors to truly capitalise off the adoption of aerial drones. Tell us about the pay-off for aerial drones in Australian agriculture today? RC: Most people think of aerial drones as small multi-rotor aircraft equipped with cameras or multi-spectral sensors. That is what is primarily in operation today, used largely for remote sensing and inspection in applications such as crop health management. We are starting to see the

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scope of applications expand quite rapidly. Aerial drones are now being deployed for precision spraying, targeting weeds and hard to access areas with spot spraying. They are also being used for planting and seed dispersal. Drones are also being used in farm maintenance for inspection of silos, fences, and large machinery. There’s a number of applications enabled by greater connectivity between devices. So you’re seeing drones that don’t just fly and collect data but also uploading that data into existing software packages and farming machinery such as spraying or fertilising delivery systems. It’s becoming increasingly less about the vehicle and the sensors and more about interconnectivity and how it feeds into the broader farming system. What is the government doing to advance the potential of aerial drones in Australian agriculture? RC: The Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), the

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national aviation safety regulator, is continuing to work with industry to advance the safety regulations governing drones. While there is a lot of work to be done, Australia is widely seen as a world leader in this regard. Industry have been working with CASA to develop a strategic roadmap – essentially a plan for the advancement of safety regulations for this sector. Last year the Federal Government released its National Emerging Aviation Technologies policy, which took a much broader look at the key challenges that need to be addressed. This included aspects such as noise, privacy, security, spectrum, and community acceptance in addition to matters of safety. A key initiative under this policy is a funding program that aims to advance the uptake of drones – with the focus specifically on those applications that benefit rural and

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regional Australia. So the Government is starting to make some meaningful strides in support of the sector. How can Australian agriculture get even more out of aerial drones today? RC: Key to really opening up the full potential for drones in farming and agriculture is achieving beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operation. Without it, the farmer is limited to keeping the aircraft within Visual Lines of Sight (VLOS), which would limit the size of the area a drone could be effectively deployed. If you have huge pastoral land or massive grain farms, you can’t just keep driving and stopping to launch and recover your drone. AAUS has been working collaboratively with CASA to try and forge the knowledge and understanding of what it takes to get a BVLOS approval. As a result of this work, CASA has

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

released standard scenarios for BVLOS operations, which help streamline the requirements and process. AAUS has been delivering free webinars to help operators understand what it takes to safely operate BVLOS and how to get the necessary approvals using these standard scenarios. We are now seeing more and more BVLOS approvals being issued for operations in rural areas, but we still have work to do to broaden the scope of these approvals. The agriculture application industry for drones will be the first to benefit from more routine BVLOS operation. Farmers are doing it now however it just takes a huge amount of effort. To open up the agriculture application, we really need to get the process moving much more smoothly. What risks are posed by the use of aerial drones

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in Australian agriculture? RC: The main challenges are in ensuring drones can be safely operated alongside other aircraft or over people and property. In particular, we need to manage the risk of a collision with another aircraft operating at low altitudes, such as helicopters or crop dusters, or a drone impacting a person or house. The relatively low utilisation of airspace and vast areas of low (or no) population mean it’s much easier to close the safety case for drone use in rural and regional areas than it does for drones operating near a city centre. This makes many farming and agricultural applications much more of a near term opportunity. How will Australian farmers cope with so much new data sourced by aerial drones? RC: There is a real risk of “drowning in data” and the solution really lies in connectivity and automation. Farmers don’t have time to go through hours and hours of video data or multispectral data and make sense of it. What they really need is that one image or information product that supports the decisions that need to be made. This is where data analytics and automation come in. Artificial Intelligence (AI) could aid farmers in combining, interpreting and analysing the wealth of data collected by drones and other farm sensing systems. But before all that we need to make sure the data collected by drones can be readily imported into existing farming software and automation systems. This is achieved through standardisation of interfaces and data formats. Can you tell us more about the role of AI in aerial drones. RC: You can liken AI to an expert consultant, available 24/7, that embodies the accumulative expertise of huge datasets. AI can be used to “see” the complex patterns and trends that lie in the data. For example, that certain areas of a crop may have an infestation or need additional water. AI can also suggest courses of action, like the particular type of insecticide and its rate of application, or the amount of water required to those identified areas. The benefit of AI lies in presenting the information relevant to good decision-making. To close the automation loop, approved courses of action could then be simply uploaded to farming spraying or irrigation systems! Automation and AI also helps overcome issues with connectivity in rural and regional

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areas. Drones, and many other farm sensing systems, can collect terabytes of data. The challenge is then – how to get all this data back to where you need it? If there is automation or AI at the point of data collection (i.e., on the drone itself), the system can instead process the data in the field and just send back the one important image or piece of information needed by the farmer. So, there is a very strong case for the use of AI in farming and agricultural applications. It’s becoming increasingly less about the aircraft and more and more about the product it collects and how it connects to existing decision-making processes and farming automation systems. What does the future look for aerial drones in Australian agriculture? RC: Farming and agriculture is already one of the largest use cases for drones and it will continue to grow. This growth will be enabled through greater awareness amongst farmers of the applications for drones, continuing advancements in the capability of the drone platforms and associated software systems, and the streamlining of regulatory processes. Processes that enable routine and safe BVLOS operations will enable a raft of new applications, particularly in broadacre farming. Within the next decade, you could readily see large drones undertaking broad area aerial application tasks, shuttling feedstock or equipment, picking up RFID tags of livestock, and even undertaking the mustering. Much of the technology to do this already exists. However, we still need to advance the regulatory processes to make all these great use cases a reality. AAUS is doing a lot on this front, working with CASA to advance our joint understanding of the safety case and mitigations that need to be in place. We also have a working group exploring the requirements for aerial spraying. There’s a lot of work still to be done but one thing is certain, the potential benefit is huge.

Dr Reece Clothier is President of the Australian Association of Uncrewed Systems (AAUS). AAUS is Australia's peak representative body for the drone industry across land, sea, and air domains.

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LINDSAY PARTRIDGE ON MANUFACTURING INNOVATION We interviewed the Managing Director of Brickworks, Lindsay Partridge AM, to learn more about their innovation processes. What drew you to study engineering and how did this aid your career overall? LP: My Partridge ancestors have been engineers for hundreds of years. I found my chosen area of Ceramic Engineering fascinating because of its infinite possibilities. In short, I would never be bored. And? LP: An early motivation was that I liked to understand how things worked. This progressed to ideas of wanting to pursue the development of beautiful products that lasted forever, so I used to imagine how to both make a product and market it simultaneously. That’s something we’ve observed about Brickworks, this combination of fresh product ideas and effective marketing. LP: You cannot do one without the other. You have been in one place, growing, much longer than most CEOs, 35 years and 21 as Managing Director. LP: I have worked in all areas of the industry and the company. Do you think lack of management duration is a problem plaguing Australian manufacturing?

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

LP: Yes. Short-termism is a universal problem, not only confined to Australian manufacturing, but yes. This is an issue about accumulated knowledge of one’s business and therefore ability to deal with change. One problem in Australian manufacturing is probably related to companies having too many products, lack of knowledge about the core business resulting in an inability to be innovative and adapt. So short termism relates somewhat, or a lot, to all of these. This word “adaptation” is useful, because Brickworks seems, if you read the history, to have been in a continual state of adaptation. LP: We have always been future focused, which is not just words that sound good. Circumstances have demanded it. It’s hard to survive in Australia, you don’t really have a choice. You’ve done a lot of acquisitions which seem to have worked out well, across an era when many do not.

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LP: You have to know fundamentally who you are and what you want to do. We’ve had advice from time to time from investment bankers about a potential company to acquire, but in the end you need to remind yourself what the objective is. Who and what you actually are as a company. There are companies which look desirable, but after thinking you decide not to proceed acquiring a company that does not fit. In other cases we have been approached about companies which fit very well. Do you have formal innovation policies? LP: There are informal and some formal firm attitudes, guidelines. Everyone knows innovation is fundamental. The whole company was put together to create innovation. How so? LP: Determining correctly how you want to grow, what fits. Beyond that, it’s a functional policy to let each operating unit have enough independence to be creative but within sensible guidelines. It’s just sustained, focused management. Autonomy is an important ingredient.

LP: Marketing got a similar overhaul. We were early into using digital and on-line communication with our customers, going back to late last century, but we did it our particular way. Which is? LP: We do not sell a great deal online: that approach is not necessary in our case but a strong customer support service is, and it has worked out very well. Observing your factory operation one is impressed by the sheer speed of manufacture and the robotics—and relatively few people on the floor. LP: We were, going back to the 70s and 80s early into use of hydraulics and this has progressed into constant upgrades in use of machines. We were early into robotics, and the continual vigilance of the engineering team drives this today, the search for efficiencies never ends.

Is that to say that all innovation is top down at Brickworks, from the board?

You have now entered the US market. What percentage of revenue is derived from that market now?

LP: No. It comes from all levels. At the factory level, the engineering level especially.

LP: About 25%.

What has happened of note from the engineering level? LP: In 2008 we consolidated the whole engineering staff of around 15 and became specialists. This team became responsible for the whole group of companies. Previously they had worked in an isolated way. We had many types of engineers. Putting them together in one space created a lot of positive synergy, they became a project team. Productive interaction increased. I had realised the true value of cross disciplinary collaboration, combined with an appropriate support team. This was in fact a big change. It unlocked a lot of potential which was being wasted. What was the hard evidence of improvement? LP: Continual increases in productivity, regular new generation machines being developed, tested. But the bottom line has always been about productivity increases. Our productivity has increased three-fold in 20 years.

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Have you re-organised any other departments in recent times?

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How long have you been active there? LP: About two years. That is a staggering result, in such a short time. LP: Well as I said, if you can survive in Australia and know your business well, expansion like this will follow. We are in fact 3-5 times more productive than our American based operations, measured in production of bricks per man-hour. And your design centres, which we might call retail show rooms? LP: This started in 2011, and we are now in all capital cities. And you exported this concept to the US? LP: Yes, opening this year in Philadelphia, and soon in New York and Baltimore, but as I have said you cannot grow a business like this without both manufacturing excellence and the marketing to go with it, in equal measure – they are both areas for innovation.

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INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: A NEW FRONTIER IN CLIMATE TECHNOLOGIES Managing climate change is a universal challenge needing a broader perspective of actions, including adopting digital solutions – sentiments echoed by the World Economic Forum.

limate mitigation initiatives were once primarily focused on lowering carbon emissions and restructuring manufacturing processes. Although these measures are still at the forefront, industries, including ICT, must form holistic views of unified responsibilities to reach net zero targets by 2050. Are Australian organisations sufficiently motivated to develop the strategies for transitioning to a greener and more sustainable economy? Firstly, the benefits and costs of moving away from carbon-intense mechanisms to cleaner energy systems ought be shared fairly. Wealthier nations, for example, can apply their privilege and look towards investing in sustainable infrastructure, green technology, and learning programs that can equip the community with the assets needed to reach 2050 goals. During the May 2022 World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, experts agreed that energy, construction, and mobility are the three highest emitting sectors while digital technologies hold the greatest promise for reducing emissions. Too often, misconceptions of the cost of sustainability create barriers to change. Delivering on supply chain goals remains a work in progress in corporate sustainability commitments. Procurement and sourcing processes can uncover significant opportunities to reduce environmental impact when accounting for carbon accuracy. Fresh ideas and perspectives are needed. Transitioning to more renewable energy sources forces the utility providers to develop methods to better estimate energy production and consumption. Intelligent automation (IA) can analyse data and forecast energy output and demand, with pinpoint precision, enabling businesses to develop reliable climate change mitigation measures, while simultaneously reducing the risk of inefficiencies. Improved forecasts and targeted recommendations for low-carbon items can encourage environmentally friendly purchases from the consumer. When addressing high emitting industries, IA solutions

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

can substantially enhance the way energy is expended. Organisations that implement data automation and modelling can digitalise their operations, hence balancing the emission-based energy generation. Having a one-stop digital solution will boost efficiency and enable the novel procedures to lower power consumption and therefore reduce harmful emissions. IA has the real potential to accelerate climate change measures by reducing waste in all forms (time, money, and material). Many organisations, however, will need to re-think their strategies by implementing varied albeit complementary technologies that maximise efficiency and reduce waste. To fuel the acceleration of net-zero trajectories, Australian industries and high-emitting sectors can also help combat misconceptions of change and, as a sign of leadership, drive the adoption of digital solutions to keep up with the evolving innovation ecosystem. The Australian ICT industry has a crucial role in achieving shared national climate change goals. With digital being at the heart of everything we do, the country’s ICT leaders have a huge opportunity to pave the way to creating a unified community that is comfortable and competent with digital solutions. Establishing innovative technologies like IA is one step, however, education on how to best leverage them will create confident citizens and accelerate digital literacy. ICT industries should be encouraged to continue investing in the research and development of sustainable digital solutions and the upskilling of those who are using them. Understanding and leveraging IA is a key step to driving the catalyst of a greener world.

By Saranjit Singh

Saranjit Singh is Vice President Telecommunications and Utilities APAC, SS&C Blue Prism. SS&C's Blue Prism is a global leader in enterprise robotic process automation and intelligent automation.

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CONNECTING THE DOTS FOR RENEWABLES There is tremendous responsibility that comes with operating and managing the largest high voltage transmission electricity network in Australia, covering NSW and Canberra. TransGrid is moving beyond that mandate, transforming the nature of how Australia keeps the lights on in a carbon-constrained world.

hree million homes, businesses and communities directly rely on TransGrid to deliver safe, reliable and affordable electricity supply every day. Its network is at the heart of the National Energy Market that supplies nine million customers across the country. Transmission networks are at the forefront of Australia’s energy transformation, the backbone of the power system. It is no small feat to transport large volumes of electricity from generators to regions where it’s used, managing stability, balancing supply and demand, and facilitating competition between generators. The decisions made this decade are critically important in preparing NSW’s power system as it transitions to a greater reliance on low-cost renewable generation such as wind and solar, and increased demand driven by population growth and technology. As consumers get used to the idea of electric vehicle highways and smart infrastructure connecting our communities – TransGrid is strategically planning and investing, working in collaboration across the energy supply chain and implementing new projects that will shape the future grid. TransGrid CEO Paul Italiano explains, “The road ahead is exciting. It’s all about innovation and keeping the customer at the centre of everything we do. We are transforming the way we work, leveraging emerging technologies, designing solutions for unique challenges and championing research and development.” This involves collaborating with external partners on key projects, including several major

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network interconnector upgrade projects to put downward pressure on energy bills and facilitate the investment in and incorporation of more renewables. These projects will be critical in reducing downstream congestion on the network, increasing system stability and competition in the wholesale electricity market. As it manages the transition of the electricity system, TransGrid is navigating through some breakthrough initiatives that will improve its understanding of how the grid and new technologies can support new generation and demand. NSW’s first Renewable Energy Zone NSW’s electricity system was designed around coal-fired power stations predominantly in eastern, regional NSW where the coal was mined – with high voltage transmission networks that linked generators to population centres along the east coast. For new sources of electricity generation such as wind and solar, the most accessible and productive locations, are mostly inland in regional NSW. This necessitates new planning and investment in transmission infrastructure to connect large-scale renewable generation with population centres and industry. TransGrid is a key partner working with the NSW Government on the development of the CentralWest Orana Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) – which is expected to create 3 gigawatts of new generation capacity, enough to power 1.4 million homes and up to $5.2bn in private investment into the region to 2030. Working with the government, communities

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Innovation in practice

and industry, it will be able to design transmission infrastructure that provides the best opportunities for scale-efficient generator connections within the REZ. This new approach is an exciting step forward as we work towards lowering costs to meet the reliability standard for NSW and market dispatch costs, therefore putting downward pressure on prices for customers. Piloting emerging battery technology It is widely accepted that batteries will be key to how we make, transport and use electricity in the future. Many Australians are familiar with the idea that large-scale batteries can provide electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine – what the experts call dispatchable energy. However, a new emerging area in battery technology is how it can be used to solve inertia and frequency challenges on the grid. This will be a key challenge as more wind and solar joins the grid and coal-fired generators retire. At the moment, there are very few batteries in the world designed with this as its primary purpose – and they are an attractive option for providing synthetic inertia as they are a fraction of the cost of the next best solution, a synchronous condenser. TransGrid is taking the lead in piloting these network services through a $61.9m Wallgrove Grid Battery project that will install a 50MW battery, the equivalent of 125,000 solar panels, at its Wallgrove substation in Western Sydney. It will be the first large-scale grid battery in NSW – and has received funding by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) as part of its Advancing Renewables Program and NSW Government as part of its Emerging Energy Program. Additionally, the NSW regional centre of Broken Hill is set to become one of the world’s largest minigrids supplied by solar, wind and grid-scale storage. This follows TransGrid’s recommendation earlier this year for a new back-up supply arrangement that could see the homes and businesses of Broken Hill’s 17,000 strong-population powered by renewables. In the coming years, TransGrid will learn more about how the battery can be used to respond to a

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

frequency event, and how often it is needed to provide synthetic inertia and fast frequency response services, while setting up opportunities for future grid battery investment. Supporting electrification of transport and industry Electricity is already widely used to power trains and light rail in NSW. Electric and hybrid passenger vehicles are continuing to grow in popularity, with fast charging electric vehicle infrastructure being rolled-out across the nation. Transport and industrial operators are also looking at ways to decarbonise operations and invest in electric solutions. Globally, almost 50 percent of new bus purchases are now electric. NSW and ACT governments have already committed to electrifying their entire public bus fleets, some 5,000 buses in total. Italiano notes, “Our focus is on working with industry to understand the implications of electrification on the grid and exploring opportunities to accelerate the electrification of transport by designing integrated solutions supported by transmission networks”. Driving outcomes for customers TransGrid is not alone on Australia’s energy transformation journey. Governments, regulators and industry are all working together, with roadmaps and strategies in place – and widespread recognition across the energy supply chain about the role networks, generators and retailers have in driving better outcomes for customers. This is evidenced by the Energy Charter, an industry-led initiative with TransGrid as a founding signatory, which is focused on better addressing customer expectations. Italiano explains, “As we look to the future as an organisation, our path is clear. We must continue to be at the forefront of innovation and technology, develop our understanding of future grid requirements, and ensure that every investment in the power system is rigorously assessed and demonstrate benefits to energy customers.”

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CHANGING WITH THE TIMES The Elders Group has undergone a resurgence by focusing intently on a model of customer service and satisfaction. Now, the company is operating as a medium between the latest in agriculture technology and science, helping its customers to invest their money intelligently to improve productivity.

he Elders business story is one of forward-thinking innovation, forced on by disruptive events. It started with a single ship setting sail from Kirkcaldy, Scotland in 1839 holding sixty barrels of tar, six thousand roofing slates, nine cases of biscuits, gunpowder, fish, rum, brandy and whisky, along with agricultural material and seed. In the 180+ years since, it has experienced peaks and troughs, including billion-dollar losses, record breaking shareholder returns, and in recent years, profits that defy significant droughts. Elders had to contend with and survive WWI, the Great Depression, finally finding some business luck following the outbreak of WWII. Australian wool experiences a boom and becomes one of the most sought-after products in the economy. Demand for the wool from Korea for its soldiers led to prices of 1 pound for 1 pound of wool. Driven partly by Elders, Australia is said to be "riding on

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the sheep’s back", and the company acquires multiple additional wool brokers. What has stayed consistent is its focus on the end-user: the Australian farmer. When it grew the business, it added divisions that could offer additional levels of service: financial services, real estate, insurance, plant genetics, genomics, consulting, and most recently, an R&D arm: the Thomas Elder Institute. The Thomas Elder Institute allows the company to secure and facilitate funding and investment in strategic research programs while building and securing new partnerships with universities and research institutions, multinational and national suppliers, government research and development agencies, and farming systems groups. Contrary to popular opinion, farmers are constantly looking for new developments in research and technology and are great innovators. The key to the adoption of new practices, and extending

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new ideas or technology, is a clearly-defined value proposition. “Then, you need to support people in delivery. This means in both the practice change, or implementation of technology. Ag tech is great, but if it is new to people, you need to support them as they adopt it,” notes Michael Wilkes, Head, Thomas Elder Institute. For example, The Thomas Elder Institute collaborates with the University of Adelaide to provide a farm-facing understanding of the value of specific machine-learning algorithms for crop and field prediction. In Queensland, it partners with Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), giving access to its livestock agents, and serving as a conduit flow for information between the MLA to primary producers, and vice-versa. It is a collaborative effort that allows for the filter of useful information to its end-users, providing value. Triangle of services fostering innovation The Thomas Elder Institute functions at the peak of the Elders’ triangle, with the centre comprising Thomas Elders Consulting, which provides highlevel business advice to customers, and market-research arm Thomas Elders Markets, launched in mid-2020. The foot of the triangle, signified by the largest on-ground coverage, is the Elders Rural services network throughout Australia. By offering advice on farm management strategies that incorporate science and technology, Thomas Elder Consulting allows its customers to make decisions to ensure the viability and sustainability of their businesses, based on the best available science. It builds on, and puts into

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practice at the national level, the research conducted by the Thomas Elder Institute. Thomas Elder Markets offers industry-wide market analysis, rather than the individual farm level, opening up benchmarking work with its clients. By looking at the data from an industry level, it allows Elders to identify market opportunities and examine and understand how Australia is performing as one agricultural nation within a global market. Future farms in practice Elders has partnered with Primary Industries and Regions South Australia to demonstrate and test best-practice farming in real time. The Struan and Kybybolite Farms, located in the Limestone Coast, will demonstrate the use of agtech, the latest in animal genetics and pasture varieties, alongside water-saving measures, disease management and grazing strategies. Importantly, it allows Elders to give the best advice to their customers, while working with researchers to improve new measures that will have a positive impact to their farmers’ productivity and profitability. By being involved early, Elders can be ahead of market trends. As Elders CEO Mark Allison explains, “This government-industry collaboration will enable a world-class sustainable farming enterprise that will provide a platform for new research activities, ground-truthing of new technologies and demonstrating the latest commercial products, as well as being a resource for ongoing industry education.”

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MORE THAN A TOY What happens when a global toy manufacturer realises it can be more than a source of entertainment? LEGO funds research, resources, and STEM-focused products to drive hands-on learning, embracing innovation as a social good.

ost children in Australia will hold a piece of LEGO in their hands at least once through childhood – for this author, it was the Duplo sets, and the Bionicle toys as a pre-teen. Fewer people are familiar with the LEGO Foundation, first set up in 1986, which is now is a force worldwide in promoting the neuroscience behind play, and learning. For all the talk in Australia of the need to build STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) skills at a young age, there are few companies actively invested in growing the research base of what works to engage children, and even fewer providing those resources to the general public for free. As Dubois et al. write in The Conversation, “Turning raw material into something that sparks kids’ imagination, promote social and motor skills development or perhaps even trigger career aspirations, is no small endeavour. “Involved in this process are designers, artists, videographers and engineers, in addition to marketers, sales representatives and everyone in between. These innovators leverage the latest science — psychology, early childhood development, linguistics, physics, computer modelling — and use techniques such as biomimicry to replicate nature’s work (such as hatching).”1

Only 17 per cent of students considered themselves ‘very confident’ in learning STEAM subjects. Only 36 per cent of teachers considered their students more confident today than five years ago, while 30 per cent of parents believed their child was more confident than their peers.

Confidence and learning One recent poll funded by the LEGO Foundation attempted to understand the general level of confidence among STEM, or STEAM (which is STEM plus the Arts, a recognition of their crucial role in shaping understanding). From 11,000 and responses, including 5,000 students and parents, and a 1,000 teachers, there was a clear disconnect in confidence. 1

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https://theconversation.com/not-childs-play-the-serious-innovation-behind-toy-making-128211

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Only 38 per cent believed their child was more confident than they were at the same age. Hardly inspiring figures, especially when you consider that 76 per cent of teachers surveyed believe that anxiety and a lack of confidence hinder learning among their students, and half of students surveyed feel nervous about trying new things at school. Here’s where the research gets more interesting though – As many as 95 per cent of teachers believe that hands-on learning builds student confidence. For parents, 93 per cent believe that hands on learning helps their children retain skills, and just under 90 per cent of students feel that it helps them learn, and retain information. The benefits of building STEAM skills also appear to have confidence-boosting effects broadly in education settings. For students, 82 per cent that were confident in STEAM felt

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confident about school broadly, and 75 per cent of those students said they felt more confident than their peers. Building confidence There is a wealth of research that shows the link between hands-on play and learning. A 2019 paper2 featuring an Australian lead author, Rachel Parker, Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), alongside Dr Bo Stjerne Thomsen, Global Head of Research at the LEGO Foundation, asked: How has learning through play been applied in formal schooling, and what has been the impact on children’s holistic skills? Mapping out pedagogies, the methods and practices of teaching, the LEGO-funded research noted that in Australia, England, and the United States the curriculum of formal schooling is being ‘pushed down’ into early learning contexts in place of play. Essentially, kids are being forced to learn formal concepts in lieu of growing the skillsets that will allow them to learn more holistically. There is less time for recess, play, and creating. “At the same time, a number of Southeast and East Asian education systems are seeking more child centred pedagogic practices to foster holistic learning. They are expanding learning outcomes to include social, emotional, physical and higher order thinking skills, and recognising that holistic learning requires executive summary integrative pedagogies such as project-based or inquiry-based learning,” the authors write. As Australia’s education standards and results falter in comparison to its APAC neighbours, perhaps it is worth re-examining the value we place on play in learning. Education programs that involve study skills, metacognition, collaboration, and student-centred approaches to learning positively impact overall learner achievement and close the gap between low and high performers.3 As the authors note, “It is not enough for children to merely participate in education. The right of children everywhere is to access quality evidence-based education praxis and theory that will equip them to live more materially, socially and culturally meaningful lives in the future.”

https://www.legofoundation.com/media/1687/learning-through-play-school.pdf Mannion, J., & Mercer, N. (2016). Learning to learn: Improving attainment, closing the gap at Key Stage 3. Curriculum Journal, 27(2), 246–271

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THE ELECTRIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA’S AGRICULTURAL FUTURE – TIME TO TAKE CHARGE Executive Director of Tractor and Machinery Association of Australia Gary Northover says, despite electric tractors still being in their infancy in Australia, there are signs that we will join other major agricultural economies in the coming decades. As long as there’s sound leadership and the agricultural industry as a whole is fully committed and united. What do the dynamics of electrification of agricultural machinery in Australia look like today? GN: Generally speaking, we have not seen a great deal from the tractor manufacturers – who are mostly still using diesel-fuelled engines. Further, most of their research and development investment is still focused on conventional technologies. The reality therefore is that the electrification of tractors and other heavy agricultural machinery in Australia is at least 5-10 years away from full maturity across the wider agricultural industry. I do believe, however, it’s still worth starting to have a meaningful conversation now. Can or should we be doing better as a rich, educated and progressive nation?

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GN: Our European agricultural “cousins” are, in some ways, leading in this area albeit there is not a lot of meaningful progress there either. Government regulations over there provide carbon emission targets and related limits for farmers, which does not apply (yet) for Australian farmers. It’s worth recognising, however, that Australia is already a step ahead of Europe with things like the Autonomous Vehicle Code of Practice, a world first, developed in 2021 by Grain Producers Australia, the Tractor and Machinery Association of Australia and the Society of Precision Agriculture Australia. Change will probably happen here eventually depending on whether there’s enough lobbying to government and therefore some impetus to drive the

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transition. Other socio-economic dynamics are also key – the general public, a top down “force”, is showing more and more interest in the environmental footprint of agricultural producers. This is now starting to happen but not a lot yet. What are the key issues affecting the electrification of Australian agriculture? GN: The main issues affecting the adoption of electric tractors in Australia are: (1) insufficient re-charging infrastructure in rural Australia; (2) charging downtime for the farmer; (3) inadequate energy density of the battery i.e., towing heavy machinery – which is a big problem for broadacre farming especially; (4) due to their sheer size, the batteries are too heavy for tractors – hence, logistics issues and (5) no government regulation yet on carbon emissions for farmers which, if / when it happens, will inevitably accelerate adoption in Australia. Where is there real potential in the “here and now”? GN: Australian agriculture leaders and farmers alike should be observing and monitoring, “in lockstep, the rise of the latest battery-powered engine technology in other industries that also rely on heavy machinery – such as mining

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

and construction. There are important lessons learned that can be adopted and adapted to agriculture. It is, interestingly, the manufacturers themselves, like Cummins, that are leading the way towards cleaner engines. Strict requirements on carbon emissions for Tier 4-5 tractor engines have, for example, been top of mind in Australia in recent years. So, there are signs that, in principle, the agricultural industry wants to reduce its environmental impact – starting from the “bottom up” in this case. Change is more likely to be stimulated by the engine manufacturers themselves rather than the tractor manufacturers that use their power equipment solutions. Where else are there small gains that can be made to continue the early momentum? GN: The best approach for Australia in the coming years is a “baby steps” strategy towards full adoption of electric tractors – such as starting off with hybrids and also with the smaller agricultural machinery adopting electric powered engines including lighter horticulture equipment. Progress is also happening in the turf and lawn care area which I believe will drive development "up the scale". For example, golf courses along with some intensive horticulture activities.

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GATEWAY TO WA Bunbury is the economic engine of the South West of Western Australia. With the capacity to grow and 2,000 hectares of available industrial land to be developed, the City is positioning itself and the greater region as a model for regional innovation and future digital city.

or all the talk of how automation is going to rapidly change the way we work, and live, less time is spent on planning the cities we need to support that digital transition. The nation’s coastal cities are suffering under gridlock and the associated productivity losses and high costs that come with urban sprawl. Investing in regional cities and areas allow for a better movement of talent, including from overseas, and gives better options to locals, deepening the connection with the area. Bunbury sees its opportunity to become Western Australia’s "Second City", in the same mould as Newcastle in NSW and Geelong in Victoria, with a targeted plan for industries, population growth, infrastructure investment, and talent attraction that leverages its natural beauty and proximity to Perth. Centrally located between Perth and the major population centres of the region, Bunbury pitches itself as the economic engine of the South West. As a city, it supports the wider Bunbury-Geographe population of 104,300, including 41,700 workers. In the seven years leading up to 2018, the region’s population grew by 12.66 per cent. It has warehouse space, a port, rail, airport, and major highways providing access, along with space for new housing, and an abundance of water sources (contrasting from the occasionally water-stressed Perth). But, to be a digital city for the future, Bunbury sees the need for an internet infrastructure that new industries expect before making investments, that would set it apart at a state and national level. To attract private sector investment, Bunbury is lobbying the state and federal government bodies for the support of a subsea fibre optic cable that lands in Bunbury from India, or the

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UAE, which would give direct input into Europe, and a secondary fibre optic cable running down the inland highway to link up with Australia’s eastern states. For data-heavy applications like artificial intelligence, new industries need confidence that there is a self-healing network that ensures the business is not compromised if any one connection goes down. That redundancy is a key selling point for long-term partnerships, opening up industry trials and research, and production opportunities for the jobs and sectors set to be most disrupted by new technologies.

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Mal Osborne, CEO, Bunbury Council, explains, “Underpinning that is the amazing liveability that Bunbury and the South West of WA enjoys. It is about working where you want to live, rather than living where you have to work.” With the right investments inbound, what does the region’s targeted strategy look like? It is one in which postgraduate and research degrees connect researchers to regional primary industries, while providing a world class lifestyle and liveability through a campus and international student accommodation hub. Horticulture, livestock, food production and processing, timber, mining, energy generation, ports and marines, heavy rail, road freight, oceanography and aquaculture are all on the cards for Bunbury. The City has identified opportunities for an Oceans and Marine Complex, and the repurposing of 7000sqm of existing warehouse space that will shortly become available, giving easy access to marine vessels, drone launches, and ships needing to moor. From here, there are possibilities to innovate in aquaculture, climate and oceanographic research, marine drone development, engineering and material science development, and potentially wave and tidal energy generation. All of this would require a founding university, along with clear policy positions advocating for

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Bunbury together with investment from both the state and federal governments. Dr David Chandler, Director, Strategy and Organisational Performance, City Of Bunbury, notes, “Through strategic investment to create the first Digital Innovation District under the Australian Innovation and Science Australia Strategy, a unique model for population, industry, and economic diversification for regional Australia can be realised, while stimulating business investment in research and development.” There has been some movement at the state level. With more than 2.6 million square kilometres of area, and no regional centres greater than 100,000, Western Australia is acutely vulnerable to the challenges of rural-urban drift and the negative impacts of mega-cities, a trend the state is already attempting to hold off. It has created the Bunbury Development Committee, and in 2019 released its Diversify WA framework. As Osborne notes, there is clearly potential for 25,000 additional people to live in Bunbury, utilising the capacity available across the 12,000 dwellings permitted by space and zoning laws. “To accommodate them is one thing. To give them jobs is another. No matter how much we talk about liveability, jobs need to be created to grow the city, and sustain that growth,” he says.

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LOCAL R&D, INTERNATIONAL IMPACT Lockheed Martin chose to build its first multidisciplinary R&D facility outside of the United States in Melbourne, Australia. The Science, Technology, Engineering Leadership, and Research Laboratory (STELaRLab) is breaking new ground across the gamut of defence.

hen Lockheed Martin was selecting the location for the STELaRLab, it had a few criteria. First and foremost, an environment for world-class innovation. The FiveEyes nations, the alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and United States, which have well-established R&D relationships that underpin sophisticated Defence and Intelligence cooperation, were on the list. It needed to have access to a wealth of young, talented researchers producing quality work, with a balance of affordability and lifestyle to attract people and retain them. It needed to be a place seeking to play a role in, and create, truly global innovation. Australia, and specifically Melbourne, had the combination of world-class research institutions, combined with a balance of affordability and lifestyle to attract students and young researchers. The company is thinking long-term, valuing the steady pipeline that only a few cities in the world could offer. STELaRLab focuses on creating Australian innovation in understanding and utilising information for defence. It is led by Dr. Tony Lindsay, one of Australia’s preeminent defence scientists, and a former senior executive at the Defence Science and Technology Group, the scientific body of the Australian Department of Defence. Cutting edge STELaRLab is set up as an information lab, developing technologies to understand the

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information out there in a complex, fast-changing world. “We see ourselves as creating Australian innovation in understanding and utilising information for defence and national security purposes,” explains Dr. Lindsay. One of the main areas of research for the STELaRLab is deep reasoning, also referred to as ‘Neuro-Symbolic AI’. It is an attempt to match the power and speed of neural networks, with the human ability to develop generalised concepts from their life experiences. Think of sign-in tests that you occasionally need to take to prove you are not a robot online. Tasks such as ‘click all the squares that contain bicycles’ are difficult for a machine that has not been trained to specifically identify bicycles. A human that has seen one to two bicycles could reasonably identify more without issue. To create these systems, the developers need expertise across artificial intelligence, mathematics, Theory of Mind, language, the meaning behind actions, psychological science, and symbolics. The perfect challenge for wide, interdisciplinary collaboration. How do you take symbolic ideas and turn them into a neural network that a machine can reason with? How can you turn concepts into a sequence of zeros and ones, and give a machine the ability to navigate and perceive uncertainty? One program developed through STELaRLab saw the team develop a methodology and a means for describing complex, arbitrary systems

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so that a machine could make assessments and pass messages about identifying and defeating potential improvised threats. How do you build a system that can detect, reason about, and defeat any imaginable combination of threats? How do you begin to analyse that problem, “grip it up”, develop the methodology to do a threat analysis, and quickly allocate resources to defeat the threat even in circumstances where the information may be uncertain or deliberately degraded? The researchers had to consider things like underwater attacks using old-fashion mines, drones carrying biological or chemical weapons, surface threats like fast attack craft or jet skis - any conceivable threat imaginable. With all those different methods, it is extremely difficult to even “get your arms around” the problem, to work out how to represent the myriad possibilities in a consistent framework – and it gets exponentially harder for a machine to calculate a response. Each additional entity capable of an attack requires the system to re-calculate all of the possibilities once more. The answer lies in appropriate combinations of advanced complex optimisation techniques, machine reasoning systems and human-AI teaming. “If you can connect the dots quickly, get the information to the right place at the right time to make the right decisions, that is the differentiator, especially with a small force like Australia’s. Investing R&D into the things that give a small force the decision superiority that allows the type of precise, surgical responses that have the impact of a force many times larger is the right thing to do from both a taxpayer and investment perspective,” explains Dr. Lindsay. Co-creation, collaboration Within the defence space non-defence small enterprises and startups are becoming increasingly important, as their founders will have the advanced technical capabilities in commercially-driven and fast-moving fields such as artificial intelligence, advanced communications, and information systems, which are increasingly crucial to national security needs. As a result, STELaRLab, as part of the larger Lockheed Martin, can play the role of facilitator and mentor, identifying interesting technology in a research or early-company phase, and finding a mutually beneficial process for developing it further. Additionally, the mentor process can

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help small companies transition from a hightech focused startup to a lean, agile business. Operating as a separate profit and loss entity within Lockheed Martin, STELaRLab does not directly sell Lockheed products but remains tightly coupled to Lockheed’s global R&D centres and Business Areas. The keys to success are early partnering and having a global view of opportunity. “The difference between doing it themselves, or partnering with us, is that we have an R&D interface that can help them get the technology right, and fit for purpose, after which the partner company can decide how it wants to move forward,” says Dr. Lindsay. A wealth of expertise makes the difference. Between the top leadership at STELaRLab, there is 100 years of defence R&D experience. In 10 years, Dr. Lindsay expects the lab to have grown to some 80 researchers, having made substantial contributions to Australian sovereign capabilities in securing the nation. For Lockheed Martin, a company which defines itself by its ability to produce state-of-the-art systems, the substantial focus is placed on the ability to innovate at the high end of what could be possible, creating value for both the company and the nation.

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THE INFORMATION AGE MEETS THE GOLDEN YEARS 1MG spoke with Peter Fuller, Managing Director of Micro Focus Australia and New Zealand, about what the IT industry is doing in digitalization of Australia’s aged care sector. By Duncan CampbellAvenell.

hen the tsunami of COVID-19 crashed, uninvited, onto Australia’s shores, industries of all stripes were swept up in its destructive wake. But in the subsequent months, few were confronted with the same literal life-or-death stakes as the aged care sector, whose raison d'être is to look after those Australians who are most vulnerable to the virus. Readers will know that some providers rose to the challenge better than others, and that troubling issues in the for-profit segment are coming to light under the glare of the Royal Commission into Aged Care, forcing an overdue reckoning for those private operators that have not been toeing the line. It’ll be a shame if the ensuing reputational damage tars the industry at large, because good-news aged care stories do exist, if you know where to find them. One is how the technology and IT industries are helping aged care facilities through the COVID crisis, and, more broadly, how leaders from those cutting-edge fields are increasingly helping to shape a brighter future in which technology will improve older Australians’ quality of life. A case in point is MannaCare, a not-for-profit aged care facility headquartered in Doncaster, in Melbourne’s north-east. The largely government-funded organisation is owned by the Manningham community and steered by a board of seasoned corporate leaders from diverse fields. Commendably, the board works pro bono, and it bases its decisions on a set of

humanistic values rather than the profit motive. MannaCare can accommodate around 150 live-in residents in its two residential facilities (one is for those who are mobile but require assisted living, the other for those with dementia and other high-care residents). All residents are cared for by a staff of highly trained nurses and carers with supplementary support provided by an energetic squad of local volunteers. The organisation also provides a range of vital at-home and other services for hundreds of locals who require them. The costs of private aged care remain high for many Australians, and a key pillar of MannaCare’s philosophy is to provide high-quality care for those who need it, rather than those who can afford it. Among the silver linings of COVID (squint hard, and you’ll see them) is the growing realisation that, while the in-person element will always be indispensable, high-quality aged care does not always need to occur face-toface – and that emerging technologies have the potential to revolutionise the field. Mannacare – whose board of directors includes IT industry captains Peter Fuller, of the software giant Micro Focus, and Mark McNamara, an expert in digital transformation – is fully embracing those transformative ideas. So what are the current and potential future applications of tech in the evolving aged care ecosystem? Peter Fuller says, “For now, at MannaCare, they include residents being able to meet remotely with their GPs and specialists, as well as socialise with families and

Innovation in practice

friends, through video applications (crucial during Melbourne’s 2020 lockdowns); access to video-on-demand and pay TV services; and the use of tablets and other smart devices in the rehabilitation of people with disabilities.” At-home care is a growing part of the industry’s big picture, and here, the possibilities that tech opens up are almost endless. As Fuller says, they include “wearable tech that can measure an individual’s heartrate and other vital signs, including blood pressure (going far beyond the old ‘panic button’, which has to be physically pressed); motion pressure detectors that can perceive falls; and tech that can remind people to take their medications in ways a plastic pill box never could. The Internet of Things (IoT) will open up a whole new world of once unthinkable possibilities; suppose, for example, that pill box could record whether its lids had been opened each day and alert the user if they hadn’t.” The IT industry has in recent years had a collective epiphany: that it can create social as well as corporate value in a range of areas

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

– healthcare, disability services and aged care, for example – and it’s already directing significant intellectual capital towards that end. “Of course, industry can’t do it alone,” Fuller notes. “Getting high-speed, cost-effective, reliable internet into more aged care facilities is crucial to improving residents’ lives, and government is the key player in that area. Government can also help by improving the regulatory and funding landscape to speed the development of cheaper and simpler-to-use smart devices.” Fuller continues: “Tech will never fully replace the human element of aged care – a volunteer’s warm smile or a nurse’s thoughtful gesture can achieve what even the smartest device cannot. But tech can be – and already is – a valuable supplement to the existing infrastructure.” MannaCare’s use of technology in its operations, its strong leadership structure and its sense of social mission are good news for Australia’s ageing population – and point to a better way forward for the industry as a whole.

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DEFENCE INNOVATION: CATALYSTS FOR CHANGE How can Australia increase its economic complexity through technology-driven innovation?

ctober 4, 1957. An 84kg, 58cm-diameter metallic sphere starts its three-month journey from Biakonur launch complex, eventually orbiting the earth 1,440 times at a speed of 7,780m/s before re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere in fiery triumph. The word "Sputnik" (meaning fellow traveller or companion) became, overnight, a new and permanent addition to the English lexicon, eventually spawning derivatives such as "beatnik" and "peacenik". It has been observed that the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 was the most significant catalyst for technological culture change in the US since Pearl Harbor. This included the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); the Advanced Research Projects Agency, direct forerunner to today’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and its various incarnations across the American national security landscape); the 1958 National Defense Education Act to encourage increased participation in maths and science; and a combined editorial, scientific, engineering and political tsunami that eventually led to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. Reflecting on the impact of the catalyst that was Sputnik is instructive for a nation like Australia for two reasons. Firstly, it highlights the fact that Australia has rarely (if ever) experienced such institutionally driven, culture-changing responses to a technological event. Sputnik, of course, is just one example, but it serves to spotlight how this type of national experience contributes to a visceral, culturally embedded view of the critical national security role of advanced science and technology R&D. The flipside is a potential cultural blind spot when it comes to the relative value placed on R&D by Australians when compared to our American cousins. Secondly – as reflected in the DARPA mission

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– it led to an attitude of “never again”. This resulted in a risk appetite for R&D that far exceeds that of Australia’s, and as a complementary reaction the implementation of technology-control regimes such as the International Treaty on Arms Regulations (ITAR), which are designed to protect the technology overmatch that results from these hard-won, high-risk, high-payoff investments. From a national security perspective, it is essential that Australia maintains a strong, sovereign R&D base, one reason for which is the capability to make valued contributions to our alliances in order to leverage those partnerships, but more generally because of the diverse and complex nature of Defence R&D. Complexity and innovation Broadly speaking, the statistics appear to indicate that Australia performs well when it comes to basic research but suffers in translation of that research into industry collaboration and in bringing innovation to market. Part of this has doubtless been structural issues associated with the magnitude and manner in which R&D has been funded and managed over the years. But these structural settings are themselves a reflection of the underlying cultural attitude towards R&D, and, as importantly, the lack of experience in the translation of innovation to globally competitive products. It is this second factor that is of interest to this essay. In the absence of some catalytic event, how are the limitations to be overcome? There is a body of work that suggests the economic complexity of a country is a measure of that country’s potential for diverse and continued export growth – which suggests some ability to translate innovation into globally valued products. Broadly speaking, a country innovates through two mechanisms – the active, mission-driven investment in high-risk, high-payoff

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breakthrough areas (the Sputnik example), and the more measured, osmotic process of moving into adjacent technology areas from established markets. For the second mechanism to be effective, the innovation ecosystem requires some level of complexity – those economies that have a diversity of skills can find innovation in the interactions between otherwise disparate technology areas. The more complex the technological landscape, the greater the opportunity for interdisciplinary breakthroughs. The Harvard Atlas of Economic Complexity and the associated country economic complexity indices are an interesting way to quantify this phenomenon. The Chinese economy developed from a few specialised clusters in 1995 to a much richer set of activities in 2018, the interactions among which hold the strong potential for ongoing innovation. During this period, China’s world complexity ranking improved from 39 to 18. If a vibrant level of economic complexity is a major source of ongoing innovation in a country – and in the absence of some catalytic driver potentially the major source – the question arises, how does Australia compare? Using the complexity metric, Australia’s ranking has dropped consistently over the decades, from 55th in the world in 1995 to 87th in the world in 2018. While Australia undoubtably has world-leading areas of strong economic activity, when viewed through the lens of this model the lack of complexity might be related to the apparent inability to translate otherwise world-leading basic research into new industries and opportunities. There may be a low density of sufficiently adjacent and experienced industry participants to mature and industrialise the basic research. Australia undoubtedly has world-leading areas of R&D, but the lack of overall complexity limits the natural ability of the ecosystem to drive ongoing, increasing innovation in new adjacencies, which in turn means innovation translation remains stovepiped into a few areas. This hypothesis, if true, might inform the structure and metrics of programs that are seeking to increase Australia’s innovation capacity.

The role of defence R&D Defence systems, and the environments in which they operate, are extremely complex. As a consequence, defence R&D, particularly when driven thematically (for example the current set of Defence Science and Technology Group STaR Shots), is also characterised by high levels of complexity. Thus, defence innovation programs are well-suited to be catalysts for driving innovation and change, and upskilling the broader Australian innovation ecosystem. Facilitating and executing R&D with high levels of complexity is also a feature associated with defence primes. A company like Lockheed Martin, with 49,000 research engineers developing new technologies for programs that span the deep oceans to deep space, can leverage its internal complexity to create new opportunities. This beneficial internal complexity, when combined with established supply chains and significant R&D investment, is one means by which the general R&D/innovation success of larger companies enables them to remain dominant in innovation and, hence, in the market. Summary An observation from decades of experience in AUS-US Defence R&D collaboration is that there is a significant, cultural difference between the two nations in the way R&D is perceived and, hence, managed. This can have a tangible impact on technology transition – especially for high-end technologies and international collaboration-where R&D and national security policy are deeply intertwined at all levels, though less so in Australia. Recognising and managing these differences is important not just for Australia’s national security but for maximising the potential contribution of the Australian innovation sector to future joint capabilities. Australia’s falling level of economic complexity may be an issue in positioning the nation to have a robust, broad-based, innovation future. International defence primes, such as Lockheed Martin, that are investing in Australian innovation play a unique and key role in the Australian innovation space.

Dr. Tony Lindsay is the director of Lockheed Martin Australia's STELaRLab. Previously, he spent 28 years at the Defence Science and Technology Group, finishing in his role as chief of the National Security and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance division in 2016.

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INNOVATING IN MANUFACTURING The Innovative Manufacturing CRC (IMCRC) pushes the boundaries of innovation, with a commitment to expand the range of what we can manufacture in Australia, and how we do it.

t is funded through the Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) program, which are medium-to long-term industry-led collaborative research programs that aim to solve industry-identified problems to improve the competitiveness, productivity and sustainability of Australian industries, funded through the Department of Industry, Science, Energy, and Resources. The CRC programs offer a pathway for PhD’s to partner with industry for research programs, while increasing the R&D capacity in small to medium enterprises (SMEs). Since its launch in 2016, the IMCRC has invested $30m of Commonwealth funding in advancing Australian manufacturing, in turn securing over $200m in overall investment towards transformative and collaborative research projects, innovation, and education. That is greater than a 5x multiplier from a taxpayer investment, a significant return. The funding reverberates across SMEs (from whom a substantial two thirds of the industry cash investment comes), industrial manufacturers, and new startups looking to scale their technology to the market. Significantly, this early return does not include the benefits of commercialisation, investment, job and supply chain creation, which all come in time. In four short years, including the most disruptive 12 months of the 21st century, IMCRC has enabled more than 40 industry-led projects, with 6 projects already completed. Its work focuses on four key areas: additive manufacturing processes; automated and assistive technologies; high-value product development; and industrial transformation.

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How does it work? What makes the IMCRC successful is its constant focus on the industry-led approach. That is how win-win outcomes are created for all the parties involved: universities, SMEs, startups, and research institutes. A commercially led-approach harnesses the skillsets of universities and research bodies including the CSIRO, while any commercial wins can serve to fund new research, leading to more commercial wins, and so on. Its team features a wealth of talent that have deep experience in manufacturing, and the realities involved. At the design stage, each project is crafted to ensure that its outcomes are not ordinary, but transformative, adding a new capacity or ability into the market, and raising Australian manufacturing as a whole, as well as providing exemplars to incentivise others. If a company or researcher seeking to bring a prototype to production approaches the IMCRC, it will insist that they partner up with a manufacturer so that there are genuine sector outcomes from the development. An $8m design robotics research project between Urban Arts Projects (UAP), Queensland University of Technology (QUT), RMIT University, and the IMCRC, aimed to develop vision-enabled robots that SMEs could use easily to replace the manual labour involved in producing complex art installations. As part of the project, UAP agreed to open its manufacturing facility, and involve other businesses in the research, allowing it to test and retest its robots in different projects, adding value for both UAP and artists. Manufacturing that has been done in low-wage environments like China, has now been relocated to Queensland through

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investment in technology that is improving local manufacturing competitiveness. As interest grew, the research project developed into the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Hub, attracting millions more in funding, and opening up the technology and knowledge to SMEs that want to move towards that advanced manufacturing, but can not wear the high capital costs up front. Now, the ARM Hub is a place where different manufacturers can connect, share knowledge, and collaborate across sectors, opening up new potential for innovation. It would have been simple for the IMCRC to help facilitate the program under its original design, and bring together two universities with a private company. By asking "How will this raise the level of manufacturing in Australia as a whole?", it allowed for the creation of something entirely different, with a much bigger impact. In the 2019–20 financial year, the IMCRC launched a new funding initiative that offers SMEs manufacturers access to R&D expertise and matched cash funding between $50,000–$150,000 for shorter-term, industry-led research projects in advanced manufacturing and digital technologies. This was in recognition of how critical SMEs are to Australia’s technology, and overcoming the limitations on access to funding, facilities,

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and expertise that multinationals and corporates already have available. This was also designed by IMCRC to stimulate investment and collaborative projects as the sector emerged from the COVID-19 crisis. Australia’s manufacturing future belongs to those who invest in advanced technologies and new business models, and the program directly facilitates that, allowing companies to compete on the quality of ideas and implementation, compared to the success of the past. This new funding builds on a broad portfolio that is creating new manufacturing opportunities, research and business models across most of Australia’s primary industry sectors. Furthering the concept that manufacturing is a horizontal enabler across all industry sectors, IMCRC’s projects cover the medtech, defence, mining, energy, construction, automotive, electronics, materials, consumer goods, utilities, and other key sectors. It is clear the IMCRC is transforming Australia’s capabilities, raising the bar of what Australia can manufacture. It is an enabler, helping to capture the real value of Australia’s world-class education and research institutes, bringing them together with industry to benefit all. The opportunity exists to scale up IMCRC’s business model, which is innovative in itself, to bring these benefits to the wider Australian innovation ecosystem.

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THE THREE PILLARS OF DEFENCE SCIENCE The Department of Defence, through the Defence Science & Technology Group (DSTG), leads the game-changing collaborations between private industry and government that drive disruptive innovation in defence, with a long history of scientific achievement.

s the second largest government-funded science organisation in Australia, DSTG achieves an outsized impact on science development in the country, with countless breakthroughs and world-firsts. Its history dates back to 1907, when Cecil Napier Hake was appointed Chemical Advisor to the Commonwealth Department of Defence, conducting research out of the Victorian Government Explosives Department Laboratory in Flinders Lane, Melbourne. In the 113 years since then, some of its standout successes include the Barra sonobuoy (a portmanteau of ‘sonar’ and buoy’ built by Australians in the late 1960s and used to detect enemy submarines), and laser defence systems deployed by fighter jets which can jam incoming missiles by using a burst of infrared light. It is not only Australia’s conflicts that inspire innovation within defence science. Closer to home, it designed the Aeromed Retrieval Unit in 1983, a medical unit designed for transporting premature and sick babies from regional areas to hospital by air, to conquer the tyranny of distance and time in life or death situations. But what does the future of defence science look like? And how does it see itself as operating within the broader Australian defence network, which includes civilians, universities, and private companies? A partnered future Turning ideas into innovations, commercialising them and bringing them into practice is no

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easy feat – many of the famous breakthroughs mentioned above were developed with years of effort. In the defence landscape, bringing a new technology to reality first is more than a market advantage, it is a necessity. Released in May 2020, More, together: Defence Science and Technology Strategy 2030 marks the shift to a partnered future. It will allow good ideas to become defence capabilities in a timeframe that matches the rapid rate of technological change. The challenge is to identify and partner with the right organisations and people early, ensure early buy-in, and mitigate what Defence refers to as ‘potential disconnects in innovation pathways’ to shorten the time taken to translate innovative thinking to capability advantage. And we are already seeing More, together in action. In November 2020, Minister for Defence Industry, The Hon Melissa Price MP, announced that the Next Generation Technologies Fund will be seeking submissions in early 2021 to develop an innovative ‘space qualified’ Radio Frequency (RF) sensor payload as part of the Space Capabilities priority area. This initiative is designed to develop and demonstrate high risk, high payoff space technology for Defence, but it can’t be done alone. Dr. David Kershaw explains it as such, “Moving into the future we are asking: What is the total S&T capability need? Where do those capabilities and skills lie in Australia? How do we access them together, to build that defence output?” This frames the first pillar of More, together,

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‘One Defence Science & Technology Capability’, in which an overarching coordination led by Defence achieves better results for the defence force, Australian companies, and researchers. However, to achieve the goals, both shortterm and long-term, Defence recognises it needs the right people and the right culture within its own organisation to lead the way. This is where the second pillar comes in – ‘Brilliant People, Collaborative Culture’. “That is about building people's leadership skills so that they can execute. Our people need to lead teams within Defence, industry, academia, and international partners. That is quite a different skillset to working on your own team, with your own problem,” says Dr. Kershaw. There has been a renewed focus on building a Defence science and technology workforce that is diverse, and a recognition of the value of teams with different life experience. Creating an inclusive culture will allow the organisation to both attract, and more importantly, retain, the best researchers in Australia. Once you have the framework for collaboration, and the people with the skill sets to achieve it, you need a state-of-the-art infrastructure to be able to break the mould. This is the third pillar, ‘Outstanding Research Infrastructure’. Defence’s mission is to build and maintain a technological advantage in warfare. By providing advantages at the research level, Defence can make sure that technology shocks, external advances that can render past progress obsolete, can be managed. Even those with no experience or understanding of the defence sector can relate to the rate of technological change over the

past two decades. Computers have developed from rudimentary, slow dial-up connections to pocket-portable smartphones that are constantly connected. That rate of change in the context of weapons systems, and more importantly, simulation exercises, has fundamentally disrupted the nature of defence research. Defence’s latest infrastructure investment, a supercomputer located in Edinburgh, South Australia, is being built with the goal to be within the top 50 most powerful computers in existence. Defence scientists will be able to run code thousands of times faster than on their highend desktop computers. “This means shortening the runtime for complex problems to realistic time frames, and tackling problems we couldn’t even dream of attempting on a desktop. High-performance computing offers a whole range of advantages, including accelerating the innovation cycle which is critical to maintaining competitiveness,” explains Professor John Taylor, DSTG’s program leader for High-performance Computing and Computational Science. Individually, the pillars seem like a common-sense approach to research and innovation. All organisations need the best people, best processes, and best infrastructure to achieve the best results. What will set Defence apart is how those pillars inform and support the truly incredible science and technology work it does, incorporating them at a cultural level, and propelling the rate of innovation forward. And all of Australia stands to benefit from the shift.

Photo: Department of Defence

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SCALE, PARTNERSHIPS KEY TO DELIVERING IMPACT Australia faces an increasingly complex and contested security environment. Our capacity to maintain a regionally superior Australian Defence Force (ADF) with a strategic advantage across the full spectrum of Defence capabilities requires a new approach to military research.

ith an annual budget of around $600m, the Defence Science and Technology (DST) Group is Australia’s second-largest public sector research institution. Defence scientists contribute to world-class, high-impact science-supporting operations and advise on the acquisition and sustainment of Defence capability. For the past 113 years, DST researchers have contributed to the global good through inventions such as the black box flight recorder and, more recently, counter-IED devices, known as Redwing and Silvershield, which have boosted the nation’s economy by more than $45m and saved the lives of countless Australian and Afghani soldiers. Moving forward, DST will play a stronger role in enabling and coordinating support to Defence from a national S&T enterprise, of which other publicly funded research agencies (PFRAs), universities, large companies, small businesses and entrepreneurs are all critical elements. Collaboration affords young STEM students the opportunity to work in world-class Defence laboratories, further developing their skills and talent. These exchanges provide Defence with a workforce pipeline to sustain Defence capability into the future. They also provide the opportunity for staff and student exchanges between agencies. Supporting this vision is the Next Generation Technologies Fund (NGTF), a forward-looking program focused on R&D in emerging and future

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technologies, with an investment of $730m to June 2026 as determined by the Defence White Paper 2016. The $50m Defence CRC for Trusted Autonomous Systems opened its facility in Brisbane in July 2019 with the aim of creating collaborative research and innovation networks focused on Defence-capability outcomes. Inaugural founding members include BAE Systems Australia, DefendTex, RMIT University and DST. Contained within a mission-focused model, the first three research projects were conducted in the maritime, air and land fields, led by Thales Australia, Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems. It is the strategic environment that shapes Defence’s capability needs and requirements. This includes technological trends and emerging threats, as well as lessons learned from existing capability. Defence has made significant progress in creating programs that foster new ideas for advancing ADF capability, programs that mature these ideas and others that leverage the national S&T enterprise. The 2016 Defence White Paper introduced a major new investment in science, technology, research and innovation, with funding directed towards significantly growing the contributions of Australian industry and the tertiary sector to the creation of new Defence capability. We now have an opportunity to build on these initiatives, moving further towards realising integrated innovation pathways and ensuring

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the ideas of our brilliant Defence Science and Technology research teams have impact in the form of Defence capability. The More, Together: Defence Science and Technology Strategy 2030, launched by the Minister for Defence, Senator Linda Reynolds, in May 2020 outlines our vision for Defence science and technology over the next decade. Our new strategy is a significant shift in the way we partner with the national science and technology enterprise to achieve impact through strategic research. At its heart, the strategy is about scale and partnership. It involves effectively leveraging and shaping the national S&T enterprise to tackle our most critical challenges. Our approach is technology agnostic. Instead of backing particular technologies, we have focused on defining the problems we want to solve and working back from there. The strategy requires an interdisciplinary approach. Deep collaboration across the entire S&T enterprise, between government, industry, academia and the broader research and innovation community will enable us to tackle challenges from every angle. This is a tremendous opportunity for industry and the research community. Over the next decade and beyond, we will be relying on Australian businesses, from start-ups to national enterprises, to play an increasingly significant role in developing and maintaining Defence capability. A robust, resilient and internationally competitive Australian defence industry is critical to our vision. Our strategy is headlined by the introduction of a new concept – a set of ambitious science, technology and research initiatives called STaR Shots, in homage to the more familiar "moon shot". Our STaR Shots are challenging, inspirational and aspirational scientific endeavours that the whole nation can get behind. By concentrating the nation’s strategic research efforts on a smaller number of bigger, specific and challenging problems, we can

increase the scale and intensity of our efforts to deliver real, game-changing impact. The STaR Shots are focused on delivering capabilities that will be critical on the future battlefield: disruptive weapon effects; remote undersea surveillance; information warfare; resilient multi-mission space; battle-ready platforms; agile command and control; operating in a CBRN environment; and quantum-assured positioning, navigation and timing. As our strategic context evolves, new STaR Shots may be added. And just as the space race and moon landing gave us innovations such as Teflon, freeze-dried foods and flame-resistant clothing, I expect that our STaR Shots will deliver spin-off benefits for the whole of society. The strategy also outlines the scaling up of the broader DST program of developing a highly skilled and collaborative workforce, recognising diversity in partnerships and building a shared culture. Our strategy presents great opportunities for industry and the S&T community, and I firmly believe there is good reason for confidence and optimism. While the future may be uncertain, the strategy provides guidance to ensure the national S&T enterprise is strengthened and explicitly leveraged to achieve the scale needed to address the strategic and geopolitical challenges we face. I have no doubt that, regardless of the challenges that confront us, we can achieve more, together.

Professor Tanya Mary Monro FAA, FTSE, FOSA, FAIP, GAICD, is an Australian physicist known for her work in photonics. She has been Australia's Chief Defence Scientist since March 2019. Prior to that she was the Deputy Vice Chancellor, Research and Innovation at the University of South Australia.

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THE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF INNOVATION ECOSYSTEMS Innovation ecosystem dynamics: thought leadership insights from an innovation scholar Dr Lara Moroko.

MG: Why should we be thinking of Australia's total innovation enterprise in terms of an “ecosystem”? How does it help in understanding and advancing the country’s innovation output? LM: My favoured definition of innovation is a new idea, that creates value (for the innovator and the user) and can be executed (see: Kastelle, 2012). When an innovator is part of a healthy ecosystem, access to resources, knowledge and other organisations they need for the successful execution of the idea is both possible and supported. So, having a clear view on the nature of Australia’s ecosystem, it’s generative hubs, weak spots and participants is critical to understanding how output can be improved in general and for specific sectors and regions. 1MG: What are some KPIs for judging the "health" of the nation’s innovation ecosystem? What are some of the issues associated with measurement against these KPIs? LM: Some work has been done by the MIT Lab for Innovation Science and Policy on proxy metrics for judging the health of ecosystems via innovation and entrepreneurship capacity. Two of their simple measures for ecosystem outputs are number of start-up enterprises established each year, via business registration (E-Cap, an entrepreneurship measure) and number of research publications and patent applications (I-Cap, an innovation measure). Those ecosystems that have high levels of both tend to be productive and thriving. For example, on a global scale, Australia ranks very highly for entrepreneurship (new businesses), but is comparatively poor in terms of patent applications per capita.

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While these measures are easy to collect, they are retrospective and don’t shed any light on what should be addressed to improve the connections, vibrancy, velocity or value of the ecosystem. In the Australian example, the metrics don’t help us unpick whether the number of new businesses is high due to an inherently entrepreneurial business culture or the perceived tax advantage of running a small business. 1MG: What are some things our innovation hubs etc. ought be doing more of / less of to ensure meaningful contributions to society's needs? LM: There are three big areas of improvement for most innovation. The first is upskilling prospective and current investors. While a lot of effort is put into upskilling entrepreneurs to secure investment, little or no effort is put into improving and expanding the investor base. This means that in many ecosystems there is a small pool of investors with specific mandates that only serve a subsection of the potential ecosystem, skewing development into areas of investor focus, rather than areas of greatest societal benefit. The second is the tendency for institutions within the ecosystem to replicate programs, structures and processes that have worked elsewhere. Support appropriate for an ecosystem heavy in fin-tech entrepreneurs may be a bad match for ag-tech or social entrepreneurs, for example. Innovation hubs can improve the positive impact on ecosystem health by firstly understanding the needs of the existing and latent entrepreneurial talent and the unique advantages of the region, rather than assuming what works in Silicon Valley will also work in Sydney, Melbourne or Hobart.

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The third is to deliberately collaborate with other institutions to be a positive force for structural change in their local system. Outperforming ecosystems tend to have the benefit of policy initiatives such as favourable tax treatment of R&D spend, flexible planning permissions for concentrated innovation zones, public funding of seed funding for discovery, prototyping, commercialisation and internationalisation, etc. Generating these conditions, locally, is beyond most individual institutions, but can be achieved through the coordinated, collective effort of the ecosystem. 1MG: What are some big issues affecting the ability of startups reaching their full potential? LM: The biggest issues I see startups struggle with is lack of deep curiosity about their market and business. While this may seem counter-intuitive given the zeal of most founders, there two manifestations of this common in underperforming startups. The first is a poor understanding of the market for their product, service or experience, i.e., a lack of “product/market fit”. Many startups flounder when they don’t do the hard yards in iterating their initial idea until it makes sense to an addressable, profitable market. The second is lack of understanding of how their business should be structured given what the market is willing to pay and the resources they can access. Whether through inexperience, poor advice or lack of mentorship, I see startups with an amazing market offer for a clearly defined customer segment but no idea how to turn an innovation into a viable business. Both these issues can only be addressed if the founders are willing to be coached and have the intellectual humility to move beyond the early forms of their market offer and business structure. 1MG: How important is "cross-pollination" of ideas on innovation, between government, academia and industry, to Australia’s innovation ecosystem reaching its full potential? LM: There is an emergent understanding of the importance of this “quadruple helix” of government, industry, universities and entrepreneurs/

public. These groups interact, combine and recombine for a healthy and growing ecosystem. This seems particularly important when an ecosystem is being deliberately created. In recent research, my colleagues and I mapped the birth of a new ecosystem hub. Government provided a policy change that attracted co-funding with a university and industry partners. The university and industry set strategy and provided training and networking for the entrepreneurs/public. University academics and entrepreneurs/public provided the IP for innovation, which was co-developed, tested and scaled with the university and industry. If you remove any of the strands of the helix, pathways in the ecosystem are broken and individual actors are effectively cut off from the resources and skills they need. 1MG: What are some challenges facing innovators in commercialisation of their novel ideas? LM: Pitfalls in the path to commercialisation and scale are well understood, at the founder and startup level. Getting and acting on the right advice and mentoring, attracting flexible and timely funding, curating an appropriate team with deep skills and the ability to multi-task, plus beating competing innovations to market are just a few of the known challenges. In Australia, the startup ecosystem is well supported through university based and commercial incubators, open networks and supporting entities, such as the Sydney School of Entrepreneurship. However, there are some additional challenges stemming from the structure of our ecosystem. For example, quality and quantity of venture capital is comparatively low (ranked in the bottom quintile of developed ecosystems). Furthermore, Australian universities have world class researchers in almost every field, yet research-based IP commercialisation – also known as tech transfer – is surprisingly modest. Factors such as inconsistent support (investment, mentoring and resources) and policies relating to tech transfer have led to no Australian universities being ranked in the top 100 most innovative universities globally and only four universities featuring in the Asia Pacific top 100.

Dr Lara Moroko is Adjunct Fellow at Macquarie University and also Managing Director of Fisherfolk Partners, a boutique consultancy specialising in innovation, commercialisation, human centred design and smart disruption.

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A DESIGN DRIVEN CIRCULAR ECONOMY A chemical engineer with knowledge of economics defines an area of potential Australian leadership, and a systematic solution to the global waste crisis. By Ali Abbas

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he world is amid a waste crisis; we are producing waste more than ever, and our traditional recycling avenues cannot keep up. Australia sees itself at a crossroads: we are firmly positioned to be world leaders in green technologies, yet our progress is insufficient. To overcome our problems with waste will require more than just better end-of-pipe recycling systems, it requires an overhaul of the way we look at waste entirely. Everything we use, every object and material that we create has value. More importantly, it has value before it is created, and after it is thrown away. Are we using our raw materials in the most effective way possible, and how do we best extract value out of our products once they have been used? It is through the principles of the Circular Economy that we best answer the question of maximising usefulness at every step of a product’s lifecycle. Much emphasis has been on recycling, and less on design that considers materials with their entire lifespan in mind – design thinking that holistically considers every step a material passes through in supply chain. This includes substitution of materials and chemicals with low-carbon alternatives. The goal of circular design is to increase the time any one product stays in service, and to manufacture products such that they are easily repairable and repurposed. This is the central motivation behind the ‘Circular Economy Certification Scheme’* we have called for, and whose requirements for better design aims at ‘designing out’ waste by reducing environmental inefficiencies in

material and product design. I point out two critical gaps – the first is about coupling modern design paradigm, empowered by algorithmic intelligence, with circular economy principles and quantifying the circularity of manufactured products, through material circularity indices (MCIs). Products designed with high MCIs are pursued with MCIs serving as objectives that drive the design in a feedforward sense. This effectively brings the technological innovations focus to the front end of the product lifecycle – the design step – being, I contend, the most impactful step in the entire circular economy proposition. This contrasts with business as usual design that aims to sell more dispensable products, and then having to deal with them through ‘end-of-pipe’ recycling that is measured by feedback metrics such as landfill diversion rates. The second gap is related to Circular Economy policy, namely, a lack of information regarding which chemicals and materials should be privileged or avoided in product design. Creating a register of chemicals whose circularity will be reported will allow industry to make better informed decisions during the design stage. The techniques enabling research and innovations in circular design are increasingly clever ways to utilise data and algorithms. Design innovation necessitates the consideration of countless choices of materials, incorporation of recycled content and interactions between supply chains. At the WTRH, we have been developing and applying sophisticated algorithmic techniques (dubbed ‘machine learning’ or AI) to the field of material design

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to enable the prediction of a material’s properties and function based on any number of input variables and environmental objectives, and while within the context of that material’s service such as when used in a manufacturing process. One of the more promising applications of a design driven approach to the circular economy are large-scale integrations within Eco-industrial parks (EIPs). Within these parks exists multiple co-located industries engaging collectively for the competitive advantage of exchanged resources: materials, energy, water and waste. Often referred to as industrial symbiosis, EIPs seek to minimise the waste produced by an individual industrial entity by exploiting the fact that wastes created by one process can be valuable feedstock in another. Over the last few decades, tens of EIPs have been developed overseas and several in Australia (most recently in NSW dubbed Special Activation Precincts – SAPs) that have realised significant economic and environmental benefits. Achieving this level of circularity requires the creation of models which can identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in material supply chains. This is the core of the work that our research team is involved with. We utilise a Process Systems Engineering approach to create models using cutting-edge techniques that look at how industrial supply chains intersect, and how economic and environmental optimisations can be formulated and solved. We have created models based on the incorporation of waste and industrial co-products into low-carbon concrete, and the use of organic wastes into low-temperature biological digestion. This is materials refining – our concrete and biomaterials are extended for use in advanced manufacturing (3D printing) of new products with MCIs maximised. These innovations are now possible through computer-aided design that will see endless reuse and circulation of materials. It is exciting to imagine the ways design and algorithmic intelligence will evolve to drive future product and manufacturing processes.

Unlocking Australia’s waste resources opportunities through a digital circular economy. We expect digital sciences and platforms will unlock the massive potential of Australia’s waste resources, enabling accelerated circular economy transitions and deep innovations in manufacturing. Data is the bedrock of optimal resource management at any scale and will answer questions related to supply and demand, as well as technology development, size and location. A geo-spatial data platform (like our WTRH’s Waste Atlas) informs business decisions, technology selection, public policy and regulation. The availability and access of data and circular economy indices, at personal device level and in real-time, facilitates the social license and the public understanding of waste technologies, related to the all-important non-technical side of waste. We recognise that the issue of waste is not just a technological issue, it has deeply rooted political, social, cultural, and economic dimensions. Our ability to successfully implement circular design principles is reliant on broad but consistent community engagement. To design products and processes which are fundamentally different and more circular will require that design be intuitive, accessible, and well communicated. Technological innovations represent an important part of addressing our waste crisis, but it is only through the union of technology, industry and society that the issue of waste can be overcome. We must work in a collective effort on that sense of purpose around the environment – it is now evident that a trans-disciplinary solution is essential to the task. And Australia has the capabilities to tackle it, indeed to be a leader, should we muster the necessary focus and will.

Associate Professor Ali Abbas is Director, Waste Transformation Research Hub The University of Sydney

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BEST OF BOTH WORLDS CDC Data Centres identified a gap in Australia’s digital infrastructure and brought the best of both European and American data centres under a new business model.

overnments used to protect their documents and files with heavy steel doors, keys, and secrecy. Now, the nature of data has changed. We have seen it become digitised, and are now witnessing the next trend, an open-access model where the same security needs to be maintained while allowing different departments to combine datasets to learn new things. CDC Data Centres is enabling that transition. For Greg Boorer, the founder of CDC Data Centres, 2007 seemed like a good time to start a business. Fresh from working across some of Europe’s and America’s best data centres, he had learned how to create systems that ran on very low levels of electricity, necessitated by German laws on energy efficiency, and in high-security scenarios, relating to the US-designed centres that were built to survive through climate disaster scenarios. He had moved to Canberra to start a family, and quickly found that the systems that held sensitive government data, and computing infrastructure lived in the basements of 60-year old buildings, with little to no resilience or backup.

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“Outages were considered normal,” Boorer remembers. Having seen what Europe and the US were doing, he knew things could be done in a better way. He planned for purpose-built facilities designed around the nuances of government, with a focus on sustainability, green outcomes, high-security, and uptime. Of course, there was some resistance. Governments were not comfortable putting their crown jewels in third-party commercial data centres. In the end, cost, quality and liability benefits won out, and the company won their first job. From the business starting in March 2007, construction began in September 2007. A few months later, the GFC hit. Suddenly, it was difficult to get money, the government had different priorities, and digital transformation was put on the backburner. Years of political turmoil followed, which caused even greater disruption. Innovation needed for survival There were no banks lending, and no money available, so CDC Data Centres had to be creative. Historically, data centres are like hotels for data; they are sophisticated property developers that provide space, power, and cooling. “We just did not have the money to do a big rollout for 10-years worth of infrastructure,” explains Boorer. If they couldn’t build the whole hotel at once, they would have to start with a single room. They looked at granular, modular ways to fit out a data centre and to build it out. Combining US-style resilience and Germanstyle efficiency, Boorer added a new element, a drop-feed result that the company could build up as it brought in more clients. What they built was smaller than had previously been used in a data centre, but the same quality as what multinationals were producing at the time. The first two years were tough, notes Boorer, feeling the pressure of scaling up in a low-capital environment. “It was difficult to make ends meet. At one point I had to look up the definition of trading while insolvent,” he reminisces. “We had to be creative. That is where our architecture, business model, and approach were from. It got us through that period, but that same philosophy taken through to good times lets you be more successful – you are humble,

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frugal, creative, thinking about every dollar like your last.” As they added new government departments, each footprint was customised to fit that customer's requirements. That compartmentalisation allowed for better security between agencies, and better uptime. Working through that challenge, over the last 13 years, CDC has won tender after tender, evolving the business to suit the changing demands of government. Now, they are able to compete with the global behemoths. Pushed there by vision and circumstance, over the next decade the world moved towards their thinking. Now, modular data centres are built using pre-fabricated elements, mimicking the CDC approach. The future of data centres CDC’s clients’ data holdings are growing by 80 per cent every year and that scale will continue to grow. At the same time, technology has shrunk. Even 10–15 years ago, a computer as powerful as a smartphone would have filled up an entire room. Of course, in the same way that files sitting in a cabinet collecting dust are not fundamentally useful, the same is true of the vast collections of data the government collects. “The world has changed remarkably; people now understand that the data of the country is one of the most valuable assets you have. Now, data is seen as a nationally critical infrastructure of its own,” says Boorer. The data accumulated have been collected for different purposes, but the insights contained within that are remarkable. Now, there is movement on combining datasets for greater public benefits. Of course, this creates challenges: data centres that were created to be compartmentalised and siloed, reflecting the nature of government, now have to be built with data-sharing in mind. CDC has to manage privacy, and security concerns while creating open-infrastructure that leads to efficient information supply chains. What would this mean in practice? In 2019, workers for the national health department noticed that there was a trend of unusual birth defects happening across the country. The WA health department wanted to look at what medications were being given to which mothers, and

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at what point in time of the pregnancy, to see if they could find a correlation. Combining the national health data, which tracks which medications are given to patients, with the state-level data, which recorded patient locations and outcomes of births, this could have been a relatively simple exercise, with clear and obvious benefits to public health. In the future, that could eliminate that birth defect. Unfortunately, the protocols were not in place, so despite both datasets being accessible from a technical point of view, the law would not allow it. For CDC, which designs the systems to allow for better data-sharing and insights, it is the legal and practical agreements that are harder than the technology. “If you think about all the data that we have, and all the benefits we could find, we have barely even scratched the surface,” notes Boorer. Quantum disruption Bill Gates once famously said the world will only need nine computers. Now, people carry multiple computers in their pockets. The next big potential shift in computing will come from quantum-based systems, which hypothetically could outpower traditional computers by several orders of magnitude. Early quantum success has proven to be remarkable for specific use cases and specific data sets, though they are hardly straightforward to get working, as they are so sensitive, they need to operate in entirely ‘noiseless’ environments. This means no light, sound, movement, radio interference, or heat. Coming back to the hotel metaphor, it's easy to understand why they are still a fair way off commercial applications. Boorer says, “I am confident that businesses like ours will benefit. If you look at the history of technological and social development, globally, humans’ ability to consume available computing resources at any point of time in history wins the day. “As more power becomes available, human creativity results in greater understanding of the uses of that computing power, whether that is for research, altruistic purposes, or commercial gain. “Computing has changed a lot since we started 14 years ago, and I’m sure that will continue to be the case.”

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

INNOVATION BOOSTING AUSTRALIA’S RED MEAT INDUSTRY Australia’s red meat industry is harnessing innovation to tackle 3 key issues: carbon neutrality by 2030, biosecurity, and market access.

ustralian red meat is defying rusted-on stereotypes, with industry leaders recognising that innovation is crucial for the sector’s future. Michael Crowley, the General Manager of Research, Development, and Adoption at Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA), shares his insights on four key issues the industry is tackling head-on to ensure maximum impact for its beef, lamb and goatmeat producers.

progress – and we need the whole of industry to buy in to get us there,” Michael says. A few examples of the technological solutions to reduce methane emissions in livestock include: • A red seaweed extract used as an additive in cattle feed • A focus on lower-methane-emitting livestock breeds • Adding more legumes to the pasture feedbase.

Carbon neutral by 2030 (CN30) target In 2017, the Australian red meat industry set the ambitious target to be carbon neutral by 2030 (CN30). “To achieve that target, we need to accelerate

“Legumes have condensed tannins in their leaves that naturally reduce methane emissions and increase productivity through improved weight gain.” “Using legumes in pastures means more

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kilograms of production per hectare, as well as a positive environmental outcome in terms of improved soil health and emission reduction,” Michael says. Alongside the industry’s CN30 target, the Federal Government also has a range of financial incentives to help farmers and others in the agricultural industry take practical steps towards carbon neutrality. Key programs and strategies include a Technology Investment Roadmap, Emissions Reduction Fund, and Agricultural Biodiversity Stewardship Package. Biosecurity There are several research and development projects underway to improve the health and welfare of livestock, as well as the productivity and integrity of the Australian red meat industry. These projects primarily focus on: • Creating on-farm biosecurity plans that include measures to reduce the risk of introducing and/or spreading an infectious disease, pest or weed onto properties. • Implementing industry biosecurity programs that aim to prevent and control emergency animal diseases. • Containing disease outbreaks to prevent spread between businesses, states, and countries. • Creating vaccination protocols to prevent and contain the spread of disease. • Monitoring and evaluation of perceived

and actual biosecurity risks to the industry. “A key biosecurity priority for the Australian red meat industry in 2022 has been assisting state and federal governments to keep Australia free of foot-and-mouth disease and lumpy skin disease,” Michael says. Numerous industry organisations have partnered up to manage the biosecurity risks around these diseases, providing technical expertise and investment in potential prevention and treatment solutions, including mRNA vaccines. “Biosecurity is essential to our market access as we remain free from several exotic animal diseases and plant pests.” Market access According to Michael, there are several big opportunities for red meat in global markets, such as the EU. “We are negotiating with the EU to deliver more favourable market access conditions as part of a comprehensive free trade agreement,” he says. Meanwhile, the industry continues to add value through product innovation to bolster trade opportunities. One project in particular has explored extracting collagen from animal hides and skins, which are now being developed into food-grade collagen – as well as collagen for the beauty and medical industries. “These diverse innovations show the industry is testing its mettle for future challenges, providing better market access for our producers,” Michael says. 11/11/2022

Michael Crowley is the General Manager of RD&A at Meat & Livestock Australia.

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Innovation in practice

MONEY AS A FORCE FOR GOOD Australian Ethical is a pioneer of ethical investing in Australia, using market forces to have a positive impact since 1986.

he world as we know it erupted in 2020. It was a year of profound turmoil and disruption. In countries around the world, rich and poor, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the weaknesses of our existing systems and interconnected economies. Despite long-standing warnings from scientists about the risks of a pandemic, the world was woefully unprepared for COVID-19. And yet the pandemic is only a prelude to another looming crisis: the climate crisis. Because the impacts of climate crisis did not stop for COVID-19 – there were still wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, and rising sea levels. The most vulnerable communities were disproportionately affected. As was the case with the pandemic, scientists have long been sounding the alarm about a climate crisis. But in an unexpected twist, 2020 was also the year that these warnings began to hit home. What’s more, the warnings were no longer fringe. Instead they were reinforced by the heartland of our financial systems – central bankers, insurers, and credit rating agencies – as well as millions of people around the world demanding change. Countries and investors began to look past the division that had hindered tackling some of the world’s most pressing issues such as climate and inequality. They heard the calls for humanity to come together and address the problems facing our global community, and a clear mandate for finance to be part of the solution emerged. And so, 2020 became the year that the pandemic and the climate crisis combined to create a compelling catalyst for making ethical

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

and responsible investing the norm for every portfolio. Of course, that finance can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem is not news to Australian Ethical. The company has been investing ethically – and only ethically – since it began in 1986. The founders’ vision was to invest for a better world where money would be a force for good. Despite going against the prevailing ideology of the time with their ethical approach to investing, their ambition was to harness the power of financial markets to bring about social and environmental change. They could see that market forces were powerful and virtually impossible to eliminate. To them, money could be a source of innovation so that when it was spent or invested, innovation was transferred and new possibilities emerged. And they could see that moving capital in the right way would become increasingly important in a world that prioritised profit over planet. By allocating investors’ capital, they set out stop supporting the businesses that engaged in activities harmful to people, animals and the planet. Because without the financial support of investors, these destructive companies would eventually cease to exist. By only allocating capital to ethical companies they could accelerate the path to sustainability. However, for years, ethical investing was viewed with suspicion. Could portfolios that avoided oil and gas companies, tobacco, and other profitable but unethical industries have high enough returns to satisfy investors? Would they survive during times of market upheaval? The COVID-19 financial crisis has proven

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the doubters wrong. It has helped accelerate a shift in public discourse, making normal the ideas that were once thought fringe. Investors and businesses are becoming socially and environmentally conscious; and ethical investing is generating competitive returns that benefit society and the environment as well. And while it is indeed tragic that a global pandemic should bring us to this point, the time for small commitments, hyperbole and delays in embracing ethical investing is quickly disappearing. Instead, people are realising that ethical investing can unlock massive economic benefits for Australia while delivering financial returns for Australians. It’s not a choice between being good for the economy or being good for the environment. Instead, more and more people are grasping the role of ethical investing in solving some of the world’s most persistent problems. By allocating capital to the technologies and companies that are likely to have a positive impact on the environment and our society, ethical investing is fuelling the world’s ability to create further innovations. Research shows that 86% of Australians expect their super or other investments to be invested responsibly and ethically and nine in 10 feel it’s important that their financial institution invests responsibly and ethically across the board. Their desire for their savings and investments to have a positive impact – and their willingness to take action to ensure this – look set to shape the future of investing in Australia. And as ethical investors, Australian Ethical knows this to be true. It is seeing record flows into its investment products as Australians realise their power to invest in a better future. “With us, our customers are creating impact by investing in businesses and projects that are making the world sustainable during this time of dual crises: the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change,” says John McMurdo, CEO of Australian Ethical. It has never been about a lack of capital – there’s an estimated $379 trillion across the global financial system – but about the traditional rules that govern the allocation of that capital, lingering myths and short-termism that make it easier and more profitable for investors to bet against the planet rather than for it. But in many ways, 2020 was the year people

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began to reimagine a world that is more sustainable, resilient and healthy. And in doing so, they opened their eyes to the opportunities ethical investing offers them for better returns and a better future. Something that Australian Ethical could see

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Innovation in practice

WOLLONGONG ATTRACTING INVESTMENT The coastal NSW city features its own university, an innovation-focused growth strategy, and an enviable lifestyle. It is hoping that the combination wins over business.

ith access to a workforce of 1.2 million, $1.5bn in investments, 15 cranes currently adorning the skyline, and only 1 hour south of Sydney, Wollongong is pitching itself as a place where businesses and people can reach their full potential. A crucial factor in the success of any innovation strategy is the nurturing and availability of highly-skilled talent. The University of Wollongong (UOW) is a major jewel in the city’s crown. Consistently ranked in the top 250 universities worldwide, the research intensive university has built a strong reputation across a range of disciplines. UOW ranks among the top 2% of universities in the world, and routinely rates among the top Australian universities in key areas including graduate satisfaction and starting salaries. The University teaches 36,000 students, with more than 2,400 staff, contributing around $2bn to the region annually. More importantly, the UOW's strong focus on the local industry is a selling point for businesses looking for a new base where they can join an innovative ecosystem that doubles as a supportive business environment. The Innovation Campus, a collaboration between academia and industry that provides personalised services to businesses and startups, exemplifies this. Set on 33 hectares by the beach, the $600m site encourages innovative organisations from around the world to co-locate with leading research institutions. The city is not resting on its laurels, however, with UOW recently announcing plans for a proposed Health and Wellbeing Precinct, set

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

to be based at the Innovation Campus. The integrated research and learning environment is billed as a $400m–$500m investment in the region. As Warrick Shanks, managing partner, KPMG, which set up its own offices in Wollongong, explains, “The University of Wollongong has strong industry linkages and events which greatly benefit businesses and provide opportunities for students and researchers”. SMART investment UOW’s SMART Infrastructure Facility is one of the largest research institutions in the world dedicated to helping governments and businesses better plan for the future, and investigating how connected sensors will broadly affect all sectors, enabling automation in public infrastructure. Its work is completed alongside some of the oldest, most prestigious institutions on the planet, as part of the International Symposium for Next Generation Infrastructure (ISNGI), which also features the University of Oxford, and Virginia Tech. It brings together experts from fields such as rail, infrastructure systems, transport, water, energy, economics and modelling and simulation, providing 30 state-of-the-art laboratories to facilitate research. The SMART Infrastructure Facility has developed open-source prototypes of connected sensors in its Internet of Things (IoT) Hub, which simplifies the roll-out process across private providers in public spaces. On the AI side, UOW's CogniCity program

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harnesses social media by gathering, sorting, and displaying real-time situation reports from urban infrastructure issues such as flooding or traffic congestion. For city planning, the SMART Infrastructure Facility, partnering with Transport for NSW, collaborated to develop an interactive, intuitive, flexible simulation platform to support transport and urban planning in the state’s capital city. Feedback from businesses In 2018, the Regional Australia Institute measured the innovation measures of 95 Local Government Areas in regional NSW. Based on their matrix of innovation measures its Wollongong fit in the top three across the state. What do the companies that have made the decision to relocate or set up in Wollongong have to say of the city? Global ICT company NEC is one example, having invested $25m to open its Wollongong office in 2016. General manager of the Wollongong division, Martin Braithwaite, who had previously worked in Sweden and the USA, notes, “NEC chose Wollongong due to its combination of state-of-the art facilities, access to a talent base provided by UOW student and graduate pool, easy access to Sydney and the wonderful business and lifestyle benefits of the Wollongong location. “It also made good sense to base a global innovation company such as NEC in an environment like the one UoW’s Innovation Campus provides.

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“Since our move to Wollongong, NEC has identified additional advantages including the region’s large pool of young and well educated talent who prefer to stay in their region rather than commute to Sydney. This has resulted in an increase in our staff retention rates due to the positive work–life balance and significant reduction in travel times that our staff experience.” Investment giant Mercer employs 500 people in Wollongong, administering its superannuation services there. Renee Whiteside, people and culture leader, Mercer Wollongong, says of the city, “There is a strong sense of community in Wollongong, we co-create and collaborate around ideas and issues. “Many business networks exist here. The Australian Human Resources Institute has an Illawarra chapter of AHRI. I am the convenor for the Illawarra chapter and part of the Illawarra Business Chamber. I get to experience the sense of community firsthand through these networks. “These groups are very approachable, making it easy to network in Wollongong.” The City of Wollongong is in the process of opening up some 60,000m2 of office space for businesses seeking to relocate. For those businesses seeking strong local talent, a great lifestyle sell for employees, and none of the transport infrastructure inefficiencies of the coastal capitals, it seems like a simple solution.

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Innovation in practice

PUTTING CUSTOMERS AT THE HEART OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Australia Post has delivered across the country for the past 211 years. From the steam train to electric vehicles, the company has adapted when needed – and the novel coronavirus forced it to change once more.

ver the last decade, parcel growth has steadily hovered between ten to fifteen per cent annually. In comparison, parcel growth over the last few months of the pandemic saw 75 per cent growth this year, on certain days up 200 per cent. Executive general manager of Transformation and Enablement at Australia Post, John Cox, attributes this to the millions of Australians stuck at home, under lockdown who have been unable to access physical shopping spaces. “In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic we now have people who shopped online occasionally but have now completely shifted, and those who previously preferred to physically shop have no other choice,” said Cox. As a result, there were one million new Australia Post customers between April and September of 2020 and 8.6 million households that shopped online, equating to $4.2bn in additional e-commerce over that period that would have otherwise happened in-store. In order to meet the high demand for service, Australia Post leveraged its existing digital transformation to accelerate its physical capabilities. “The pandemic has been an opportunity for Australia Post to accelerate digital change within our organisation,” says Cox. “If we hadn’t prepared the groundwork like we did, we definitely would not have been able to respond to the same extent and high quality”.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

From a corporate perspective, Australia Post now has one of the largest telecommunications networks in the country, with its facilities and 4,500 post offices moving to a software-defined network. As this upgrade rolls out across the network, it will mean each facility will ultimately have the most up to date access to technology and services – meaning faster parcel processing, greater bandwidth for digital services and significantly higher service capabilities at every site. On the road, drivers now use a fully integrated, single scanning platform for deliveries, where previously multiple devices, using different technologies were required. The change also means that changes within the driver app can be made more rapidly, and customers will be provided more accurate tracking information for their deliveries, within a window of two hours. The inbuilt scanner app uses machine learning models to create a safe and optimised route for a delivery journey but is built with flexibility to account for any unexpected delays. In 2019, Australia Post also shifted to the Google Cloud platform to improve its data analytics, allowing for more rapid insights into the business. This has enabled it to actively improve the customer experience and improve operational efficiency, providing insights in real-time. According to Cox, utilising such data analytics has further enabled the business to create prediction models as close as two per cent for volume

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forecasts for upcoming sale periods, giving Australia Post as much time as possible to plan for some of the biggest online shopping periods across the country. “Telecommunications transformation is a key step in Australia Post’s growth strategy, which is one that includes the rewrite of retail point of sale, telematics in vehicles and facilities, and leveraging the recent partnership with Google for data analytics,” said Cox. In order to keep up with the quantities of orders being placed, Australia Post opened the largest parcel sorting facility in the Southern Hemisphere in Brisbane on a 50,000 square metre facility in 2019, with a new Melbourne west facility set to open in late 2020. The $240m investment in the flagship facility comes complete with two Beumer high-speed sorters capable of processing over 50,000 parcels per hour, four robotic arms that can together clear 320 cages per hour, a parcel picker that can move 2,500 parcels per hour, and 23 automated guided vehicles that can lift and move objects weighing up to 1.4 tonnes each. Cox says that these investments have placed Australia Post in good stead and will enable it to process more parcels, faster, more safely and more securely than ever before. Beyond the growth in parcels, there are 1550 communities across Australia, primarily in rural and

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regional Australia, that today have no bank branch and rely on the Bank@Post program to access financial services. “The rewrite of our point of sale modernises our capability to deliver services such as Bank@Post. This service will help ensure all Australians can continue to use Post Offices across the country to access important financial services,” says Cox In addition to financial services, Australia Post has innovated products such as its Digital ID. This product was given the highest level of identity accreditation for an Identity Service Provider by the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA), supporting all Australians as they connect with vital government services. The service completes 8 million identity checks, 1.9 million passport applications, and more than 2 million employment checks every year. It is clear that the COVID-19 pandemic has propelled Australia Post to rapidly rethink and pivot its approach to culture, community and business. “Whilst I am proud of the investments that we have made in building capacity and technology transformation that have enabled us to pivot and move at speed. At the heart of the transformation are our people, who have been willing to take on the challenges presented during the last year and find ways to deliver for Australians,” says Cox.

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THE FORWARD MARCH From discovering and manufacturing lifesaving medicines to supporting local biotech start-ups, Pfizer is innovating in Australia.

ne reverberation of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the proof it has given of the importance of medical and scientific innovation – and the pressing need for governments to support it. From penicillin to ultrasounds to the bionic ear, Australia has an uncommonly strong record of achieving medical and scientific breakthroughs. That pedigree, however, has not always included accompanying skills in converting discoveries into market-ready products. Innovation in clinical research and drug development is a core competency of Pfizer, which is in the business of converting discoveries into commercial products. For the global pharmaceutical company, innovation is not a vague concept but a central pillar of its operations. In Australia, those operations include a worldclass facility in Melbourne where Pfizer professionals manufacture, for domestic and export markets, medicines and vaccines to treat and prevent diseases and chronic conditions. That core business activity is built on local research and development and buttressed by a range of other initiatives designed to incubate new ideas. In 2018 alone, Pfizer invested more than $40m in clinical trials and research and development activity in Australia. The economic importance of the biotechnology sector, of which Pfizer is at the vanguard, should not be underestimated. The research firm Start-up Genome estimates that in 2019– 20, just those life sciences companies based in Melbourne were responsible for A$16 billion in economic activity. Fruitful links between industry and academia Medicine and vaccine discovery and development is an expensive, laborious business – the equivalent of starting a jigsaw puzzle without knowing if it will ever clarify into a coherent picture. The start-to-finish costs of bringing new

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

medicines to market are high, and the likelihood of potential medicines or vaccines being effective is low. New medicines are developed only after clinical research, which happens in two areas: universities and the biotech industry itself. Today, there is general agreement among key stakeholders that public–private sector collaborations are the most efficient way to develop and produce novel therapeutics. These are the animating ideas behind Pfizer’s global Centers for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI) network, which has established research partnerships between Pfizer and dozens of academic institutions with a view to exchanging and sharing data and resources to expedite the drug development process – and benefit patients around the world. The network enables researchers to convert findings into new medicines and treatments with the help of Pfizer’s deep scientific and commercial experience, which covers all the stages of drug development, from pre-clinical research to market approval. Joint ownership of intellectual property is a key principle of the program. Starting in 2015, Monash University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Queensland became the first institutions outside the US to join the CTI network. Their collaborations with Pfizer will play to their research strengths, which include neuroscience, oncology, infectious diseases and immunology. Current goals include identifying new targets for cancer and fibrosis therapies and investigating proteins that influence the growth of cancer-causing chemicals. One advantage of the CTI model is that these partnerships are being built for the long term, not as one-offs. Another is that data sharing – including from Pfizer’s vast antibody and small molecule library – can yield unexpected side discoveries.

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When the theoretical and practical capabilities of industry and academia are combined, the results can be meaningful. Pfizer is currently administering 42 ongoing studies in Australia that are providing early access to breakthrough medicines for more than 1400 Australian patients. Nurturing the spark of innovation The Healthcare Hub concept is another example of Pfizer’s innovation focus. This global initiative – which has established Hubs in innovation centres such as Tel Aviv, Stockholm and Berlin – gives biotech innovators an avenue to pilot their products and services. The Hubs invite applications from late-stage start-ups to pitch a product or service that they have developed which could tangibly help patients or clinicians. Successful applicants retain their independence and intellectual property and gain access to Pfizer’s sophisticated infrastructure – including potential first customers – in collaborating with the company to develop their pitch. In 2017, a Sydney Hub opened with the goal of

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innovating in the areas of disease awareness, disease detection and diagnosis, and compliance. Its activities have included giving a leg-up to Perx, an app that improves patient medication adherence by "gamifying" the act of taking medicine. Pfizer’s activities in Australia are a good-news local innovation story. The company is investing in Australian manufacturing and giving researchers and start-ups strong incentives to innovate. It also has a significant community engagement and CSR program, Pfizer CARES, that supports a wide range of Australian charities and disease foundations. The forward march of biomedical research will bring benefits not only to Australian and international patients but also to the domestic economy, by attracting investment, creating jobs and burnishing Australia’s reputation as a medical and scientific innovator. The Pfizer engagement in Australia stands as a model to build upon – for both the pharmaceutical industry and across the technology spectrum.

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Innovation in practice

SOCIAL IMPACT INNOVATION "Wherever we’re needed." That’s the motto of the Australian medical services provider Aspen Medical – and it’s not hyperbole. From the Pacific to the Pilbara, this agile, "social for-profit" organisation is doing vital and varied work in all corners of the globe.

arch 2020: the month when the world changed. Globally, COVID-19 is running rampant. Understanding of the new coronavirus is in its infancy; vaccines are a distant hope. Fearful populations are locked down, and no one knows how bad the situation will get – and when, or if, it will get better. In that uncertain milieu, Aspen Medical was extremely busy. The Canberra-headquartered medical services provider’s 17-year history of operating in radically challenging environments made it a natural fit on the front lines of the domestic and international response to the COVID crisis. In the ensuing months, the company showed the full range of its capabilities. It sourced huge

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

quantities of protective and testing equipment for the federal government. It coordinated quarantine for returned travellers and transport for infectious patients. It sent emergency teams to cover staff shortfalls at aged care homes and clinical teams to assist in evacuating Australians overseas. It advised government and industry, set up pop-up emergency clinics, and designed and constructed a 51-bed, COVID-specific emergency department at Canberra Hospital in just a few weeks. Its overseas work included sending a 25-strong team to assist with the quarantine and treatment of hundreds of people onboard the COVID-stricken cruise ship the Grand Princess, off the coast of California, and a team of 56 to another afflicted cruise ship in Japan. Few companies could meet logistical challenges

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like those – but when your organisational knowledge includes deep on-the-ground experience in combat zones, amid infectious disease outbreaks and in remote locations, it’s all in a day’s work. Complex settings, bespoke medical solutions Aspen Medical specialises in solving thorny medical service problems. Its record of achieving desired outcomes has made it a major player in the global healthcare solutions space, and it currently employs more than 3000 professionals in 17 countries and turns over A$500 million annually. The company does a dizzying variety of work, supplying fit-to-context medical solutions in community, defence, mining, oil and gas, governmental, humanitarian and other settings. It provides medical facilities, health professionals, administrative functions, pharmaceutical and medical products, ambulances, mobile health services and aero-medical evacuation. In practice, that can mean everything from sending individual doctors into remote locations to sending large, multidisciplinary clinical teams into disaster zones. Aspen Medical is a trusted partner of the World Health Organization and the United Nations and has worked with humanitarian organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières and the Red Cross. A sign of its global standing is that it is the only commercial organisation in the world to have been granted the status of being a WHOcertified Emergency Medical Team. Glenn Keys AO founded Aspen Medical following a varied career in which he accumulated deep understanding of multiple sectors and contexts, including defence, logistics, the disability field, multinationals and start-ups. In his telling, Keys "distilled" all that knowledge and poured it into Aspen Medical. The resulting organisation is laser-focused on outcomes, but motivated by a sense of mission and an abiding respect for patients – wherever and whomever they are. "Exporting Australian compassion" Aspen Medical regularly operates in complex overseas environments. It has managed cholera outbreaks in Papua New Guinea and built and administered health clinics across the Pacific and Africa. During the 2014 West Africa Ebola epidemic, it assisted the US, UK and Australian governments in Liberia and Sierra Leone, building, equipping and staffing seven Ebola treatment facilities – likely saving thousands of lives.

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Amid civil turmoil in Iraq, and under the aegis of the WHO and the UN Population Fund, Aspen Medical, working closely with Iraqi clinicians and other key stakeholders – including a respected local emir whom Keys remembers fondly – built and ran several maternity and trauma field hospitals in Mosul. Keys relates that in the course of their work, the company’s on-the-ground team identified a genetic defect in the local population: many children were being born with hernias that would, if left untreated, become chronic over time. So, during lulls in the fighting, local children were duly screened and their hernias, where needed, addressed. By the time Aspen Medical handed the hospitals over to the Iraqi Ministry of Defence, they had cleared 48,000 civilian casualties and delivered 3000 babies, making a multi-generational impact. They had also distributed large numbers

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Innovation in practice

of toy wombats, koalas and kangaroos that Aspen Medical had imported as gifts for local children. Innovative health services for Australians – wherever they are Aspen Medical’s major local operations include providing healthcare services for workers on remote oil, gas and mining projects and on-base healthcare for more than 80,000 Australian Defence Force personnel. The company provides a range of services at the community level and has a special interest in improving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health outcomes. Its Remote Area Health Corps, which supplies medical professionals and services for remote Indigenous communities across the Northern Territory, is making a tactile difference in that area, and its Rural Local Assistance Program is easing the pressure on rural health workers by sending allied health

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

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professionals to allow local staff members to take personal or professional development leave. The company’s "social for-profit" moniker is not lip service; it donates a portion of all of its profits to the Aspen Foundation, its registered charity, which has the current goals of eliminating trachoma and scabies in remote Indigenous communities. Assembling and equipping mobile teams for new, unexpected and often unique healthcare situations requires a high degree of creativity and flexibility. When we think of innovation, our reflex can be to think of technology and the sciences; but Aspen Medical is a beacon of innovation in service delivery – and, since Australia’s ability to create new products and services for globally competitive industries will be crucial to our future economic health, nurturing similar innovation in services should be a critical government priority.

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DIGITAL EQUITY FOR REGIONAL AUSTRALIA By Chris Thorpe

Data centres enable regional towns to compete on the same playing field as metropolitan areas

igital infrastructure in regional Australia has long been neglected, left without investment for many years. This neglect has resulted in untapped economic potential. What impact would local data centres have on growth, and how can regional centres catch up with the capital cities? The key lies in urgent attention to cost-effective connectivity and cloud access solutions for Australian farmers. Regional towns have been forced to endure limited and costly network solutions for far too long. It goes without saying that it is difficult to run a business when connectivity is both insecure and unstable. And, not only are regional businesses being disadvantaged, but they are also paying more for the privilege. Something needs to change. THE CHALLENGES FARMERS ARE FACING The current reality is, every time someone in regional Australia attempts to access the internet, their request needs to go through a metropolitan area, such as Sydney or Melbourne. This pinging back and forth results in a high latency experience – the delay before a transfer of data begins following an instruction for its transfer. The result? Slow, unpredictable connection that could drop out at any moment. It’s not a stretch to suggest that a simple weather event can leave a small town without internet for several days. If left as is, the situation is only going to get worse. There are no two ways around it, as extensive public cloud use is prohibitive. Plus, the widespread inception of 5G and growing applications for augmented reality and artificial intelligence means that the volume of data is mushrooming. How will regional towns cope? FINDING A SOLUTION The answer is simple. Business data and the cloud both need to live closer to where it is needed in order to streamline processing and reduce latency. This is where data centres come into play. A data centre is a highly

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connected secure facility that centralises all IT operations and equipment in order to store, process and disseminate data and applications. For many people and businesses, data centres house their most critical and proprietary assets and, therefore, are vital to the continuity of their daily operations. They also provide direct connectivity to the cloud. There are reportedly more than 7 million data centres worldwide. You can thank data centres for any data storage, management, backup and recovery, as well as your email, high-volume e-commerce transactions, big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence and more. Unfortunately, it’s no longer enough to have access to a data centre and sending data to and from big cities just won’t cut it anymore. It needs to be local. That’s why edge data centres are so important. An edge data centre is a small data centre located ‘at the edge,’ meaning closer to the people, processes and technologies that generate and use data. Edge data centres are based in 23 regional Australian centres with large populations such as Tamworth, Wagga Wagga, Bendigo, Townsville and Coffs Harbour. They provide direct cloud access, low latency connection and a competitive marketplace that creates a technology hub for the local community.

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THE BENEFITS FOR FARMERS Edge data centres deliver improved telecommunications services for those living in and around regional centres including connectivity, resilience, reliability, and bandwidth. While many have been hesitant to adopt new digital technologies previously due to high latency and the connectivity costs, local data processing can remove this barrier with a fast, affordable solution. Farmers who regularly employ internet sensors, drones or autonomous farming vehicles on their rural properties are noticing a major impact on their business. These technologies, however, involve collecting vast amounts of data that need to be processed. If the data centre is back in Sydney, these technologies cannot operate in real-time, and a time-lag is inevitable. A local edge data centre allows the data to be processed close by, in real-time, providing better data and analytics for managing and harvesting crops. The impacts of adopting edge data centres can be felt throughout the farm business as a whole. For example, the overall cost of each harvest can be reduced by adopting sophisticated technologies that can detect specific bugs on a leaf, or sensors that measure moisture and tell the farmer exactly when to apply water. The more information the farmer has access to, the faster he / she can take action; the result is less crop wastage. This isn’t just good for farmers - it also means that the price goes down for consumers. Everyone wins. THE BIGGER PICTURE We know the demand for data is already skyrocketing in agriculture, and it’s not just due to the rise of advanced technology. Due to COVID-19, there has been an influx of people and businesses moving to the regions, putting an even greater burden on an already heaving infrastructure. There are many other socio-economic benefits of edge data centres being widely adopted for regional and

rural populations. It is well known that kids raised in rural communities leave the farm to gain a tertiary education and often don’t return due to the lack of work opportunities outside of agriculture, which results in a “brain drain”. Building regional data centres enable metro businesses to relocate their offices to regional areas. Local businesses are also operating more effectively, allowing them to compete on a global stage. All of this creates opportunities for new jobs, driving the local economy and enticing people to move to the area. KEY PLAYERS The uptake of edge data centres has been swift, with many businesses and organisations coming together to make it possible. Leading Edge Data Centres own and operate the centres, while Schneider Electric is responsible for the design and build, monitoring and maintenance. Cisco Systems powers the network, in partnership with the NBN POI (Point of Interconnect) which is what allows the data to stay local. This means that every house and business on that POI can take advantage of the faster speeds. Most of the large telecommunications companies are on board too, allowing users to choose their carrier. The ecosystem within each data centre has been created with the user in mind. There are Managed Service Providers and IT services that can help customers connect and run their business network efficiently. It’s this collaboration that will make work and life easier for Australian farmers. The time for regional businesses and communities to have access to a stable, reliable and cost-effective network has arrived. It won’t be long until regional towns are on an even playing field with metropolitan cities, achieving digital equity across the whole country.

Chris Thorpe is Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Leading Edge Data Centres, a Tier III data centre operator providing co-location facilities across greater metropolitan and regional locations within Australia.

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ROADMAP FOR ELECTRICITY NETWORK TRANSFORMATION By Andrew Dillon

Innovation in energy networks is essential in Australia to ensure our 20th-century grid is able to deliver energy the way consumers of the 21stcentury demand.

ur electricity network is under unprecedented pressure. This is because the generation, distribution and consumption of energy are undergoing extensive change. Customers’ electricity demands have turned on their head in the last decade, with many increasingly generating their own electricity through the use of household solar PV and, increasingly, adopting batteries to store some of the power they generate. Developments in new types of generation, the emergence of the ‘internet of things’, consumer preferences, electrical storage and other drivers are necessitating innovation and adaptation of existing infrastructure to support new demands and directions in network transformation. The Electricity Network Transformation Roadmap was developed by Energy Networks Australia and CSIRO. It identified the key technical challenges and gaps in innovation which need to be addressed if grid transformation and optimisation is to be achieved. Key areas where gaps were identified include: • voltage management; • frequency control; • decentralised control techniques; and • management of local constraints optimising demand side services. The benefits for customers and the power

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system from innovation and optimising the integration of solar and storage into the grid are significant and include: • direct participation in the market by customers; • accommodating all generation and storage options; • enabling new products, services, and markets; • providing power quality and reliability; • optimising asset utilisation and providing operational efficiency; • anticipating and responding to system disturbances; and • operating resiliently and managing environmental impacts. This research has led to further projects to help inform and resource innovation in both the physical electricity network as well as the policy framework it operates. The Open Energy Networks project by Energy Networks Australian and the Australian Energy Market Operator aims to tackle the challenges associated with emerging distributed technologies and optimise their integration into the electricity grid. This research has shown that more than $1 billion of customer energy benefits can be unlocked if we get this process right. Significant research, development and

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deployment are occurring in power networks as new techniques and technologies are being investigated to help manage changes in demand and generation in the most cost-effective manner. Energy networks across Australia are undertaking many innovation projects to address network challenges. Business investment in research and development is being integrated into the system while improving grid resilience at a local and system-wide scale. Innovation in networks is keeping our grid reliable and affordable, despite continuing pressures for networks to reduce costs. In 2019, ElectraNet was presented the Annual Energy Networks Innovation Award by the Victorian Energy Minister for delivering an Australian-first storage and market solution to accommodate the needs of a highly complex local energy system. The Dalrymple Battery Energy Storage Project provides a blueprint that can be replicated by other networks and is particularly

suited to renewable energy zones and fringe of grid geographies. With a clear objective, ElectraNet demonstrated great collaboration in thinking about how to solve problems and has navigated the National Electricity Market registration, licensing and connection processes. This has created the largest autonomous regional micro-grid development to date, co-optimised for both grid-connected and islanded operation with 100 per cent renewables. On the gas front, the role of hydrogen and the benefits of sustainable gas sources are the focus of the Gas Vision 2050 project run by Energy Networks Australia. A report released in October 2019 highlighted the work underway on hydrogen infrastructure projects with more than $180 million already committed as of that date. The report highlights that both electricity and gas networks will enable a sustainable energy future through innovation.

Andrew Dillon is the Chief Executive Officer, Energy Networks Australia.

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NO MODERN NATION CAN THRIVE WITHOUT ENGINEERS Rear Admiral (Retd) Michael Julian van Balen AO, Principal of the Australian Maritime College, discusses the persistent shortage of STEM skilled graduates and declining STEM talent pool. With Australia’s maritime security at stake, he calls for a whole-of-nation response.

t the opening of a science facility in Canberra in 1988, the then Prime Minister, the late Bob Hawke, agreed that Australia needed to become “the clever country”. At that time, Australia could still benefit from technological, economic, social, and political innovations that were developed in other countries. In 2015, the then Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, challenged us to become the ‘innovation nation’. Today, we are far behind on numerous metrics: and the changing geo-political, natural, and economic environment in which we find ourselves, shows we are not as far away from the problems of the world as we once were. As a maritime nation, Australia is reliant on the sea for trade, resources, security, and economic prosperity, though the importance of the maritime ecosystem as historically languished in the national psyche. More than a generation since Hawkes’ “clever country” declaration, recent regional and global geo-political events and the COVID-19 pandemic have raised our consciousness on the importance of being an Indo-Pacific maritime nation. This is evidenced by the Federal government’s naval shipbuilding program, proposed acquisition of nuclear submarines, and discussion on development of a “strategic” (merchant) fleet. Our ability to develop the industrial complex to fulfil these strategic plans is, however, hampered

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by past inactivity, inefficiencies in the high cost of manufacturing, and ongoing cultural reluctance to develop the necessary science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) skills. As a nation, we more than ever need to become highly educated and skilled, efficient, cost competitive, and innovative. We must become the “clever” country to ensure our strategic plans and future security and prosperity are not at risk.

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NINETY EIGHT PERCENT OF AUSTRALIA’S TRADE BY SEA Australia conducts 98 percent of its trade by sea; therefore, most domestic economic activity and employment is reliant on this trade. In 2018-19, Australia imported $239.0 billion of goods by sea, and exported $333.8 billion worth. In 2017-18, the economic output of the Australian maritime industry, including natural gas, LPG, oil, fisheries, shipbuilding and repair, marine equipment, and waterbased tourism and transport was $81.2 billion; and it provided employment for nearly 340,000 full time workers. Yet, most Australians are oblivious to the importance of the maritime ecosystem. The rise of China and its claims to the South China Sea, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the decline of the United States’ hegemony have challenged the world order, and the rule of law, and woken us to the importance of the maritime. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT RECOGNITION OF SEVERE SHORTFALL The Federal government has committed over the next 30 years to a $183 billion continuous Naval Shipbuilding Plan, with additional funding for a nuclear submarine program expected to be announced in early 2023. At the same time, the veil has been lifted on the indigent state of Australia’s national merchant fleet which has reduced from approximately 100 vessels three decades ago, to just 14 today. The government has now recognised the reliance we place on foreign governments and companies for our essential imports, a reliance which has been exacerbated in recent times by the COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters. As a result, a taskforce has been established to investigate development of an Australian “strategic fleet” to strengthen our economic sovereignty and national security, and to secure our ongoing access to fuel supplies and other essential imports. In recognition of the importance of workforce development to delivering the government’s programs, the Naval Shipbuilding College (NSC) was established to support defence industry job seekers and provide advice on opportunities to upskill through direct connections with education and training providers. NOT THE CLEVER COUNTRY However, the work of the NSC is occurring in an environment in which the maritime industry, is struggling to recruit. Part of this problem comes from competition with

other national infrastructure programs, and the mining and energy industries. But the biggest negative impact is the apparent reluctance of young Australians to develop the STEM skills required to contribute to the workforce. The number of students studying STEM subjects in Years 11 and 12 has flatlined at around 10 percent; and school students’ science and maths results are declining or stagnant. The impact of this STEM deficiency from a strategic maritime perspective, is most evident in our engineering capability. Australia has a shortage of engineering skills with only 8.2 per cent of graduates in Australia graduating with an engineering qualification. This compares poorly to countries like Germany at 24.2 per cent, and Japan at 18.5 per cent. In 2022, the top ten engineering disciplines in demand in Australia included civil, mechanical and marine engineers. Maritime engineers, comprising naval architects, ocean engineers, and marine and offshore engineers, are categorised by Engineers Australia within civil and mechanical engineering areas of practice, and therefore the ability of our workforce to meet the requirements of the national shipbuilding programs is clearly an emerging problem. A NATIONAL PROBLEM REQUIRES A WHOLE OF NATION RESPONSE Maritime engineers are also crucial to maritime civil engineering tasks supporting port and offshore mining and energy infrastructure. Immigration policies to assist workforce development are helpful, but in areas such as the nuclear submarine program, for national security reasons, the workforce must be Australian. As such, resolving the workforce challenges in pursuit of our national strategic plan will require collaboration between all levels of government, industry, the tertiary education sector, and professional associations; a willingness and enthusiasm to participate in the pursuit of knowledge and skills by all Australians; and an efficiency and commitment about our purpose. A whole of nation approach is required to develop skills and to ensure our ongoing economy and prosperity, using all components of our industrial and societal complexes. As a nation, we need to become more educated and skilled, more efficient, more cost competitive, and more innovative. We truly need to become a “clever” country and an “innovative nation”, and this need becomes ever more pressing and challenging the longer we wait to take credible action. So, what are we waiting for?

Rear Admiral (Rtd) Michael Julian van Balen AO was appointed Principal of the Australian Maritime College in 2019. Career highlights include Commanding Officer of HMAS Sydney (FFG-03) in 2003, where he deployed to the Persian Gulf for the war in Iraq.

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T-SHAPED EXPERTISE DELIVERING INNOVATIONS FAR AND WIDE Sophisticated satellite technology crucial for diverse industrial and business applications for increasing productivity, safety, and further innovation is currently being rolled out in Australia and New Zealand.

t was first trialed based on the expertise of Melbournebased social enterprise, FrontierSI. The not-for-profit company drew on its satellite, spatial, and data analysis insights for a collaborative project of national importance. A key deliverable was the development of a fully integrated system which could geolocate people to under a metre in real-time. “We collaborated with more than 100 companies to build and test this satellite-based infrastructure. It’s a capability that Australia and New Zealand will have by the end of 2022”, says FrontierSI’s Founder and CEO Graeme Kernich. A number of industries will initially use this state-of-theart geolocation solution, and, by the end of 2025, every

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smartphone in Australia and ‘across the ditch’ will be using the signals to better locate people. Expect to hear a lot more about this Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS), known as the Southern Positioning Augmentation Network (SouthPAN) project, in the coming 12 months. FrontierSI, whose purpose is to anticipate and solve problems using its spatial and space-based expertise, delivers economic growth while improving the natural environment and the community’s well-being, by developing and delivering solutions to some of the country’s most complex information system problems. The company’s specialty areas include spatial mapping, IoT infrastructure, positioning, built environment, geodesy, analytics, and standards. Geodesy, one of the oldest sciences dealing with the planet Earth applies science to support many professional, economic, and scientific activities that rely on precise positioning. They range from land titling, mineral exploration, navigation, mapping, surveying, remote sensing data for resource management, building dams and drains, and interpreting earthquakes. “Over nearly 20 years, FrontierSI has refined its offerings to become the go-to for trusted technical advice in space and spatial across Australia and New Zealand. Our industry partners back that up – they say that our talented staff are deep technically, good communicators, hit the ground running, and work effectively under autonomy,” says Graeme. Graeme’s team also partners with a wide range of organisations from government, academia, and private industry across Australia and New Zealand. Key government

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partners include the Department of Defence, Geoscience Australia, Spatial Services NSW, Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), and the West Australian Department of Health. They also have a memorandum of understanding with the Australian Space Agency. FrontierSI’s remit includes contributing to the 2030 Space and Spatial Industry Growth Map, being a lead partner on the Australian Housing Data Analytics Platform, and helping build policy and decision-making capability within Australia’s $7 trillion housing market. They also recently facilitated a commercialisation project with the University of NSW on a toolkit to calculate property valuations for urban development. The company has delved into healthcare, collaborating on the Australian Cancer Atlas, a world first, and a 3D facial analysis project called Cliniface. FrontierSI also continues to develop machine learning and analytics for automated imagery analysis across several industry projects, including an award-winning real-time geolocation tool for mapping the precise location of every tree in Victoria under the VicMap Vegetation project in collaboration with the Victorian State Government’s Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning. The social enterprise is also leading a Commonwealth-funded trial to demonstrate how 5G helps with precise positioning for agriculture and drone flights. Graeme and the FrontierSI team work collaboratively on use cases for digital twins and with Geoscience Australia to promote the use of space-based technologies. Their 2030 Space and Spatial Industry Growth Map report found that Earth observational data and analytics bewilder national authorities - an issue triggered by the industry’s potential worth. The expected value is estimated at US$1.35 trillion in the Asia-Pacific region by 2030. FrontierSI is committed to addressing this lack of understanding by developing a five-year strategy which will discuss the goal of FrontierSi to be the lead social enterprise in Australia and New Zealand in location-based innovation. “Spatial projects have been our bread and butter, but we’re making quite a strong foray into the space sector, bringing a lot of credentials built into our DNA. We aim to provide leadership, connections, the partner ecosystem, and expertise to build industry capability and deliver innovative, high-impact solutions to complex challenges”, says Graeme. FrontierSI’s range of solutions, both present and emerging, will result in collaborating to facilitate the art of the possible turning into a reality. “The distinction between space and spatial is where the data is collected – from our atmosphere and beyond or on the Earth,” says Graeme. “But it’s part of a continuum that allows us to wield data to solve complex problems.

Where we make a difference, is cross-cutting in dealing with different types of data, fusing data, visualisations, and helping our clients and partners understand the opportunities as well as limitations of that data,” he adds. FrontierSI is also collaborating with other government agencies to advise on how space infrastructures can meet their future needs. “We’re part of a concerned group of citizens who say, ‘OK, there’s a lot of interest in space and the last mile of using data from space’. That’s where spatial comes in with applications drawing on all that information, collating, analysing, and viewing it very carefully to understand the value chain.” Graeme sees Australia as ideal, with its small population but vast land mass, for building applications that can be used around the world. “Our staff of 40 have complementary skillsets to collaborate for development of ideas into research prototypes, then to a useful product or service. That’s even if your data is sitting in different systems across your organisation in platforms such as Amazon, Azure, or Google,” says Graeme. “We don’t have any relationships to vend out any product, so we are truly independent in our advice regarding the technology stack we advise on.” FrontierSI started in 2004 as a co-operative research centre but in 2018 morphed into offering trusted technological advice in the space and spatial sector to state and federal governments in Australia (and New Zealand) and large industry partners. “We reinvest our earnings into projects we believe are going to advance industry to further develop these projects which can be commonly used – that’s a strong driver for us”, says Graeme. To find out more about FrontierSI, see their latest annual report. 21st September 2022

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BELL: AUSTRALIA NEEDS TO COLLABORATE AND COMPETE Professor John Bell, DVC (Research and Innovation), of the University of Southern Queensland, discusses clean energy, commercialisation, and issues of risk.

ollaboration is important but so is competition – both drive success. As a country, we can do better at recognising the value of using a diversity of thinking to create ideas. At an international level, Australia is fair at collaboration, except it is far below where it should be at with China; lately it has broken down. China is deeply interested in our science and has a lot to offer us. They want to collaborate with us more but there is nervousness in Australia around Australia's secrets being compromised. This happens with every country we collaborate with, to a degree, including our closest friends like the US so I think we have to sort out the areas where we need to collaborate and where we need to compete. This same issue is often an impediment to collaboration within Australia too. There is a lot of money around for R&D investment – at one level there is never enough, and a big issue right now is that government investment to R&D is decreasing. However, I am not sure it always goes to the right places. Getting the really good ideas funded can be hard, while often it is easier to get incremental research funded. Short term thinking is another problem. STEM projects, for example, really need 5-10 years of investment not just 3 years. I call this “deep level investment” and I think there is not enough of it. I also suspect our universities are not entrepreneurial enough, but this is probably due to the way our universities are funded. While the education system has a responsibility to ensure that people think in an entrepreneurial way, it cannot do everything. Australia has a strong government commitment

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to R&D but has a poor record of capitalising on R&D outcomes due to some weaknesses in the commercialisation process, and also due to relatively weak (compared to other countries) business investment in R&D. We need more companies looking into commercialisation, and being ahead of their competitors, and probably with slightly more willingness to take risk. Australia's relatively small size is no excuse as many smaller European countries perform better in this respect. Our isolation may be a factor. Australia’s universities could take a more active role, and most universities would probably like to be able to invest more, but the structural funding issues of universities mean they simply can’t expose themselves to the financial risk. Australians should be getting excited about the changing energy landscape. It's fundamental to what we do. Lots of sophisticated renewables are available and emerging and now are making a difference e.g., the rise of EVs with lithium batteries. Undersea cables will become a reality, allowing Australia to export its vast wind and solar resources to Asia. Japan is doing major things with hydrogen storage and transport, which could be a model for Australia to emulate, and adapt to our environment. Our natural resources will allow us to produce clean hydrogen more efficiently than Japan, and then export it to help them meet their defined local demand. For energy change to become a reality, we need a national energy policy which will encourage industry to invest, like other industrialised countries have started to do and are reaping rewards.

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AUSTRALIA, FROM INNOVATION CONSUMER TO INNOVATION EXPORTER Our ICT growth is key to our innovation leadership in the next 10 years.

uch of Australia’s economic performance this century has been underpinned by agricultural and mining commodities. These globally recognised traditional industries, driven by remarkable innovation advancements and extraordinary export success, have provided the nation the foundations for incredible growth. Yet despite a rich history of innovation feats and accolades in these sectors and others (i.e. the black box flight recorder, the electronic pacemaker, and Google Maps) Australia is rarely perceived as a nation of innovators. In many ways, Australia’s innovation experience since the start of this century has been limited to an individual level – enterprising Aussies ravenous for solutions and finding their way. Indeed, world-class talent, capital, and infrastructure have all played a role, but contemplate “systemic innovation”, and countries such as Japan, the United States, South Korea, Israel, and Germany come to mind. The Global Innovation Index (World Intellectual Property Organization, 2021) lists all five, innovation being foundational to their national identity. South Korea, for example, spends 4.5 per cent (USD95.4 billion) of its Gross Domestic Product on R&D, with a historically “top-down” innovation system that promotes close collaboration between government, industry, and the academic community. This approach has helped the country transform into a global trailblazer when it comes to ICT exports, intelligent factories and farms, AI-powered IoT consumer products, and the data economy, and all in a span of 25 years. In Australia, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation beyond our imaginations. More and more businesses are now leveraging advanced digital technologies like AI and hyper-automation to increase flexibility, agility, and business resilience. These changing dynamics in combination with Australia's strong economic foundations - flourishing digital ecosystems, deployable capital, and outstanding infrastructure– place us in an excellent position to join the ranks of the world’s innovation leaders in the near future. Reflecting on Australia’s investor confidence, Venture Capital (VC) invested USD2.5 billion into start-ups between July 2020 and July 2021. Our “home-grown unicorns” such

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as Canva, Atlassian, and AfterPay are brilliant testaments to how Aussie innovation can be exported successfully. The fintech business models of this trio can offer much learning to our burgeoning agritech and mining technology sectors. Israel’s leverage of technology to dominate global agritech exports in smart irrigation and crop yield technologies was powered by big data analytics. Australia will need to “double down” on policy-supported R&D spending across sectors such as defence, aerospace, healthcare, and telecommunications to stay ahead of the innovation race, catalysing robust but underfunded academic-led research. Simplifying the influx and allocation of VC will intensify intellectual property creation and scientific research output whilst incentivising commercialisation, and this may eventually shift government R&D investment to the profit-driven private sector. In addition, policy interventions proposed by the newly established Technology Council of Australia, based on a measurable framework that supports technological advancement, will align R&D and business communities. These interventions working in unison will help accelerate the pace of innovation in Australia, placing us on the front foot in addressing several nationally important challenges ahead. A 10-year goal to achieve globally recognised ICT innovation and leadership will provide a much-needed roadmap for many Australian industries, and strengthen our resolve to be a world-class innovation exporter for the long-haul. Sarah Adam-Gedge is the Managing Director of Wipro Australia and New Zealand.

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AN AUSTRALIAN FAMILY SUCCESS STORY From humble beginnings and with a simple dream, Casella Family Brands is now Australia’s largest family-owned winery and second-biggest producer of wine in the country.

he family success story begins with Filippo and Maria Casella, who sailed from Sicily to Australia in 1957, seeking a fresh start for their family and with the dream of building a winery, honouring centuries of traditional family winemaking in the process. Filippo and Maria started life in Australia working in agriculture, where they worked tirelessly season after season for over a decade. They eventually settled in the Riverina growing grapes for local winemakers. Filippo was a passionate winemaker himself, and with the desire to craft their own wines still very much an aspiration, Filippo Casella purchased Farm 1471 and hand-built the first winery shed. In 1969 the Casella family winery was born, but little did they know the incredible success that would follow, particularly when Filippo and Maria’s middle son, John Casella, became managing director in 1995. Growing up helping his parents in the family vineyards and winery, John learned the winemaking craft from a young age. He witnessed their hard

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work, generosity of spirit and sharing of wine, food and memorable times with family and friends. The hard work, tenacity and expertise that Filippo Casella instilled in his children, as well as his acute knowledge of winemaking, has stayed with John throughout his career to date. A passionate winemaker himself, John recognised a gap in the market for a wine brand that was approachable, consistent, and offered excellent value. The rise of a global wine phenomenon Working with a like-minded family business in the US, Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits, the first shipment of Yellow Tail left Australia for the US in 2001. The initial forecast was to sell 25,000 cases but actual sales were over one million cases within 13 months. By 2003, global sales hit five million cases bringing the iconic yellow-footed rock-wallaby label to countries all over the world. The Yellow Tail range was quite simply wine for just about everyone. Approachable, bursting with fruit flavours, soft on the palate with no jargon, it became a global phenomenon that to this day is enjoyed by millions globally. A valued innovation, that paved the way for Australian commercial wine production and continues to bring new consumers into the category with a taste profile which is appealing, delicious and presents extremely good value. Despite his unimaginable success, John remains humble and grounded. Family values permeate the business, and personal relationships are integral to the day to day operations. Casella Family Brands works with over 100 growers across the Riverina and many of these families have provided fruit for yellow tail wine for generations. Their livelihoods are always top of

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mind and John can relate to the challenges of agriculture from his own personal experiences. John gives back in many ways, and is a pillar of the local community. A new chapter Understanding the wine consumers’ growing desire and appetite for premium wines, John established a clear vision for how the family business could expand. Coupled with his passion and love for Australian winemaking history, he made the foray into premium and highly regarded wines by acquiring brands with a distinct history of family ownership and winemaking legacy. In 2014, Casella Family Brands acquired Peter Lehmann Wines, an iconic Barossa winery with decades of winemaking expertise. Shortly after, Brand’s Laira of Coonawarra joined the family, followed by the highly awarded fortified winery Morris Wines of Rutherglen in 2016. The addition in 2017 of Baileys of Glenrowan added an organic wine range to the portfolio. Honouring decades of family winemaking tradition, John’s passion is to showcase the regional excellence of Australia’s most famed regions and widely respected winemakers to the world. “Crafting consistently high-quality wines is at the heart of everything we do. Our desire is to bring to the world a range of distinct and outstanding Australian wines that leave a legacy, and contribute to Australia’s reputation as a world class wine-producing nation,” says John Casella. At its core, Casella Family Brands is a

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family-owned wine company with a belief that research, innovation, adoption and continuous improvement are key to achieving ongoing success. The winery has an extensive vine nursery and a thriving business in clone selection, with orders for more than three million vines last year. Casella Family Brands has also been at the forefront of sustainable wine production, through leading edge water recycling projects and innovation in oenology to combat droughts, especially in the Riverina and Barossa regions. It remains at the forefront of industry growth by embracing new ideas, always putting the consumer first and by encouraging people to think differently, in order to continuously contribute to the Casella Family Brands’ legacy. It is clear that the contributions that Casella Family Brands has made to the continued growth and prosperity of the Australian wine industry are profound; in addition to the string of awards and accolades for the wines, in 2019 John was recognised for his contribution to the wine industry with the prestigious Graham Gregory Award at the NSW Wine Awards. John Casella’s pioneering spirit has resulted in a range of distinct and outstanding Australian wines that continue to honour Filippo and Maria’s founding winemaking philosophy; to enhance the joy of life, friendship and family. He is passionate about crafting Australian wines, for every occasion, price point and palate to ensure the family’s vision to share a delicious glass of Australian wine with the world continues.

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RETURN OF THE GEDI: A FORCE FOR GOOD IN AUSTRALIA’S MEDICAL RESEARCH SECTOR If the health and medical research sector in Australia is to move forward, it must address gender equity, diversity, and inclusion- which means making the sector a safe and inclusive workspace for all.

n a recent speech by a long-standing champion and advocate for gender equity, the room was asked to stop pretending the issues women faced in the 80s and 90s are actually any different to what is happening now. Men are still awarded higher value grants, women are disproportionately disadvantaged as they remain the main care givers, and bullying and sexism is still rife. The speech was supposed to be celebratory, but I was glad for this insight that gave me reason to pause and think. In previous roles I have headed the strategy and engagement for Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE), a program that aims to achieve systemic change for gender equity, diversity, and inclusion by adopting the Athena SWAN model. In other positions I have firmly kept gender equity on the agenda when working within funding agencies. Now I am pausing and asking if I, and the greater scientific community, should be happy with the progress we’ve made. Spoiler alert – it’s a no. As CEO at AAMRI, representing 58 of Australia’s medical research institutes, I am firmly putting this at the top our priority list. AAMRI is calling for an equal split in funding allocation between men, women, and trans researchers, and reconsideration of what a fair merit-based system looks like. We have a Gender Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (GEDI) Strategy and Action Plan, with an emphasis on actions that encourage and enable a workforce of people with different backgrounds. The GEDI action plan also has a firm focus on driving cultural and structural changes to address biases that result in gender imbalance and inequities. We’re helping Institutes actively make changes at their Institutes through the Respect in Research project – which aims to create safer and more respectful workplaces by eliminating gendered and sexual harassment. By mid-2023, we’ll be delivering sector-specific best practice recommendations for actively preventing and responding effectively to sexual harassment, while also beginning to embed best practice principles that promote more inclusive and respectful work cultures.

I don’t expect this to be a silver bullet, but my aim is that when I am making speeches in a couple of decades, I won’t have to say we’re looking at the same problems. I’m not naïve enough to think there won’t be new issues, but I’ll welcome addressing different issues if some of this low hanging fruit, that has spent way too long on this metaphorical tree, is dealt with. I want to ensure we have a protected workforce to maintain the vibrancy, innovation, and continuation of our health and medical research sector in a rapidly changing world. If we continue burdening ourselves with these decades’ old issues, then science will suffer as we won’t have the best and brightest minds working to their full capacity. Addressing gender equity and supporting a diverse workforce can only result in long term better outcomes for our community and economy.

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DIGITAL INNOVATION IN AUSTRALIA COVID-19 has proven to be, among many other things, a catalyst for change.

he almost-overnight conversion to a digital-first world has reinforced the importance of embracing the latest in digital innovation and technology to improve business continuity and efficiency. Although Australian mining and energy companies can rightfully stake their claim as leading innovators on a global scale, the evidence suggests other industries are falling behind the pace. While many view Australia’s digital innovation struggles as a challenge, it is far more powerful to see them as an opportunity for growth. Business leaders who are willing to explore the potential of commercial data analytics, hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) technology will ultimately become a major business disruptor no matter what industry they operate in. In recent years the world has been mired in what many refer to as the Information Era, investing in and instituting systems designed to collect as much data as possible. While gathering information is certainly a critical step in analysing, evaluating and ultimately improving business performance, merely stockpiling data is not the panacea to our productivity woes. For data to properly inform business decisions, it must be actionable. There must be a focus on not simply collecting it, but organising it in a way that makes it valuable. Welcome to the Age of Insight, where information is only as powerful as the clarity of the story it can tell. One only has to look as far as the transformation in cloud storage to understand the gravity of change in the technology space, and the new ways in which we can interact and organise our data. The initial onset of COVID-19 saw many organisations rush to find public cloud solutions, trying to manage disparate data sources as a result of the mandated

work-from-home era. But almost as quickly as a public cloud solution demand rose, the benefits of hybrid and private systems began to emerge. The costs of off-site data storage mounted quickly for businesses who perhaps weren’t expecting them to, and the lack of immediate access to on-site data storage began to hinder organisations’ ability to turn stored data into financially-valuable output. With the renewed push to expedite digital transformation, we are also witnessing the evolution of business practices and applications of AI technology that seek to completely transform the way we do business. These trends are real and exciting, but with them they bring great responsibility. As has been the case with every great transformation throughout human history, significant change has the potential to cause significant harm; business leaders must be aware of the potential pitfalls such as the threat of cyber-attacks and a growing dependence on AI technology threatening the traditional norms of jobs. Ultimately, we must keep one overarching question in mind: how can we ensure digital transformation within business is sustainable, inclusive, and trustworthy? The answer to this is not simple, and the responsibility does not lie with any particular sector. llaboration is key, and everybody has a responsibility to ensure that the digital-first world is one that promotes environmental sustainability, business ethics, human rights and data privacy. Together, we can ensure that the Age of Insight is an age for good.

Stephen Bovis is Vice President and Managing Director, South Pacific, of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

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BUILDING THE NEW AUSTRALIA Engineering and construction were already undergoing rapid changes prior to COVID-19. New projects increasingly require complex digital skill sets, and the ability to synthesise more and more data to get the best results for users, and clients. Louise Adams writes on the small, everyday innovations that were born of necessity, alongside the big-picture, structural changes needed to drive changes. By Louise Adams

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Australia was lucky to have strong foundations in its economy heading into the coronavirus crisis. There was already a drive by governments in Australia to create independent bodies to assess and prioritise large infrastructure projects. This has been done in part to de-politicise the infrastructure planning process and ensure that long term, integrated decisions are made. We had also seen a shift in behaviours between government departments. Traditional silos were beginning to be broken down. Collaborative discussion was increasing across the key industries of health, education and transport. We are living the holy grail of disruption when you look at the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic and the changes it has forced us to make at an individual and organisational level, both from a national and global perspective. COVID-19 truly would have to be a once in a lifetime disruptive event. The short and longterm impacts that this pandemic will leave on how we socialise, work, travel, invest will change the fabric of humanity. Whilst this is uncertain, we shouldn’t necessarily see this as a negative – it does provide us a distinct opportunity to create a better world.

As we adapt to a new way of being, we’ll need to change our environment. Not only will this require us to revisit the designs of our existing infrastructure assets but also how we design, build and operate our future assets. So many aspects will change – for example, will there be long-lasting changes to the way that people use public transport? Will workplaces of the future permanently become a mix of home and the office, and if so, how does that impact upon our traditional office spaces? These are just some of the questions we face but there will be many more. We will need to use all our capacity to innovate as we grapple with these challenges of the future regarding infrastructure development. Consider Aurecon’s site inspection team in Adelaide. Prior to COVID-19, a team of 12 or so people would visit construction sites once per month. With social distancing restrictions, that was changed to two people. To overcome that limitation, the two people on site would broadcast through Microsoft Teams from their iPhone or iPad, with remote colleagues guiding them as to what needs to be checked. Instead of 12 people being involved, we could have more than that on the video call, with most able to avoid the time expenditure

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of travelling. Little innovations like that will stay with us. In terms of technology, digital tools enable us to collect and analyse massive suites of data together which can be used to guide and inform infrastructure planning at a precinct and community level rather than just plot or site. Planning and constructing public infrastructure that will be relevant, robust and affordable in 30 years’ time, is coalescing with incredible digital technologies that will help us plan and build the infrastructure, operate, maintain and monitor it at a quality and cost we’ve never before seen. The explosion in smart infrastructure means the skills of the people performing infrastructure roles into the future are going to be very different. As massive infrastructure projects require increasing digital technologies, engineering and digital skills will simply be entrylevel requirements. Infrastructure professionals of the future are likely to be delineated not just by their qualifications, but by their outlook. They won’t be judged on what they know, but on how they think.

ourselves to do what we believe is impossible. The challenge will be in embedding the innovations created as a result of the crisis, moving forward. When we’re through the crisis, we can’t go back to what we were doing in the past. We can not forget about the gains and efficiencies we picked up on the way.

A productivity revitalisation There is a great opportunity for COVID to be the turning point for the construction history. It has had a productivity decline over the turn of the century, and this is a chance for us to look at technology advances, efficiency gains and the innovations that we can drive into the industry to get us through the crisis. It has forced us to front up to so-called impossibilities and make them possible. It is a wonderful opportunity, the role that we as engineers and advisers have is exciting. We will help Government and society come up with solutions and those ideas. There are lessons to be learned around the complexity we have built in the supply chain. That drive to save every last dollar, and what that means for us. How do we make our supply chains smarter, not just cheaper? In the future, if we do face these global shocks again, with massive border closures, we need to have more resilience built into our networks to withstand those shocks. People get embedded into what we are comfortable with, we do not challenge Louise Adams is Aurecon Group's Chief Executive for Australia and New Zealand.

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RESEARCH TRANSLATION – WE MUST RISE TO THE CHALLENGE Innovation in general, and disruptive innovation in particular, changes the way individuals and businesses go about their daily lives … mostly for the better! Underpinning this innovation are enabling technologies and inventions that all had very humble beginnings. By Doron Ben-Meir

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omputing, microprocessors, optic fibres, radio, Wi-Fi, internal combustion engines, electric motors, light emitting diodes (LEDs), battery technology, antibiotics … the list is long. Each of these technologies were impressive in their own right but over the years they have been refined, combined and developed into life changing products and services that we now take for granted. Smartphones, ultralight notebooks and tablets, GPS navigation, modern medicines … are all the result of bringing together a vast array of very clever inventions and scientific breakthroughs to deliver functionality that we clamour to purchase. It is this kind of adoption and commercialisation of new inventions that defines “innovation”. Today, many of our researchers are working in areas that are leading to discoveries and inventions that will enable the innovation of tomorrow; perpetuating the relentless progress we have all come to expect. The problem is that often when new discoveries or inventions are created in research laboratories, it is not always so simple to envisage the final form of a resultant product or service that people want to buy.

Typically the skills and experience necessary to achieve the great scientific breakthroughs are very different from those required to then turn those technologies into compelling products and services. It is also not widely understood that for every dollar spent on the research to develop a new product, at least $100 will be spent to successfully bring that product to market. When we contemplate the opportunity to translate the research outputs of our universities and research Institutions into commercial

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products and services, we must be cognisant of the diversity of skills and amount of capital required. Having spent the best part of their lives researching a particular field, many researchers have neither the skills nor the experience necessary to take the results of that research and manage the translation process themselves. If they had the financial resources, they could buy in the management and business building skills to complement their technical skills. Unfortunately, at the stage most new technologies appear in research laboratories, traditional venture capital and corporate investors consider the risks too high primarily because the owners of the invention (researchers and their institutions) are generally not experienced at building new products and taking them to market and typically can’t identify, much less hire, the requisite talent to make it happen.

Catch 22? Yes. To break this nexus we need to consider the utilisation of venture catalysts dedicated to our research infrastructure. Similar to an incubator or accelerator, a venture catalyst provides working capital to help translate lab level inventions into investable propositions. The key difference is that the management team of a venture catalyst actually becomes the senior management team of each project – working with the founders/inventors. This hands-on model leverages the skills and experience of seasoned business builders across multiple projects in an effort to find the shortest path between their starting point and the point at which commercial investors may find the opportunity attractive. Venture catalysts develop the starting value proposition (what is the product, and who wants to buy it?) and core team (who is going to run the company?). They will scope the addressable market and establish a starting operational plan. Given the very early stage nature of these projects many will fail, but that is precisely the point; one can think of this activity as commercialisation R&D and like any form of research, the outcome is never assured. Importantly, however, many more opportunities will succeed than would have otherwise. This systematic mechanism fills a critical gap in the innovation ecosystem that will generally not be filled by commercial investors. Critically, the very process of developing this infrastructure acts as a two way gateway delivering quality opportunities from the university to the market and bringing insightful market intelligence into research institutions thereby better informing research direction. Whilst not delivering a commercial grade return over the short to medium term, a catalyst has the potential to self-generate. For this reason it is an attractive structure for research institutions and government to jointly fund as there is the prospect of maintaining a powerful translation engine without incurring a perpetual resourcing liability. There are many variants of this principle operating in the most successful innovation ecosystems of the world. Adapting models that are best suited to Australia’s research infrastructure will be an important piece of the puzzle in lifting our national innovation performance.

Doron Ben-Meir, Managing Director of Superb Solutions Pty Ltd and Chairman of InterValley Ventures Investment Committee.

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4 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION TH

This is an important time to stop and consider the question of: “How will we increase our capacity to adapt to a world of accelerated change?”.

By Rocky Scopelliti

have been researching this question for some 15 years and have realised that, to answer it, we need to explore the relationship between demographic change associated with Millennials, now the largest demographic group on the planet, and the technological environment that we can anticipate they will be exposed to – the 4th Industrial Revolution. This revolution will be a cyber-physical social system characterised by new technologies that are merging the physical, digital and biological worlds and is predicted to impact all disciplines, economies and industries globally. These emerging technology breakthroughs will have potentially highly disruptive effects in the areas of artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, biotechnology, nanotechnology, materials science, energy storage, blockchain and quantum computing. The symbiosis of these two forces will profoundly change the way we think about our social, cultural, economic and technological future. The question can be addressed through a wonderful word that has influenced and changed my life. Welcome to “Youthquake” – The Oxford Dictionary 2017 word of the year, coined in 1965. Youthquake is defined as a “significant cultural, political, or social change arising from the actions or influence of young people”. Youthquake was first coined by Vogue magazine’s editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland in 1965 to describe the cultural movement on the streets of London by a new generation of young people we now know as Baby Boomers. Vreeland wrote in her article entitled Youthquake - “Youth is surprising countries east and west with a sense of assurance serene beyond all years”. Ironically the term’s renaissance five decades later has been used to describe the children of Baby Boomers’ – Millennials (19 – 39 years). It is no surprise that the first and most powerful influence on Millennials was their parents, the generation

of the sixties craving significant cultural, political and social change. This was well described by one of the world’s most influential leaders of that time, John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States: “The future promise of any nation can be directly measured by the present prospects of its youth.” The postwar economic boom of the 2nd Industrial Revolution not only gave rise to the baby boom, but a manufacturing, mining and housing booms. Baby Boomers were enveloped in prosperity developing an unquenchable thirst for in-home appliances, telephones (fixed to walls), white goods, televisions, motor vehicles and leisure activities that fueled the creation of many new consumer markets. They were living through a “Youthquake” that was characterised by transformations such as the gender revolution, which reshaped our views on marriage and divorce and redefined the nature of family life. Youthquake for Millennials, on the other hand, will be quite different to that of their parents. To Millennials, their voice and influence is global through the social media they fuelled and continue to fuel. It’s instantly delivered to their smart phones and that’s become as natural to them as the air they breathe, efficiently consumed through the artificially intelligent, personalised, platform-based, exponential models serving them. They are the first generation to have grown up digitally. Just like their parents whose “Youthquake” gave rise to the economic boom, this generation’s “Youthquake” will give rise to the next technological and scientific boom. These demographic changes and technological advancements give us optimism and we have much to look forward to – improved health, education, lifestyles and new businesses and industries. The world we know today was designed and built as an extension of our imaginations – so let’s begin imagining the 4th industrial revolution.

Rocky Scopelliti is a futurologist and author of Youthquake 4.0 – A Whole Generation and The New Industrial Revolution.

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DROUGHT-PROOFING A SUNBURNT COUNTRY Australian Poet and Fiction Writer Dorothea McKellar’s vision for Australia is still waiting to be realised. But where will all the water come from?

s we make our way through this third decade of the third millennium, Australians are confronted with the challenge of sustaining our world-class lifestyle in the face of unprecedented threats to our national security. Various geopolitical, public health, and socio-economic forces are now converging while most of the international scientific community describes climate change as out of our control. Our resilient farmers survived a horrific record 6-year drought to be rewarded, serendipitously, with a glut of rain in 2020 and 2021. Consequently, our stewards of the land are

currently enjoying unprecedented economic prosperity. To depend on the right climate at the right time, however, is a fragile strategy fraught with risk, as any Australian farmer will tell you. The only sustainability that counts in this country is water security. Despite personally advocating for it for a long time, the plan to drought-proof the inland of Australia is not new, in fact. John Bradfield CGM (1887-1943), the eminent Australian civil engineer who built the Sydney Harbour Bridge nearly a century ago, came up with a plan in the 1930s to turn rivers in Queensland and New South Wales backwards to feed the thirsty inland.

Warwick Lorenz

The mighty Ord River Dam, in The Kimberley north-east, where huge volumes of water are poured into the sea every day.

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L.H. Luscombe’s map showing his dream, 82 years ago, of a vast inland sea. Wouldn’t it be great to build up our water storage and to refill the Great Australian Artesian Basin every year, instead of once every 6 years? A few years later, towards the end of the World War II, and prior to becoming a journalist for the Truth and Daily Mirror publications in the 1950s, Leslie Henry Luscombe started promoting the same idea. His 177page book, “Australia Replanned”, was published in 1945, though it was written in 1944 before the war had ended. His map, drawn by hydrologists at the time, showed how rainfall could be captured and stored for the “six lean years” to come.

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Luscombe put forward the proposition of what a country of a mere seven or so million people able to put that huge an effort into the war should be capable of doing with the opportunities afforded by this vast island continent. He suggested our number one priority is water supply to the inland – such as dams and channels, similar to the Snowy River Scheme that was eventually constructed between 1949 and 1974.

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In my humble opinion, credit should go to Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott, who as then Deputy Prime Minister and Prime Minister of the country, later had a similar vision called the “Hundred Dams Project” in 2013. They realised that with much of our wealth being generated by farmers, regional Australia’s water security was a great opportunity to enlarge and grow the sector. The idea was to turn Bradfield and Luscombe’s dreams into reality albeit three-quarters of a century later. They argued that improved water supply to the agricultural sector could mean , Australia producing

not just four times more food and fibre that we can consume ourselves but perhaps even 20 times that amount. The idea of simply channelling water from Northern Australia, where it is abundant, to southern areas of the country that need it seems logical enough and technically feasible – at least in theory. This possible solution is, however, affected by a number of converging forces and therefore causing enormous complexity – social, technological, environmental, economic, and political. Hence, easier said than done. Has anyone ever considered measuring the actual potential of a water transfer strategy, beginning with the question of “how much surplus water is there in cubic feet in Australia’s North?” and “what logistics are involved in bringing it south, where to, and to what benefit? “Interior rejuvenation” through the mass hydration of regional Australia, an “anti-desertification move”, ought be on the national agenda. Other parts of the world, including the Middle-East and Africa, are now engaging in this practice, especially if there are good water reserves in one part of said country. The proposed Hells Gate Dam on the Burdekin River in northern Queensland, a transformational project for the region, could be a great start. Investing in the channels to get the water spread in a wide enough area to turn more land into quality high value cropping, however, should not be overlooked. Certainly, a project of this nature, which has attracted an historic AUD5.4 billion funding package from the Federal Government, has great potential to improve the “drought proofing” of regional Australia as largely serviced by the Murray Darling river system. Nationally recognised water specialists like Simon Cowland-Cooper, a recent Order of Australia award recipient for his services to the irrigation industry, have ideas that are worth considering. Simon advocates that the Mount Foxton Dam proposal is another possible way of offering greater water security to both the eastern and western regions of the Great Dividing Range without the use of tunnels, pipelines or pumping units. This is achieved by substituting the proposed Hells Gate Dam with a far more appropriate structure 30 kilometres downstream to the Gorge situated Mt Foxton. At this location, a dam will be far higher than the Hells Gate Dam having an RL 380 which will be able to provide two discharge gravity outlets to service both the East (RL 300) and West (RL 350) riverbed sides of the Range. For the world’s driest inhabited continent, Australia’s next 5 to 10 year crippling drought is surely not a matter of if but when. While there are drip-feed improvements in attitudes happening and plenty of people with good opinions worth listening to on this nationally important commodity, what’s really needed is a tsunami of orchestrated action before it’s too late.

Warwick Lorenz is Managing Director of Australian Pump Industries and a veteran of the water industry. He occasionally writes for various magazines.

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DIGITAL SERVICES - A NEW LEVEL ASKED FROM REGIONAL PROVIDERS New community expectations have all organisations trying to keep up with digital transformation. By Mark Nicholls

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In my experience in the ICT industry, I have witnessed many significant changes surrounding mainstream adoption of technologies and have become familiar with the various factors that play a role in the speed of technology adoption, having been engaged in technology adoption for over 3 decades. Around 9 years ago, I published a series of articles and delivered several presentations on the topic “The Pressure for Change”. In these talks, I set out to describe the tension created among three parties, namely digital innovators trying to gain traction for new products and services, the community’s ability to change and adopt these innovations and become customers, and government’s ability to either de-regulate or regulate to support the change that innovation brings.

My proposition was that government is generally the slower of these three, and so those innovations that rely on regulatory change will gain traction late. Next slowest was the community. People need a compelling argument to change their habits, and many innovations simply don’t stack up. Those that did stack up initially, were those where the product or service could be digitalised readily, creating convenience and improved utility for customers. Thus, banking, entertainment (TV/ movies/music), information and knowledge (newspapers, magazines, books and directories) were all “first movers”, as governments had a minimal role to play here and therefore weren’t slowing the process by “getting in the way” (or failing to “get out of the way”). Other innovations were either digitalising aspects of existing physical services, or creating new physical services with the help of various digital solutions. This included ride-sharing services like Uber; food and grocery delivery services; and a number of other improvements when it came to researching and buying products and services, even if the final sale and delivery was done in a non-digital way. In fact, house, car, and many other types of purchases are now performed partly online and partly offline, with some providers having moved (or moving into) fully digital sales models. Some of these generated more interest from Government than others, especially where they conflicted with existing regulation. Ride-sharing is the most notable example here. To their credit,

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Innovation in practice Uber (and others) adopted a “crash or crash through” approach to that problem. It is unlikely they ever would have gained sufficient patience from their investors and achieved success if they waited for every government to go about due consideration and change. They created a problem and forced governments to address it. It worked, but was not without damage. A number of legacy license holders were big losers and various governments, even today, are still taking rearguard action. How has the pandemic affected this dynamic? Firstly, community priorities have changed. The general public needed better ways of going about their lives due to enforced lockdowns or self-imposed restrictions on movement. Industry (and Government) service providers needed new ways of delivering services to customers, citizens, staff and students. And Government, in their regulatory role, wanted to facilitate many of these as it helped to minimise the impact of restrictions on physical movement by supporting as much economic and community activity as possible. As a result, the interests of all parties aligned, and we gained massive acceleration in digital adoption across so many sectors. Many of the technologies adopted have been around for many years, even decades, so it was not a question of whether these were new, but whether they were being newly adopted. These technologies created the enablers, the pre-existing capability that could be scaled. This included cloud technologies - allowing services and systems to be accessible anywhere and scaled immediately – as well as video conferencing, which was already gaining wider adoption with Zoom making the services provided by Cisco and others more accessible. Microsoft was already well advanced on its Teams solutions, although they did accelerate their development through the pandemic, as did many technology providers. Even QR codes, first used by millions through the pandemic, have been around for over 25 years - it was defined as an ISO (International Standards Organisation) standard 22 years ago. As we move slowly (hopefully) out of the COVID-19 pandemic and into an endemic phase, what have we learned in digital innovation adoption and where are the opportunities today/tomorrow? In many cases, community expectations for digital services are moving faster than some organisations can provide. Those organisations most challenged are smaller organisations, those that operate in regulated environments with restrictions on revenue growth, and this also tends to be regulated service providers in the non-metropolitan regions of Australia. This may include local government, utilities, healthcare, community, and aged care

providers. Furthermore, skills are a big challenge generally, and in regional areas this is an even bigger issue. What is the solution to all this unfulfilled digital transformation ambition? One answer lies in the lesson of the pandemic. As stated above, “the interests of all parties aligned and we gained massive acceleration in digital adoption across so many sectors.” If we align the interests of regional service providers, how can they better collaborate, and potentially create economies of scale to digitise more quickly? And with their customers geographically distributed more than most, they have an even more compelling argument to provide digitised services. Sharing technology platforms, digital skills, and internal technology capabilities all offer accelerators for regional providers. Cloud technologies offer capabilities that support this. Commonwealth and state governments have been quietly adopting various forms of shared technology provision for some years now. This lowers the cost of digital service delivery, allowing scarce funds to be redirected into improving services. That investment in improvements also goes further with shared use of the same capability. While traditional “shared services” delivered some unfulfilled promises over a decade ago, the new shared models supported by new technologies are now generating many benefits for the clusters, consortiums, and alliances that adopt them. Our building body of case studies are increasingly reflective of the quiet promise that is delivering results across Australia.

Mark Nicholls is a partner and CEO of Information Professionals Group (IPG), as well as National Deputy Chair of the Australian Information Industry Association. State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

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HOW CAN AUSTRALIA BUILD SMARTER CITIES? Paul Brescia interviews Craig Lawton, IoT & Smart Cities Specialist for ANZ Public Sector, Amazon Web Services. How has thinking changed around smart cities in Australia in the past five years? The advent of cloud computing has enabled organisations of all sizes to create smart city platforms. As a result of this, quality of life is enhanced by improving existing, and adding new, services, for citizens, businesses and visitors. For example, city councils can now build digital solutions to integrate and analyse data, or connect sensors using IoT, AI, and data analytics technologies. Previously these projects required significant capital expenditure, however using cloud-based solutions, can now be spun up or down easily, and scaled quickly. What are the roles for the public and private sector when creating smart cities? How can both work together when planning? The role of the public sector is to enable smart

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cities to grow, innovate, create jobs and provide timely services to citizens. Their key roles include enhancing the technology, security, and connectivity of traditional cities; providing required infrastructure, and setting expectations, and standards, within the private sector.

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Companies within the private sector are innovating with new technologies including video analytics and IoT, while also building a digital “bridge” to support traditional engineering demands in transport and utilities, for example. Outside of the private sector, collaboration is occurring in education and start-up incubation hubs, which will support long-term economic growth. Both private and public sectors understand the centrality and importance of data to a smart city. It is therefore imperative that governments clarify and define standards for data management including, ownership, sharing, interoperability, and public access. This allows societies to respond to real-world challenges, including transport congestion, environmental protection, emergencies and urban planning. What can be achieved in the short term to improve liveability for residents, and accessibility? In the immediate, there are proven opportunities in waste management, air quality control, parking services and improved citizen engagement systems. We see customers deploying smart solutions through IoT-network providers that helps connect cities, communities, and industries with IoT sensors. These can be used to monitor the number of people in a particular area, weather conditions and air quality for example. Other companies are leveraging IoT to understand how full bins are to quickly optimise efficiency for the collection of rubbish, and keep cities clean for citizens. They are also pioneering

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a leading edge computer-vision solution to monitor safety, rapidly deploy thermal sensors for employees in essential services, and also bushfire monitoring and live streaming from helicopters. Another sector we’ve seen quick impact in are areas such as parking, and how parking is used across cities. Parking is a revenue generator for cities, and also it is important to ensure there enough carparks available for citizens. City councils across Australia are adopting computer-vision-based technology companies for deploying smart parking technology that use cloud-based AI and ML to process images which then notify drivers of available parking spaces. It can even perform turn-by-turn navigation to empty spaces. What conversations need to take place for Australia to maximise the potential of its cities, and who needs to come to the table? Discussions on building a foundation in cities’ digital capabilities that includes, funding, governance, infrastructure, digital talent and capability are a necessary first step. A digital foundation should align with a cities long term goals and strategy. This enables a city to transform themselves and take full advantage of digital technology for improving: insights from data, citizen engagement and economic development. Discussions around how to fund projects in a way that shares the responsibility across multiple levels of government, and that also avoids large upfront capital expenditure where it’s not needed, are also important.

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SPOTLIGHT:

SOUTH AUSTRALIA

INNOVATING FOR GROWTH: Q&A WITH FRANK SEELEY AM WHERE NUTRITION AND INNOVATION FOR THE ELDERLY INTERSECT - Maggie Beer DATA DRIVING SOUTH AUSTRALIA’S FUTURE INFRASTRUCTURE- Infrastructure South Australia HEALTH INNOVATION AND TRANSLATION ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP AND INNOVATION TEACHING YOUNG PEOPLE THE VALUE OF A SKILLED TRADES CAREER - Sage Group TAKING THE PLUNGE - Sentek DIGITAL HEALTH HUB CONNECTING RESEARCH TO INDUSTRY THE JOURNEY TO GREEN STEEL - Whyalla Steel SOUTH AUSTRALIA CAN LEAD - GFC Alliance

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A CURIOUS, PARADOXICAL MINDSET ENGINEERING INNOVATION WITH SYSTEMS THINKING - Shoal Group GROWING SUSTAINABLY - Adbri INNOVATING THE PIPELINE - Philmac VISUALISING AUSTRALIA, THEN THE WORLD - Aerometrex NUTRITION FIRST - Beston Global Food Company LESSONS LEARNED THROUGH PRACTICE - Beston Global Food Company AUTOMATING AUSTRALIA - Diverseco FROM GRAPE TO GLASS THE AUSTRALIAN COMPANY REVOLUTIONISING DATA-DRIVEN SHEEP BREEDING - BreedELITE

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Image: South Australia Tourism Commission

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INNOVATING FOR GROWTH Q&A WITH FRANK SEELEY AM From working out of a garage to producing 1.5 million parts per year, Seeley shares his insights in manufacturing, R&D and workplace culture with Australia’s Nobel Laureates Volume III.

rank Seeley founded Seeley International, Australia's largest air conditioning and ducted gas heating manufacturer, in 1972, growing it to a business with 550 employees, exporting to 120 countries around the world. Innovation Intelligence sat down with Seeley to discuss his approach to innovation, dispel myths around Australian manufacturing, and advice for Australia's next-generation. 1MG: What’s your key message to Australia’s rising entrepreneurs and aspiring manufacturing innovation leaders?

FS: People might first laugh at your business idea like I myself experienced. You’ve got to have self-belief. You need to be a lateral thinker. You might lose friends by going on your own but you cannot be afraid. Don’t rule anything out. You need to be intentionally dissatisfied and always seek perfection. I had an urge to find ways of doing things differently. I spent many hours learning from the experts and relentlessly pursued a completely unconventional idea of making a cooler entirely out of plastic. Now I lead a group of the country’s top innovators, called “Imagineering”, at Seeley International. 1MG: How do you approach enterprise risk? FS: I’ve always considered risk to be both a good servant and a bad master. If you’re not prepared to take risk, you need to do follow a lesser adventurous calling. One of the biggest risks is getting complacent after experiencing success and thinking you have made it. You need to be always asking “where’s the next threat to my business?” and “where’s the next opportunity for greater commercial success?”. Another mistake people make is assuming that decisions involving risk can be made on their own. Throughout my career, I constantly seek the expert advice from clever people around me. Not socialising these decisions with your peers is one of the riskiest behaviours that anyone can indulge on. This boils down to ego and arrogance. Humility is a key leadership

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Spotlight: South Australia

trait for managing risk decisions as well as progressive businesses. 1MG: How should manufacturing businesses approach R&D? FS: It’s simple: you get out of anything what you’re prepared to put in. Some companies make the mistake of only having a discretionary R&D function or one that is contingent on the performance of the whole company. And while it’s important for that R&D function to be helping the business continuously improve with incremental enhancements and refinements, the real pay-off of R&D, to measurably accelerate the company, is discovering and implementing advanced “blue sky” concepts to effect a disruption that, may even be 5-10 years away from commercialisation. 1MG: What are the less obvious benefits with having a culture of innovation at the workplace? FS: Innovation has resulted in things like automation which, by definition, takes away traditional labour jobs. Some are opposed to this trend. But it means those people can get re-trained for new jobs with higher function that comes with greater levels of job stimulation and satisfaction and therefore employee morale, which, inevitably, heightens retention rates. Innovation is not just limited to smarter manufacturing methods and products. Innovation

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

is something for everyone in the company. Innovation in the workplace also applies to leadership, especially managing people and politics. Humour and always being approachable (emotional intelligence), are two uniquely effective leadership traits that help unite us all. 1MG: How do you see the future of Australia's manufacturing industry? FS: The government has a good history of generously supporting Australian manufacturing including provision of grants. The government needs to continue with this R&D facilitation role as it stands to benefit it, as well as all of us, in the long run. Also key to positive future outcomes is for our young people adopting JFK’s principle “what can I do for the manufacturing industry … where can I make the greatest contribution?”. We should be proud of our manufacturing past and excited about our manufacturing future. We have a long and rich history of excellence in manufacturing innovation such as over the horizon radar. There will always be threats to our manufacturing industry, like becoming complacent and cheaper offshore labour, but for every one of them, there is a defence. Staying ahead of and anticipating threats is key. Of all engine rooms of the innovation economy, manufacturing is arguably the most fertile. We need to seize it. It’s where the future of the world is and where Australia ought to be!

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WHERE NUTRITION AND INNOVATION FOR THE ELDERLY INTERSECT: A CULINARY CRUSADE Culinary artist and entrepreneur Maggie Beer now devotes her time to a long neglected area of Australian society: appropriate food and nutrition for those in aged care. Hopefully she is kicking off a trend which will more widely affect hospitals and other healthcare institutions.

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often think how lucky I am to live in South Australia. Our smaller population, for starters, means we have the ability to rise above the pack. I see this as a blessing not a curse as we can bring people together more easily to collaborate which allows innovation to shine; yet we must

always realise that while it’s okay to be good we have a responsibility to be great. The secret of the success of my business life, during the Dunstan era, was coming to live in the Barossa Valley and to immerse myself in the ethos of this wonderful community. Both the richness of region’s produce and wider agricultural landscape and becoming a part of the exciting food and wine world of South Australia gave me “entrée” to the state’s depth of knowledge, innovation and sophistication. This set the tone for excellence over the ensuing decades. However, in selling our food business two years ago, the next stage of my life was right in front of me and it's certainly the biggest and most important role I have ever undertaken. I am on a crusade to raise awareness of the link between food and well-being – particularly aimed at those in aged care who are unable to ‘do’ for themselves and to whom we have a responsibility to ensure there is a good end of life; that can’t happen without both the pleasure that good food brings and the natural health benefits that allow them to be participants in a quality life.

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Yes, it is like turning the Titanic around yet there are those that are determined to do it well and they are to be celebrated and used as templates of what is possible. Yet there are issues that abound, stumbling blocks at every corner, to so many. In the main, Australia as such a relatively young country hasn’t established the foundation of food being one of the most important things in life. Certainly, we now have an exciting food culture, which is now growing exponentially, around the amazing fresh produce we have in this vast land and the creativity of our world class Chefs. However, it’s not the deep rooted knowledge of how really good food can shape our lives. When there is that knowledge and passion for food in the leadership of the aged care industry then the cultural change we need can and does happen. However, it requires cooks and chefs to acquire new and evolve existing skills and knowledge who are confronted with an incredibly complex situation. There are such changes in the lives of the elderly that demand, as well the nutrition that is required to fuel an elderly body, an understanding of the relationship between triggers of the smell of real food cooking and the stimulation of saliva that tempt our older Australians to eat and how that the saliva aids in digestion. For this to happen, a closer link between kitchens and dining rooms is needed to give the cooks and chefs direct access to those that they are feeding.

There are things that can be done with many of the current care homes when the will is there to maximise every possibility to give this sought after connection to those comforting aromas of good food. What is really needed however, in planning new care homes for the future, is a different mindset where the importance of food is uppermost and a different model of funding to allow for smaller or satellite designed homes that can be part of a multigenerational experience. To do this properly, our talented cooks and chefs with a love for food and those that have the will to make a difference need to be encouraged and be given the knowledge that is so vital; I myself am working hard on this. Giving them the respect they deserve and demonstrating what is a strong and meaningful career path that fits in with a family life will also help. While respect always needs to be earned, the leadership of the care home is so vital in this culinary crusade for our seniors; all of the important parts of a ‘home’ need to have this same drive to make a difference and imbue that knowledge with the health professionals, the administration, the nursing and caring staff and the gardeners too. The combined energy and resolve from having all key players on the same path, where food quality in aged care becomes the priority it deserves, can create an environment where wellbeing for the residents and pride for the cooks and chefs that prepare their meals become a reality.

Maggie Beer's Farm Shop - Nuriootpa SA Maggie Beer AO is an Australian cook, food author, restaurateur, and food manufacturer living in the Barossa Valley. In 2014 Maggie established her own foundation; Maggie Beer Foundation, to provide the pleasure of a good food life for all, regardless of age or health restrictions.

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DATA DRIVING SOUTH AUSTRALIA’S FUTURE INFRASTRUCTURE We spoke with Jeremy Conway, chief executive, Infrastructure South Australia, about the benefits of interconnected access to data in planning infrastructure investment and services.

outh Australia is in a position where it is looking for infrastructure to facilitate both economic and population growth. It has a capacity to grow at greater rates than it has historically, but that needs to occur in a way that is planned, with liveability maintained. Sydney and Melbourne are having to build their way out of congestion, while South Australia is in a position of transitioning: the closure of the automotive plants, the rise of Defence manufacturing and the arts. There is a need to capture opportunities to facilitate the government’s growth ambitions for the state. Conway notes: “To support Australia’s population in the future, we will need to make maximum use of existing infrastructure, while investing in new, integrated precincts and platforms. The critical piece of that is in the front end. You need to have a good understanding of the problem, the options, and a robust benefits-management plan.” The key to optimising investment in infrastructure is allowing data to drive decision-making, always relating performance back to the benefits you set out to achieve. This is true of both new and existing builds. People have different ideas on how to define infrastructure. For the team at Infrastructure South Australia, it simply refers to the built form, a definition which extends beyond buildings to networks. However, it is always important to consider what service the infrastructure is intended to enable and who the customer is.

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Conway explains: “We have a role to monitor projects through their life cycle from delivery to post-implementation. The return on investment comes from the front end, making sure a project is properly planned and scoped.” This is what the South Australian Government is aiming for with its Health and Wellbeing Strategy. Imagine a world in which support services can be deployed to the people most in need of them, before situations become critical. Where kids at risk of abuse or adults at risk of homelessness can be flagged automatically through a combination of data points that effectively predict the future. Being able to intervene early can be the difference between deepening trauma or the beginning of healing. Networking health Health budgets are blowing out across Australia due to an ageing population. Australians are living longer but with more chronic health issues, including higher rates of mental illness and obesity-related diseases like diabetes. The health industry is unique. Typically, innovation and new technology make things cheaper. In health, new services, devices and medicines can be more expensive than their forerunners. While technology can provide better, more precise medicine, it does not necessarily make it cheaper. At time of writing, South Australia spent 37 per cent of its most recent budget on health.

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Building hospitals, medical centres and other health infrastructure takes a significant amount of time and money. More efficient health outcomes could be made by improving community or in-home care, with digital platforms allowing doctors to reach isolated, mobility-impaired and older patients. Conway explains: “Globally, we have good-quality health services. The reality is that it is becoming an increasingly large part of the budget. There needs to be a greater focus on prevention and wellbeing, as opposed to treating acute issues. There needs to be a more efficient way to treat people. That will often be community care as opposed to driving people to hospitals.” South Australia has a large, sparsely populated, landmass in which people travel long distances to

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

recieve medical attention. Digital technology allows for more remote monitoring and treatment. Imagine an increased ability to monitor and treat patients remotely at the outbreak of the coronavirus. How many people would have avoided exposure to the virus had there been more remote diagnoses of non-COVID diseases? Then there are the benefits that come from making use of data – using it to predict pinch points or decide investment priorities. There is huge potential for AI to assist data-driven decision-making in health and other sectors. What will be key to unlocking the full value of the data is balancing the security of people’s personal information with a digital infrastructure that allows critical information to be accessed by different government bodies. Traditionally, SA state government agencies have been siloed. They are focused solely on the service they provide, as opposed to what a person needs. This limits how effectively a person can be supported, as the full picture is not visible. “Breaking down silos means you can provide more personalised and effective services to individuals. It enables early detection of people at risk. You can have intervention services to prevent harm and deescalate things,” says Conway. An initial area in which to demonstrate the power of integrated data could be child protection. A child will have many touch points through its life in terms of various agencies, and by combining data from these agencies you could build a more complete picture and potentially identify early indictors of risk. Early intervention services – social workers, occupational therapists, family counselling – might then be activated. “It is about bringing in the necessary support services to address issues before the problem manifests,” Conway says. When increasing the accessibility of data you need to balance that with increased security. That means people’s personal information is "cleansed" or de-identified when looking at macro-level analysis and having appropriate security measures in place when handling personal information. When looking at improving the lives of remote South Australians through digital health infrastructure, the biggest challenges will be regional connectivity and digital literacy. As Conway puts it, “You can have the greatest high-tech solution, but if people cannot access it, or do not understand how to use it, it is no good.”

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HEALTH INNOVATION AND TRANSLATION Adelaide’s BioMed City is South Australia’s first health innovation and translation district, leveraging the power of colocation and collaboration to improve outcomes across industry and academia. By Yvette van Eenennaam and Caroline McMillen

key factor in regions and cities across the world that have made successful transitions to innovation-based economies is the presence of precincts or clusters variously known as knowledge ‘quarters’, innovation ‘districts’ or ‘neighbourhoods’. These have been characterised by the Brookings Institution in the US as “geographic areas where leading-edge anchor institutions and companies cluster and connect with startups, business incubators and accelerators”. Over the past two decades such clusters or hubs have moved from the science-park model operating at a distance from the city centre to a location within a CBD or inner-urban area co-located with research, residential and industry developments. The key assets innovation districts and neighbourhoods have in common include: • knowledge and economic assets – research- intensive institutions, firms and organisations with a focus on knowledge creation; • physical assets – the buildings, spaces and infrastructure that support collaboration and innovation with a focus on knowledge transfer; and • networking assets – the key relationships between different organisations and people that generate, develop and commercialise ideas; specifically, a focus on innovation, translation and knowledge application.

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When established well, these districts drive disproportionate innovation, employment and economic growth. As highlighted in the Arup Report (UK): “the clustering of industries and workers that occurs, usually in knowledge-intensive roles, attracts additional entrepreneurs and innovative industries. This, in turn, drives up average incomes, gross value-add (GVA) and exports”. In the UK, innovation districts make up eight per cent of businesses but contribute 20 per cent of the GVA. In line with global observations, the clustering of research and industry institutions in Australia appears to enhance translation of R&D and associated job growth. There has also been an increase in the number of accelerators, incubators, mentoring programs and technology-transfer programs in Australia across the past decade. In South Australia (SA), significant investment by state and federal governments, research institutions and industry has resulted in the establishment of key innovation districts in the south (Tonsley Innovation District, Waite Campus), north (Mawson Lakes, Edinburgh, Osborne), west (Adelaide Biomedical City) and east (Lot Fourteen) of the CBD. These innovation districts play an important role in SA at a time of economic and social transition. The SA Government has identified the South Australian health and medical industry sector as one of the fastest-growing sectors in which the state holds comparative research, innovation and translation advantages. Adelaide

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BioMed City (ABMC) is a $3.8bn health-innovation and translation district in the heart of Adelaide that brings together capabilities in research, clinical care, education and industry to drive innovation, translation and commercialisation. ABMC is part of a "knowledge-transfer network". With the other major innovation districts, it supports the convergence of health and medical fields with frontier technologies including AI, data analytics, augmented reality, nanophotonics and robotics to drive innovation and translation for better healthcare. As a major health innovation and translation district, ABMC is a major asset for South Australia supporting better, more affordable healthcare and offering co-location opportunities for health and medically-focused SMEs, as well as the development of clinical entrepreneurs. Key anchor institutions within AMBC include the Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH), which provides comprehensive tertiary clinical care, and the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI), an independent centre home to some 600 medical researchers and ranked among the top 40 of its kind by the Times Higher Education rankings of 2018. Just steps from the RAH and SAHMRI are research, education and commercialisation facilities for SA’s three major research-intensive universities: the University of Adelaide, the University of South Australia and Flinders University. By 2021, ABMC will expand further with the addition of the Women’s and Children’s Hospital and the Australian Bragg Centre. This $500 million hub will house the first proton therapy unit in Australia, delivering precision radiation therapy. It is named in honour of Englishmen Sir William Henry Bragg and his son Sir William Lawrence Bragg, joint winners of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics. The SA Government has played a critical role in the creation and realisation of the ABMC vision. In fact, both the state and federal governments have been instrumental in creating pro-enterprise and pro-productivity reforms that protect IP, reduce regulatory timeframes and cost burden on innovative businesses, and reduce barriers to investment critical for innovation precincts and the broader innovation

economy. They are also key partners in strategic land development, global promotion of the scale and ambition of the innovation district, and in the attraction of new industry partners through global trade offices. In many successful innovation districts across the UK, US, Canada and Asia, sustained support and leadership from local as well as national governments has been essential to ensure the development of a clear competitive advantage to increase access to national and international markets. As innovation districts mature, the role of the private sector intensifies and is a crucial driver for creating a vibrant, tech-advanced innovative environment and growing the commercialisation pipeline. Public-private partnerships and private sector involvement bring key information about market opportunities and demand, provide access to industry networks and operational pipelines, and encourage the formation of startups and the growth of SMEs. Now that the first chapter of the establishment of ABMC has been written, the focus shifts to the development of strong alignment between its vision, governance, strategy and operational frameworks. This will ensure that ABMC harnesses the talent of clinicians, researchers and entrepreneurs, together with the input of industry, startups and the impact of new technologies to deliver world-class and affordable healthcare to the communities it serves within and beyond South Australia.

Yvette van Eenennaam is the general manager of Adelaide BioMed City. Caroline McMillen is South Australia’s Chief Scientist. Photo: Dan O'Cker - https://www.flickr.com/photos/danthemanocallaghan/15522915098/.CC by-sa.2.0

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ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP AND INNOVATION Leadership is often defined as the ability to motivate a group of people or an organisation to achieve a worthwhile common goal. But what role does entrepreneurial leadership play in a world defined by uncertainty? By Martin Haese

hen you stop to think about it, you would not be entirely honest with yourself if you did not admit to having experienced a range of emotions over the last twelve months including fear, frustration, skepticism, resignation, acceptance, hope or even positivity. Irrespective of how we have each processed the challenges, this is surely a re-set moment for the global entrepreneurial community. The imperative for innovation and change is now omnipresent. There was no script for 2020 and this year has a new set of challenges. So, what role does entrepreneurial thinking play in the current context, in an environment where so many businesses have looked to government and government administrations to support them through the turbulence? Let’s first acknowledge that we’ve all seen examples where entrepreneurs have pivoted their business model to adapt. Bravo to those who have successfully done so. However, not every business can readily digitise their services, re-set their supply chain or flip their channel strategy, so this issue runs deeper, much deeper. Like you, I have also come across many people who have either innate or learned leadership qualities. However, they do have common traits and the most inspiring and effective leaders have vision, inspire trust, are good communicators and they always accept accountability. In a rapidly changing environment, entrepreneurial leaders often come to the forefront.

An entrepreneurial leader has the ability to remain calm, deconstruct the situation and reconstruct it so that the organisation not only survives, it prospers. Most tellingly, entrepreneurial leaders are able to do this in an environment where the “unknowns” often outweigh the “knowns”. The key ingredient that defines an entrepreneurial leader is their ability to lead an organisation in a rapidly changing and highly uncertain environment. Entrepreneurial leaders understand ambiguity, and they realise that perfect decisions are not always possible because they are operating in an imperfect environment. Entrepreneurial leaders also have a unique relationship with adversity. They seem to see through it with a vision of what things may look like out the other end. That’s because change almost always brings opportunity. Whether that comes from changes in technology, markets, legislation, regulation or consumer tastes and preferences, change is an open door for entrepreneurial leaders. Now is the time refocus on your own goals and ensure that your business model is robust enough to be truly sustainable. Reinventing your products, services or your business itself may be the most important actions you take to navigate the turbulence of today and capitalise on the opportunities of tomorrow. Just like South Australia, it’s time to write a new and exciting script for the future.

Martin Haese was Lord Mayor of Adelaide in South Australia from 2014–2018. He is now CEO of the South Australia Chamber of Commerce.

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TEACHING YOUNG PEOPLE THE VALUE OF A SKILLED TRADES CAREER As Australia grapples with a critical skills shortage, many are now encouraging young people to embrace a career in the trades, where a wealth of opportunities awaits.

hen we ask our children what they want to be when they grow up, we hope they will dream big, and pursue a career of enjoyment and meaning. Many young people are overtly steered towards university, and led to believe the skilled trades are only an option for those not sharp enough to aim higher. The truth, however, is that the trades offer an exciting career path that is rich with possibilities, and critical to Australia’s social and economic goals. Building the future Australia is in the grip of a skilled labour shortage, which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, nearly 50 per cent of trade and technician jobs were in shortage, according to the National Skills Commission. This represents a golden opportunity for young people, who can enter their training confident they are gaining specialised skills that are in high demand; demand that will only rise as the nation grows. They will achieve stability and security in an uncertain world. A trades career also offers the chance to earn as you learn. Unlike university, where most graduates enter the ‘real world’ with debt hot on their heels, trade workers make an income from the get-go. Many go on to enjoy above-average wages; some salaries rival those of doctors and lawyers. They grow their own businesses. They thrive.

running the electrical department for Bridgestone. I was constantly disappointed with the poor service on offer from contractors. I knew a company with the right attitude could do better for its customers. This belief led me to found SAGE Group in 1994. The company had humble beginnings. Our first project was a small domestic wiring job that a mate and I charged $140 for. Within a year we had seven people working in my backyard shed; today SAGE has approximately 700 hundred employees with revenue of $180 million and offices around the country and overseas. It wasn’t always easy, but the skills I acquired in my youth as a trades apprentice – collaboration, communication, problem solving, curiosity – provided a solid foundation for success. There is no limit to where a trade may take you. I love what I do. When I come into work, I don’t feel like I’m walking into a job. I am walking into my passion. What more could we want for the next generation?

By Andrew Downs

A crucial opportunity Parents, carers, teachers, and mentors need to champion the skilled trades as an invigorating career option as they guide young people towards tomorrow. It is important and valuable work. When our children – or grandchildren – tell us that when they grow up they want to be an electrician, a carpenter, a plumber, a builder, a mason, a welder, or any other tradesperson, we must recognise this for what it is: a big dream; one that is worthy of our encouragement, and our pride.

Andrew Downs, Founder and Executive Director of SAGE Group

Beyond the tools A trade occupation can unlock diverse opportunities and experiences, and foster an upward mobility that reaches beyond the tools. My own career illuminates this. I started out as an apprentice electrician, before

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TAKING THE PLUNGE Soil monitors probe global water scarcity problem

n the context of climates changing, and the general global trend towards water scarcity and aquifers running dry, soil water management has become more important than ever before. This is where Sentek Technologies, an Australian-born company with a presence in more than 80 countries, is working hard to meet these challenges of the future. With headquarters in Adelaide, they are doing this by designing, developing, manufacturing, and globally distributing world-class technologies for measuring and managing soil moisture, salinity, and temperature – by measuring the ‘drinking speed’ or crop water-use. Farmers use Sentek’s unique technologies and tools – such as TriSCAN, a fertiliser/salinity, temperature, and soil water monitoring system, which takes readings on a near-continuous basis, to monitor groundwater movement, generate exceptional research data, and gain vital insights into crop water usage to make better irrigation decisions. Sentek was co-founded in 1991 by Peter Buss after he developed a commercial irrigation scheduling service for irrigators (ICMS) for the South Australian Department of Agriculture in 1986. This involved taking manual readings of water in soil and crops. Over time this developed into his own consultancy business. Peter, who has a Bachelor’s degree of Engineering in International Agronomy and a Master of Science in Rural Science among other qualifications, talks of the challenges of working with data in the pre-internet age. He used fax machines to transmit data from the probes he developed with an electronic engineer while working one-on-one with onion farmers in

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and around Adelaide – an example of the customer-driven approach that has led to Sentek’s continuous improvement and success. Now he is focused on “Irrigation 4.0”, which leverages Industry 4.0 process optimisations such as the cloud, artificial intelligence, and “big data” in combination with tried-and-tested human management methods. Other elements include remote sensing for crop measurement, weather forecasting. and irrigation system performance. To what end? Why should farmers improve their water management? The on-farm reasons are optimising input sources such as water, power (electricity or diesel) and fertiliser and maximising farm outputs such as yield, crop quality, and environmental sustainability. The overarching reason is to perform better irrigation management. The statistics on agricultural water use draw into stark relief the need to find further efficiencies. Earth’s Future, the journal of the American Geophysical Union, recently published an article saying “agricultural water scarcity is expected to increase in more than 80 per cent of the world's croplands by 2050.” Given “agriculture irrigation accounts for 70 per cent of water use worldwide and over 40 per cent in many OECD countries,” according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and given it takes “about 1300 cubic metres of water to produce a ton of wheat and 16000 cubic metres of water to produce a ton of beef”, according to World Energy 46, the time is right for growers and primary producers to put more emphasis on their irrigation management strategies.

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Most people tend to over-irrigate, Peter says, and this presents problems beyond water use. Peter is a strong advocate for taking a systemic approach to fixing systemic issues when it comes to irrigation, which he says is not being discussed. For example, over-irrigation also flushes out fertiliser from the soil below the root zone, leading to the pollution of groundwater reserves and waterways. Disciplined water management therefore not only increases crop yields and quality but also decreases expenses on a wide variety of fronts beyond water itself. In a throwback to Sentek’s original story, the company demonstrated its innovative precision agriculture solutions for onion, corn, cotton and soybean growers and consultants in Texas. Thanks to their easy-to-install Drill & Drop probes, Sentek enabled the agronomy team to track root development and ensure water was delivered to the right depth without wastage through excessive drainage. Closer to home, Sentek worked with McLaren Vale’s popular Wirra Wirra winery to measure their soil water levels precisely, including Regulated Deficit Irrigation, to achieve maximum water use efficiency, and required grape quality. The outcome enabled wine improvements to Ultra Premium grades. Impacts are increasingly global, with over 80 percent of sales now international. This expansion, the product range and the rate of product commercialisation is reflected in the many innovation, export sales and marketing awards Sentek has picked up. Peter Buss has put his academic experience to good use, having been involved with almost 20 published journal articles related to irrigation and soil management. An example is the 2018 paper in Acta Horticulturae that showed the benefits of using the award-winning IrriMAX software to “Visualise the water and salt distribution within the soil in 2 dimensions” among potato plants. Sentek’s IrriMAX Live software works with any internet-connected device, and integrates soil moisture, salinity, and temperature data. The information is viewed through a range of graphs, simple to read water gauges, and a map view showing the probe locations and their irrigation priority within farm management zones. In an article presented at the 2016 Irrigation Australia International Conference and Exhibition, Sentek’s Drill & Drop probes are used to compare

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

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how water travelled through two separate sections of turf at Adelaide Zoo – one exposed to public footfall and one sheltered from it. The probes found, among other things, that “significant overwatering (of the sections of turf) were occurring,” leading Peter and the paper’s co-authors to estimate potential water savings of up to “10.5 Megalitres of water worth around $25,000 for the year” – or 30 to 50 per cent of Adelaide Zoo’s annual water use. Peter is also involved with the Australian Water School, having presented webinars on how soil moisture sensors such as Sentek’s can provide greater insights into crop-water-soil dynamics. In a world where water use has come under more and more scrutiny, Peter Buss is widely credited for pioneering the use of soil water dynamics to achieve improved economic and environmental outcomes for growers. An adoption that is world-wide and growing rapidly.

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DIGITAL HEALTH HUB CONNECTING RESEARCH TO INDUSTRY The Cisco/Flinders University Digital Health Design Lab is driving collaboration between researchers and industry, enabling the commercialisation, trial, and deployment of new health technologies to improve the lives of South Australians.

ealthcare in Australia will only become more expensive as the population ages, with current annual expenditure sitting at $180bn. Healthcare is one of the few sectors in which newer technologies does not always lower costs; with high levels of regulation, necessary safety tests, and proof of efficacy, bringing new treatments and technologies to patients is substantially expensive. Simultaneously, there has been a massive increase in the scale of data now collected by state governments, healthcare providers, and at a federal level through the My Health Record. Helping to drive this are new medical wearables and sensors which can better track Australian’s health in real-time, at an individual and collective level. Collecting the data and making use of it are two separate processes. The Digital Health Design

Trish Williams, Cisco Research Chair, Digital Health Design Lab

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Lab, jointly funded through Cisco’s Country Digital Acceleration program and Flinders University, is bringing the research from the lab into practice, taking innovations from the prototype stage to fully-scaled and tested solutions. Operating from the Flinders University campus within the Tonsley Innovation District, the Digital Health Design Lab is examining the data we have, and the systems used to support it, holistically, to improve patient outcomes. The Flinders Digital Health Lab is currently undertaking projects across cybersecurity, data analysis, human-computer interaction, health software, messaging, and telehealth. It also undertakes the crucial testing needed to deploy new wireless technologies safely in a hospital or clinical setting. Professor Trish Williams, Co-Director of the Flinders Digital Health Research Centre and Director of the Cisco-Flinders Digital Health Design Lab, explains, “The Lab will be a place for demonstration of practical and scalable outcomes to improve healthcare delivery though smart application of technology to support people and process. This exciting venture will be driven by industry collaboration and ‘possibility thinking.’” The centre is positioning Flinders as a national and international leader in digital health systems and technologies research. It will also foster digital health university-industry alliance relationships, putting South Australia at the forefront of new commercial opportunities.

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Spotlight: South Australia

THE JOURNEY TO GREEN STEEL Whyalla Steel has been helping to build Australia for generations, and the iconic steelworks is set to usher in a new green industrial revolution through the shift to carbon-neutral steel.

hile some materials move in and out of fashion in construction and manufacturing, steel does not. It is crucial for building all pieces of the modern world – from vehicles, buildings, bridges, stadiums, railways, infrastructure and homes – and projections are that demand for steel is going to double by 2050. At the same time, countries are moving towards carbon neutrality, so something has to change when you consider the means of current steel production contributes about 9% of the world’s annual carbon emissions. South Australia’s Whyalla Steelworks has a rich history of steelmaking and leverages the region’s natural resources in magnetite iron ore to create steel. Over the past century it has manufactured warships, carriers, oil tankers and rail, while employing generations of steelworkers in the town of 21,000. Whyalla Steelworks has been a model for integrated industry, through the colocation of mining, processing and steel production, with approximately 1.2 million tonnes of raw steel produced every year, or roughly 23% of Australia’s total steel production. Now, it is being reinvented as a hub for green steel, with strategic investments from GFG Alliance ensuring its viability for generations to come. Since acquiring the integrated business in 2017, Sanjeev Gupta and his GFG Alliance group have embarked on parallel programs of work, to optimise and improve the current steelworks operation while developing a visionary plan for long-term transformation to a world-leading green steel facility.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Through the initial $700 million purchase, and several hundred million dollars of further investment in modernising ageing and neglected facilities and systems, GFG Alliance has secured the futures for the employment of 3,000 workers at the steelworks – the main employer in Whyalla, and financial life-line for many of the district’s businesses and service industries. At the same time, updated transformation plans, which include the use of natural gas and eventually green hydrogen – produced on site using renewable energy - to make steel, along with investment in a modern direct-reduced iron plant and electric arc furnace, have been released. The GREENSTEEL plant will require thousands of workers during the construction phase. Delivery of the plan, which also involves the use of large-scale renewable energy via the nearby Cultana Solar Farm initiative and Playford Utility Battery, will result in carbon-neutral steel. The renewable energy initiatives would also create an estimated 800 new jobs in the region during the construction phase, with a number of permanent, ongoing roles to maintain the infrastructure. A further "mega" 3 gigawatt solar plant is planned, following completion of Cultana Solar Farm, to feed hydrogen production. The ambitious plan is part of the GFG Alliance’s target to become carbon neutral by 2030, and has the potential to place Whyalla on the world-stage as a blueprint for others to follow when it comes to establishing modern, green industries.

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SOUTH AUSTRALIA CAN LEAD GFG Alliance executive chairman Sanjeev Gupta – a keen observer of what’s come before – wants to ensure Australia does not repeat mistakes of the past that have led to a decline in advanced manufacturing.

s the saying goes, history is a great teacher. It would be a folly for Australia, in the economic recovery effort from COVID-19, to not embrace technology, innovation and the considerable advantages it has to lead a global, green industrial revolution. In the decades between World War II and 2020, Australia was largely content to exist as a quarry and a farm to the world, cashing in on its abundant resources and simply exporting coal, iron ore, copper, wool, wheat and gas in raw or barely processed form. That pattern is unsustainable he says and has been allowed to continue while research and development – and innovation – has stagnated. Among the top 25 economies, Australia has

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slipped one place in the Global Innovation Index 2020 to an overall rank of 23. Among OECD countries, Australia’s absolute growth in manufacturing since 1970 is the third lowest and the relative decline in manufacturing as a proportion of the economy is fourth largest. Today, manufacturing employs approximately one in every 13 working Australians, compared to one in six in the mid-1980s and one in three n the 1950s and 1960s. The good news is that Australia has untapped potential in manufacturing in foundation industries, as well as new opportunities in advanced manufacturing such as renewable energy, hydrogen and electric vehicles. And South Australia is in the driver's seat.

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Spotlight: South Australia

Opportunity beckons In its Start with Steel report earlier this year, the Grattan Institute highlighted the strong onshore wind and solar potential that Australia – in particular South Australia and Tasmania – has to offer. It has the best conditions for solar and wind energy anywhere in the world, and an abundance of magnetite iron ore. The coupling of renewable energy and magnetite is significant, as it allows for new, less carbon intensive technologies and processes to be used in steelmaking. It also opens the door to green hydrogen-based steelmaking, a key enabler to a thriving hydrogen industry. We now know hydrogen provides the key to a carbon-neutral steelmaking process and can be used in place of coking coal as a reducing agent to produce sponge iron – with the by-product being water. However, the hydrogen supply chain is costly and challenging. Each stage of storage, liquefying, shipping and re-gassing, adds to the cost of a tonne of hydrogen, and that’s in addition to the capital cost of the plants and infrastructure required. By using hydrogen to make steel in-situ (i.e. immediately where it is produced), you can solve the storage and transport problems. The potential benefits, with hydrogen production established, go well beyond steel and would position South Australia as a global hub for fuel cell technology, research and development and advanced manufacturing. With abundant natural resources and

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

renewable energy sources, storage battery technologies and a smart and skilled workforce, the country has the potential to establish thriving supply chains and integrated eco-systems to contribute to a carbon free economy through ongoing innovation and decarbonisation of heavy industry. South Australia is well positioned to take advantage of its inherent natural resources, well-educated and skilled workforce and be a world leader, but the opportunity is now, and we have to grab it. The upshot of this green industrial revolution, is true long-term sustainability with benefits for the planet, people and economy. A vibrant manufacturing sector remains the cornerstone of a modern and successful economy. Manufacturing brings jobs, wealth, hope and long-term sustainability to individuals, families and communities – South Australia has the opportunity to play a different role and can usher in a reinvigorated manufacturing sector and truly enable the green hydrogen revolution Down Under.

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A CURIOUS, PARADOXICAL MINDSET Systems engineers use a rare skillset to pull off projects of mind-bending complexity. They are key players in building a future-proof Australia. By Michael Waite

s a systems thinker, I seek to understand the impact and relevance of things within their context. Since becoming an executive at Shoal, I have seen the company grow by more than 400 per cent. Within a relatively short time, we have changed our business processes, corporate structure, market focus, investment in innovation, quality assurance and knowledge management. I know many companies say “people make the difference” – and mean it. But it is often difficult to define just what it is about people that makes them crucial. Five years ago, I came across a paper by the Systems Engineering Research Centre that PARADOXICAL MINDSET 1.

2. 3. 4.

Big-picture thinking and attention to detail: how disparate elements form a system that interacts with other systems and vice versa Strategic and tactical: designing the activities needed today to achieve strategic goals Analytic and synthetic: identify and bring pieces of the puzzle together Courageous and humble: a self-awareness to draw upon the expertise of others, but the boldness to make decisions Methodical and creative: exploration of the problem space, while retaining a disciplined process.

has intrigued me ever since. It provided me with a structure to understand the perspectives that systems thinking provides, the type of people who make good systems engineers (the type of people we want to employ) and the value that systems thinking can deliver. The article, "The theory of effective systems engineers",1 introduced me to the "Paradoxical Mindset": “the ability to hold and balance seemingly opposed views, and being able to move from one perspective to another appropriately”. For instance, where a chemical engineer may face a problem from the perspective of process and the mechanical engineer from the perspective of design/build/test, the systems engineer must bring together a range of disciplines, experts and stakeholders to understand a problem in its broader context: dimensions, interfaces, interactions, operating environment, life cycle, strategic goals. As systems engineers, we challenge the status quo and ask the difficult questions – of ourselves and our clients. This drives us to find meaning and purpose in our projects and our business. It lets us consider innovative options, model outcomes and gain the information we need to make informed decisions. It is our curiosity, combined with the paradoxical mindset, that has driven change and directed growth at Shoal. The systems-thinking perspective – noting how the finest detail links to the broadest strategic goal – imbues a systems engineer with a unique viewpoint and set of skills that deliver value to our projects and our business.

Michael Waite is CEO of Shoal Group. Pyster, A., Devanandham, H., Hutchison, N. Jauregui, C. & Clifford, M. (2015). Atlas: the theory of effective systems engineers. Stevens Institute of Technology. 1

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ENGINEERING INNOVATION WITH SYSTEMS THINKING Shoal Group employs one in five certified systems engineering professionals in Australia, allowing it to fill a niche in engineering: ensuring projects function as part of the wider ecosystem.

irst launched as Aerospace Concepts in 2001, and based in Canberra, the company in its early years focused on concept development consulting to the Defence, aerospace, and telecommunications sectors. By 2004, the company employed two full time engineers, supported by six contractors and casual staff. In 2009, the company added a third full-time employee, and by 2014 had 15 full-time staff with its headquarters in Adelaide. The next year, the company rebranded to ‘Shoal’ a reflection of the word’s two meanings: • a large number of people, animals or things that move together in the same direction semi-independently, in a constant state of coordinated adaptation • and a complex, evolving and potentially risky area in a body of water where multiple systems meet, requiring skilled navigation and a deep understanding of the environment. Last year, Shoal grew more than 40% to a team of over 60 and continues this growth trajectory today. But what sets Shoal apart from other engineering firms? Systems thinking, systems engineering Systems thinking is a paradigm for understanding systems and their behaviour as a property

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

of the relationships between individual parts within a system. A system is made of three parts: elements, the actual "stuff" that makes up the system; interconnections, which are the rules, ideas, and relationships that tie the elements together, and purpose, which is deduced from how they behave, and not the rhetoric or stated goals of the system. By understanding how systems work, and the role people play in them, it is possible to function more effectively and proactively within them. The CEO, Michael Waite, explains it as such, “A systems thinking approach is all about enabling people to make good decisions by making sense of complex situations.” The application of systems thinking is called systems engineering. That is, the successful creation, use, and retirement of engineered systems. Using this framework, Shoal contends it can see across all phases of the system’s lifecycle, defining the complex problems they are likely to face, and designing solutions that can address how they reverberate within that system. For those who use public transport, and have experienced a breakdown in services, that is often a failure of systems thinking and engineering being applied. A single broken signal on a rail line can lead to a three hour wait for a train, when it is not appropriately planned for.

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Tension, balance, and creativity A year unlike others, 2020 brought words like ‘modelling’ into the greater public consciousness. Modelling was used to justify public health decisions, determine whether parts of the economy would open or close, and fund social safety nets. Engineering has always relied on modelling, from engineering drawings and blueprints, to the sophisticated, technology intensive systems Shoal designs today. And while modelling is a key part of what Shoal does – systems thinking and systems engineering is not strictly mathematical. There are a number of digital tools which can support model development and manage the complexity of these relationships. Then, there is the deep, mathematical analytical approach once the outcomes have been weighted, using software and analytics, in combination with physics. Systems thinking and engineering require far more than number crunching, and an almost paradoxical mindset balances the methodical with the creative. Shoal’s systems engineers need to understand multiple sectors, and how they relate together. That allows the team to look at any problem from the technical detail, and the broader contextual level that characterises how it all fits, and the outcomes required. One area of the business is dedicated purely to prescriptive information understanding, with traceability and context being its own skill set, and an appreciation of uncertainty within the process. It’s this level of expertise that has been applied to support some of Australia’s biggest and most complex programs in the Defence sector, across the air, land, sea, space and cyber domains. “As systems engineers, our advice has been sought in the definition and understanding of high-risk Defence issues,” says Waite. “We’re able to challenge assumptions and ideas in such a way as to support our clients to understand the complexities and interrelationships, while moving towards achieving project goals.” For Waite, “That is one of the things that is the mark of a good systems engineer – being able to hold those concepts in tension; doing it comfortably, even where there is a lot of uncertainty. This is the key to working on complex problems, and dealing with a wide range of disparate stakeholders.”

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Blue Water innovation Engineering as a discipline involves the practical application of science and ideas, adding value or achieving a purpose: as such it is almost synonymous with the definition of innovation. How then, does an engineering firm like Shoal innovate within the business, when it is already applying innovation methodology in its daily bread-and-butter work? The company has created a dedicated innovation unit within the business: Blue Water, which is one level removed from its engineering project teams. Its stated goal is to grow Shoal in both size and capability, by reviewing projects in their start-up phase, and identifying ways to enhance, or overdeliver from the original client brief. When necessary, it puts forward suggestions of skill sets the company needs to acquire to complete the project differently, and coordinates the dissemination of skills gained on individual projects to the whole team. As such, it has a direct market benefit for the company, allowing it to expand on its original contracts, along with the deeper, institutional boost of upskilling staff. It coordinates knowledge-sharing sessions at Friday lunchtime, letting people within the business make presentations on recent projects, research, or new knowledge. Sometimes, it invites outside speakers or educators to give masterclasses on particular topics. “Ideas are good, and there are lots out there. This is about recognising that the value of ideas is in their implementation,” says Waite. Shoal sees its role as complementary alongside other engineering firms, which often have highly technical, specialist skillsets. As Waite puts it, “The engineering community focuses on what they do well, and the little details. Systems engineers maintain the focus and clarity on why we are doing these things, making sure the effort is coming together.” “We are the guardians of purpose.”

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Spotlight: South Australia

GROWING SUSTAINABLY As a leading manufacturer of construction materials and industrial minerals in Australia, Adbri is drawing on a proud history of innovation to face the sustainability challenges of tomorrow, improving its reuse and recycling of materials to provide better environmental outcomes.

riginally known as Adelaide Brighton, the company’s roots go back to 1882, when its founders lit a fire in a South Australian kiln to produce the first cement made in Australia. From these beginnings Adbri has grown to become one of Australia’s largest construction and industrial mineral companies, with 17 brands and 160 plants and facilities across Australia. It is publically listed on the ASX. Throughout this proud history Adbri has developed numerous innovations to propel its growth, from the adaptation of honey tins for kerosene lamps in its first years of the late 1800s, to the installation of Australia’s first aerial tramway for carrying rock from its limestone mines in the early 1900s, to commissioning the world‘s first ship powered by compressed natural gas – Adbri’s own Accolade 2 – in the 1980s. As such a large company, Adbri recognises its sustainability efforts have a knock-on effect for much of Australia’s building industry, which is why the company has made a sustained effort to apply this ingrained innovative spirit to reduce its environmental footprint. Sustainability as a core function Since the 2009 financial year, Adbri has managed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent, while substantially growing its revenue. For a comparison, the full 2009 financial year saw Adbri earn $987m in revenue, while the first half of the 2020 financial year saw the company earn $700m in revenue. One of its brands, Adelaide Brighton Cement (ABC), is the first company in Australia to take on the burning of refuse derived fuels (RDF).

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These are made from commercial, industrial, construction, and demolition waste, and are primarily timber-based. The company re-engineered its Birkenhead Plant's kiln firing system to allow for the burning of RDF, reducing its reliance on traditional fossil fuels, in this case natural gas. To undertake the transformation, Adbri worked with a supplier to develop its resource recovery and segregation operations into a more sophisticated recovery plant, capturing what were previously wasted resources going to landfill. This was done to ensure very high levels of product quality control and stringent specifications, in order to produce a fuel suitable for the use in the cement plant. Adbri recently celebrated the use of 1,000,000 tonnes of RDF at its Birkenhead cement plant. RDF has helped reduce the company’s greenhouse gas emissions, diverting approximately 200,000 tonnes of waste from landfill each year, as well as reducing the use of natural gas by up to 30%. The company is now pressing on with a goal of reducing the use of traditional fuels at its Birkenhead plant by up to 50% within the next five years. Nick Miller, Adbri‘s CEO, explains, “We are striving to reduce the amount of process and thermal emission production of cement with the addition of carbon-neutral substitutes. Our industry-leading position here in Australia demonstrates what is possible, however, we are determined to continue pushing the boundaries to lower our embodied carbon in cement.” Adbri has also been developing methods to reintroduce one of the waste products formed

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when manufacturing cement – cement kiln dust (CKD) – back into the production process, or to find alternative uses other than disposal to landfill. This has proved successful for its Birkenhead facility, with reuse opportunities found for 100% of the CKD the site produced during the second half of 2019. In 2019 Adbri installed a bailer at its Moorebank site to capture the plastic pallet wrapping and shrink wrap for recycling, rather than have it be sent to landfill. The site identified that a significant percentage of its landfill waste was plastic, and successfully applied for a rebate under the NSW government “Bin Trim” scheme. Now when plastic waste is generated, it is bailed, collected from site, and recycled. This project will prevent approximately 70 bins, or 5.6 tonnes, of plastic per year going to landfill. At Adbri’s concrete products site in Townsville, the company recently also completed the installation of a 100kW solar array in October 2019. The solar array supplies 52 per cent of the Townsville site’s electricity consumption, with the company working to extend this program out to a range of other sites. The company is also active in developing the next generation of innovators who will carry on

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this work. Adbri has partnered with the University of Adelaide to provide annual scholarships to three female engineering students, is providing opportunities for Indigenous students through a scholarship with St Peter's College, and provides numerous work opportunities for university students through its vacation work experience program. Adbri continues to host a range of visits by young female students to encourage their studies in a range of STEM areas. In addition, the company continues to offer employment pathways through a national graduate program across a range of disciplines. As Miller notes, “Adbri believes that we have a key role to play in ensuring the development of the next generation of Australia’s manufacturing talent, and especially in encouraging diversity and inclusion as we do this.” Adbri’s initiatives show that innovation can be embraced in Australia’s manufacturing sector to materially impact environmental and sustainability outcomes both now and into the future. It is only a matter of focus, application, and science.

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INNOVATING THE PIPELINE Philmac is a uniquely South Australian success story, with the company’s novel technology now selling to agriculture, the plumbing industry, and gas companies globally.

hilmac’s history dates back to 1929 in Adelaide, when a fitter and turner by the name of Malcolm "Mac" Phillipps invented the world’s first press-button toilet cistern valve. It was an inauspicious time to start a company with the stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression, but Philmac survived and even succeeded after winning a contract to make gas meter components and pipe fittings for the South Australian Gas Company. The company soon expanded into pumps, washing machine components and plumbing fittings and continued its track record of innovation with the invention of the ball-cam float in 1947. As the industry changed, Philmac changed with it – becoming the first company in the world to make compression fittings entirely from plastic in 1962 and exporting its products around the world. The culture of innovation is deeply ingrained at Philmac and in 1982 the revolutionary range of Polygrip fittings was launched, changing the way poly pipe was joined in agricultural applications. Its unique design enabled pipes of varying sizes, standards and mediums to be joined by simply changing the insert. Not only was the range eagerly adopted by the Australian market but exports to the UK and Ireland grew rapidly. At home, Philmac became recognised by Australian farmers. The Philmac Rural compression fitting range provides the perfect connection for Australian Rural B Class poly pipe, easily identified by the trademark terracotta insert, allowing easy installation and use. The range is manufactured in Australia using the highest quality materials to ensure that each fitting is

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resistant to corrosion and has the strength and durability to provide a long service life. Philmac provides a broad range of water management solutions that service agriculture, irrigation, civil, water authority and plumbing sectors. The company has grown steadily and with the support of the Aliaxis Group, which in 2015 invested $10 million to upgrade and expand Philmac’s moulding capacity. This investment has enabled Philmac to grow its export business to now include more than 40 countries. Testament to this is the successful entry of Philmac gas fittings into the North American market they are now being distributed across the US through the 1400 Home Depot stores. The Philmac story is one of continuing Australian innovation and hard work that has yielded success in Australia and across the globe. From humble beginnings, a willingness to innovate has driven the company to a position of trust and respect in the eyes of customers all over the world.

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VISUALISING AUSTRALIA, THEN THE WORLD Aerometrex, one of the most advanced imaging companies in the world, was founded in Adelaide and has a global reach.

hen is a picture worth more than a thousand words? When it captures an entire city with a level of detail that allows you to zoom in to see objects that measure only a few centimetres across. Known colloquially as "Google Earth on steroids", Aerometrex offers both ultra-high-resolution images, and 3D renderings of vast areas, gathered with its own small fleet of aircraft, 60kg cameras, and lasers that are capable of pulsing at two million times per second. Founded in 1980, Aerometrex boasts a number of firsts in the Australian market, and globally. It was the first Australian company to introduce large-format digital aerial cameras to the domestic market, and the first in the world to offer 3D modelling using massive-multi-ray photogrammetry as a commercial service. Aerometrex is now a publicly-traded company on the ASX. Mark Deuter, the Managing Director, attributes their continued success to the appreciation of the importance of customer service, gained when it was privately owned. The company has made large investments to stay ahead of the competition, including designing its own camera system, which is manufactured in the US by a specialist. “It is the best, highest resolution camera in the commercial market that we know of, and we developed it in under a year,” explains Deuter. As a technical innovation, it is extraordinary. The device uses an array of lenses, taking multiple photos, that are then woven together to create a single map image. There is a significant amount of physics and optics involved, with the end result giving a seamless, stunning image. To get an idea of the resolution of the camera, it can capture a swathe of 70,000 pixels. For clarity, a

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pixel is the smallest element of an image on a screen, a small coloured dot. A top-of-the-range television can show roughly 3840 x 2160 pixels. And each pixel rendered by Aerometrex with their cameras can be reasonably measured to show an area of 5–6cm on the ground. What does this mean? Each image taken by the company can accurately show an area of up to 3.8km at the highest resolution. It is a question of need though; “If somebody wants to do a 150,000km2 survey of Western Queensland, we can map that at a 20cm pixel size,” notes Deuter. In practice Aerometrex technology has been used in police work, like mapping illegal activity around shipping containers, or to locate illegal crops. Its 3D mapping technology has applications in movies, computer games, simulation systems, augmented reality, and virtual reality systems. It’s even been used to map cemeteries, creating a historical record that outlasts even the most wellmade headstone. It has been used to document historic towns in France, so that in any worst-case scenario they can be reconstructed accurately down to a single centimetre. Born and bred in SA Adelaide, where the company is based, has a few comparative advantages that have helped Aerometrex to succeed. Good infrastructure is key for data-intensive companies like Aerometrex, and Adelaide has the best internet infrastructure in Australia, along with a reliable power supply and strong-performing universities that the company can tap into for new talent. “The company’s founders were born and bred in South Australia, though we have a more

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cosmopolitan workforce now. We have attracted people from all around the world, and enjoy that diversity and cultural mix,” says Deuter. The central location of Adelaide makes running an aircraft-based company simpler too, as it is no more than three hours from anywhere in Australia on a domestic jet. What’s next? Aerometrex’s latest creation is a bushfire fuel-load mapping application. It uses its laser mapping technology, along with the best available science and literature on Australia’s vegetation to comprehensively map bushfire loads in high-risk areas. The laser technology allows mapping of the tree canopy as well as the understorey vegetation which is the primary fuel load. Understorey vegetation can be mapped both horizontally (extent) and vertically (connectivity to the tree canopy).

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The application can be used by rural fire services and other firefighters to help to avoid the worst tragedies of Australia’s bushfire season by mitigating the potential danger as much as possible. Natural disasters are familiar to Aerometrex, as it has documented bushfires, floods, and cyclones, both to assess damage for insurers and gain insights for preventative measures to ensure that they do not happen again. Moving forward, the biggest advancements for the company are likely to be in the analytics space. Every image, or image map, contains vast amounts of latent information. The next key is to extract that information in an automated way, and Aerometrex is well on its way to achieving that goal. “A picture can tell a thousand words – which is great. Sometimes what you need is a number or statistic, instantly, and that carries a lot of weight,” explains Deuter.

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NUTRITION FIRST The Beston Global Food Company (Beston Foods) is leveraging its expertise across the chemistry of milk to create health products with a growing demand for a local and global marketplace.

ood companies cope with change. Great companies create opportunities from change. For Beston Foods, COVID-19, the most disruptive business event in a generation, is seen as an opportunity for change. Every product Beston Foods produces, distributes or develops is analysed, assessed and presented with key nutritional factors and health outcomes in mind, right down to the specific ingredients, nutrients, sensory factors and suitability for different dietary requirements. Demand for immune boosters and natural health products has risen worldwide, with the company now using its expertise in milk chemistry to manufacture nutraceuticals for use in pharmaceutical and medicinal products. One such nutraceutical is lactoferrin, which Beston Foods has been extracting from milk since 2018 as part of the process of manufacturing mozzarella cheese. Beston Foods notes that the global demand for lactoferrin is expected to increase by 60 per cent in the post COVID-19 environment. Lactoferrin has anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-microbial and anti-allergic functions and properties that are essential in boosting the

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immune system in the human body, with its clinical significance established in numerous medical and scientific studies over the past 40 years. Through its expansion plans, Beston Foods is positioning itself to have the capacity to sell into this increasing demand. “Importantly, this will have flow-on benefits to South Australia’s dairy farmers by way of an increase the demand for milk,” notes company founder, Roger Sexton. Two lactoferrin drinks are positioned to capitalise from that demand; LifeX10, a high dose shot designed for sale in pharmacies and health food outlets, and Immune+, a carbonated soft drink containing soluble lactoferrin, with both reaching the market by September 2020. Blockchain pioneers Consumers have high expectations for health products. When playing in a global marketplace, Australian products are rated highly for their standards, with consumers trusting them. Beston Foods has developed a technology platform which enables consumers to verify the source, ingredients, supply chain logistics, quality and integrity of its foods. The technology platform comprises two separate technologies: Brandlok, an anti-counterfeiting technology, and Oziris, which allows for end-to-end traceability. The technology has been awarded 13 patents including a blockchain patent from the USA. “Our aim going forward is to make the technology more widely available to consumers through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering to other producers of food and beverages in Australia,” notes Sexton. In these challenging times, solutions are often found outside of the normal compass. Beston Foods has set itself up to come out of the COVID19 pandemic in a stronger financial position, having identified opportunities early.

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LESSONS LEARNED THROUGH PRACTICE The founder of the Beston Global Food Company, Roger Sexton, passes on advice gleaned from 28 years of running a thriving business.

ne of the few positive outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic is that governments and businesses are looking at whether there are better and smarter ways to do things in the future. It is now widely recognised that Australia can no longer put its biosecurity and national health sovereignty at risk by relying on imports of medicines and medical technology from other countries, nor by having so many of our agricultural products processed offshore. As Australia comes out the other side of COVID-19, it is clear there should be a new policy approach around these critical issues of bio-security and food self-security. And it is equally clear that South Australia is well placed to participate in, and contribute to, any such new approach. Examples of South Australian ingenuity are the work done by Detmold Packaging to retool for the manufacture of personal protective equipment for use by health workers, and the work done by the company I founded and chair, Beston Global Food Company (“Beston Foods”), to use its expertise in milk chemistry to manufacture nutraceuticals for use in pharmaceutical and medicinal products. South Australia has a rich history of innovation and entrepreneurship. The state was founded in 1836 by a group of entrepreneurs who formed “The South Australian Company” as a means of establishing the infrastructure and developing the economy of the new colony. The early settlers of South Australia recognised the abundance and diversity of the state’s natural resources, and whether due to geographic distance, necessity or both, found different ways of doing things. Today, South Australia retains the same

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

abundance of natural resources – and the same intrinsic entrepreneurial spirit as the state’s forefathers. But it is also a dynamic ecosystem, with a vibrant lifestyle and high standards of health and education, providing an ideal platform to support the spawning of new companies. Increasing numbers of young people are finding that South Australia offers the perfect environment to pursue their entrepreneurial passions while raising a family and enjoying a high quality of life – as indeed I did when I started the Beston Pacific Group of companies in 1992 in conjunction with business partner Stephen Gerlach, the former chairman of Santos Limited and Elders Limited. I have often been asked to explain the success of the Beston Pacific Group. There is no simple explanation. We have certainly had lots of parties over the years who have attempted to emulate our achievements and/or capitalise on our successes. However, if I were to give advice to any budding entrepreneur, it would be the following. First, it is critical that you have a vision for the company you wish to build and a detailed business plan focused on how you propose to achieve your vision. It is not simply a matter of coming up with an idea and adopting an attitude of “she’ll be right”. The vision for your company needs to be based on detailed research of both historical and future trends. The business plan needs to incorporate ways of building a unique organisational culture that energises employees and ensures they are committed to the journey you are going to take them on in building the new company. Second, you need to have focus. And determination. You need to allocate resources to the

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strategic priorities that are capable of creating sustained long-term value. And you need to stay the course, refusing to be distracted from achieving your end goals. As Winston Churchill famously remarked: “You will never reach your destination if you throw stones at every dog that barks”. Above all, you need to have passion – the passion to create and finetune your vision; the passion to see it through; and the passion to succeed. Third, you need to emulate world’s best practice when building your company. The Ruthven Institute (of which I am a director) has analysed the best-performing companies around the globe and laid out “Twelve Golden Rules” to be followed. These include putting in place measures to manage finances wisely, developing strategic alliances and outsourcing noncore activities. One thing we learned very early on at Beston Pacific is that you should not attempt to take a company into overseas markets unless it can be globally competitive. Fourth, you need to be innovative, bold and self-assured. As one highly respected commentator said recently, it takes a special kind of person, one who is “crazy brave”, to come up with an idea for a business and then actually to establish it and wear the full risk of failure. It takes

someone who has both vision and courage, as well as confidence in one’s abilities, to create and build a business which has a point of difference and is able to secure a defensible position in the marketplace. Being innovative also means investing for the future so that you can always stay ahead of any “copycats” and competitors. Fifth, you need to ensure that you are capital efficient in implementing your business plan. Capital is a scarce (and expensive) resource and hence you need to be able to move forward to your end objectives in a way that achieves the greatest bang for your buck. One way to do this is to separate "hard assets" from "soft assets" to maximise the return on capital employed. Sixth, and finally, you need to be persistent and patient. There will be many unexpected events that push you off course, but you need to resist being side-tracked and keep your eye firmly focused on the destination. This means that you must keep looking ahead (that is, through the windscreen and not the rear-vision mirror) and must be tenacious about achieving your vision. Huge opportunities await anyone prepared to take advantage of what the state of South Australia has to offer, with its innovative culture, collaborative business environment and sensational quality of life unsurpassed anywhere in the world.

Roger Sexton is chairman of the Investment Manager, Beston Pacific Asset Management, ASX listed IOOF Holdings, KeyInvest, and a director of IBISWorld.

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AUTOMATING AUSTRALIA Diverseco is providing, installing, and programming collaborative robots in Australian businesses, leveraging its experience across multiple sectors to drive transformative change.

n 1992, two entrepreneurs working out of a home office started selling automated weighing equipment under the name AccuWeigh. Within two years, Brenton Cunningham and Greg Brogan bought their first warehouse space in South Australia, before expanding into WA. Six acquisitions and 27 years later, the duo have created the merged entity of Diverseco. The company has now pivoted to collaborative robots, colloquially called ‘cobots’ using expertise in sensor technology, and time-based measurement and control. It has installed freight systems which require collecting measurements, billing and barcode data across freight lines, recording accurately at three parcels a second. “There is a deep skill set developed in passing data through at exactly the right moment,” explains Tim Francis, executive general manager, Automation, Diverseco. Collaborative robots are different to industrial robots, which have a longer history in manufacturing and logistics. While industrial robots weight hundreds of kilograms, with the potential safety hazards of powerful machinery, needing to be walled off from humans, cobots (collaborative robots) can weigh under 30kg, and are able to operate alongside people on the factory floor.

companies that manufacture the grippers, which are then different to the companies that make small, moving autonomous robots which move produce around a factory floor. Now, the company can integrate robotic arms, with customised grippers, on top of autonomous mobile robots. In practice, a cobot on wheels can move down an aisle, pick goods up, return to a human operator, and hand them off. On the programming side, they are now simple enough to use that a person with the computer skill needed to work a video recorder on a phone would be able to set them up for new tasks within a business, claims Francis. “They come with a simplistic, almost ‘block’ format of programming. You do not need to be a programmer, and you can easily apply them to different tasks when needed,” he explains.

From ‘dark art’ to open networks When the technology was newer, different manufacturers made no effort to create open systems. This created a challenge for integrators like Diverseco, who would have to piece the puzzle together between different companies, with each almost speaking a different language. For cobots, the manufacturers of the robotic arms are different to the

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FROM GRAPE TO GLASS – HOW NECESSITY DROVE INNOVATION IN AUSTRALIAN WINEMAKING While South Australia is already the engine room of Australia’s wine industry, its drive to innovate in the face of climate change and other challenges is stronger than ever.

hat would nineteenth-century vigneron Robert Strangways Wigley make of South Australian schools teaching innovation and entrepreneurialism in the twenty-first century? In 1894, the failed state cricketer lost interest in both architectural and legal degrees and earned a dollar working in the cellars of Thomas Hardy at his Bankside winery on the western fringe of Adelaide. Inspired, Wigley purchased land in McLaren Vale to start a new life away from the city. Before long he was exporting to the UK and a highly regarded producer of the district. Wigley’s foray into winemaking was out of necessity to find his life’s purpose and, in so doing, Wirra Wirra Vineyards was born. While Wigley may have been a unique individual, his story was not. Necessity has been an ongoing catalyst for innovators and entrepreneurs in the Australian wine industry, in which South Australia has held a preeminent position, being home to such premium regions as the Barossa Valley, McLaren Vale, Coonawarra, Adelaide Hills, Langhorne Creek and Clare Valley. Such is SA’s role as the engine room of the Australian wine community that the peak

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industry bodies, Wine Australia and Australian Grape and Wine, and the showpiece for the industry’s research and innovation, the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI), all reside in Adelaide. The drive to innovate has stemmed from the need to survive, thrive, create value and to adapt to changing conditions, markets and opportunities. It was a group of Clare Valley winemakers, frustrated by “cork taint” affecting their wines, who banded together to release their 2000 vintage Rieslings under screwcap after trialling nine different closures with the AWRI over a two-year period. The rest of the country followed suit and now more than 95 per cent of Australian wines are bottled under screwcap, with many of the New World wine producers taking our lead and moving away from cork. While the desire to improve wine quality for the end user has never waned, it has been the necessity to adapt to climate, water and agricultural challenges that has driven significant innovation in recent years. Sustainable practices have come to the fore as growers look to manage water scarcity and a changing climate. Greater emphasis has been placed on organic and biodynamic farming,

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biodiversity and soil management to maintain healthy vineyards, rather than using chemicals and pesticides to fuel growth and keep pests at bay. All vineyards are at risk of disease pressures, including the threat of phylloxera, which wiped out European vineyards in the late nineteenth century. Much trial and experimentation has been done to develop disease-resistant rootstocks. These rootstocks may not only help defend against phylloxera, but also increase tolerance to salt levels, improve water efficiency and enhance the fruit set on the vine. Getting the viticultural house in order has allowed Australian wineries to blossom in terms of marketing and consumer interaction. Many Australian winemakers have spent the last decade differentiating themselves, seeking out alternative varietals that suit their regional climate and growing conditions. This understanding of what the French call “terroir” has seen experimentation with Tempranillo, Sangiovese, Touriga, Vermentino, Fiano and other varietals that have a Mediterranean pedigree and are well suited to dry Australian growing conditions. They now sit comfortably alongside Shiraz and Cabernet on wine lists around the country. With increased plantings and agricultural developments have come larger production numbers and the need to find markets for wine outside of Australia. From an industry that once exported “what we had left over”, Australian wine generated $2.84 billion in international sales for the year ending June 2020. As wine tourism became a drawcard, cellar doors sought to reinvent themselves as destinations rather than tasting rooms. Locavore food, café seating, exceptional coffee and manicured lawns flourished. One McLaren Vale winery took this concept to a whole other level, when d’Arenberg launched the “cube” building in 2017. Built in the shape of a Rubik’s Cube puzzle, this architectural landmark became a showpiece for South Australia, and winemaker Chester Osborn’s penchant for the bizarre and surreal attracted accolades and visitors from all over the world.

The work of our winemaking pioneers has created a lasting economic benefit for Australia, particularly in rural centres. RS Wigley could not have envisaged how his cottage industry would transform the fortunes of so many regional communities. Today 2,500 individual wineries and around 6,300 grape growers operate in more than 65 distinct wine-producing regions. The industry directly employs more than 16,000 people, making it a key pillar in country centres across Australia. It continues to evolve and innovate to remain competitive within a global market space and with relatively few barriers to entry, and still fuels the dreams of young people like Wigley who set out to put their own spin on the ancient art of winemaking.

Andrew Kay is managing director and CEO, Wirra Wirra Vineyards and Ashton Hills Vineyard.

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THE AUSTRALIAN COMPANY REVOLUTIONISING DATA-DRIVEN SHEEP BREEDING A ground-breaking sheep technology system is bettering the businesses and lives of Australian sheep breeders thanks to a revolutionary combination of software, hardware, and support never before combined into one cohesive unit.

ame-changing overarching integration is allowing sheep breeders to wholly adopt sophisticated data management systems within their farming operations without the headaches and clunkiness that many others face. Combining software, hardware, electronic tags (EID), data support, and optional Australian Sheep Breeding Values (ASBV) data within a singular unit was once considered unimaginable. Not anymore thanks to BreedELITE who is enabling breeders to turn data into dollars via their disruptive sheep breeding system that allows focus on what really matters. The Australian-owned company has managed to replace what used to require six to ten different companies’ products with one simple robust system backed by real-time industry-leading support. The result allows breeders to remain focused on breeding and making decisions rather than overcoming technical issues and having data always out of reach, letting them achieve their goals while saving time, effort, and energy in the process. Equally impressive is the by-product of an occupational environment that’s bringing farming families closer together while, given notable improvements in farmer lifestyle, simultaneously inspiring the next generation to continue their parents’ legacy. And, with the Victorian Government already making EID compulsory for sheep breeders, with other states following soon, BreedELITE’s undeniable innovation is certainly timely.

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The revolution begins BreedELITE’s pioneering journey started in 1999 when co-founder Greg Johnsson set out to track the value of modern genetic selection methods after approaching a group of commercial sheep farmers on Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia. The collection of high-quality data relating to the sheep’s objective measurement, mating, lambing, and visual performance was paramount prompting Greg to study the market for suitable software. Hitting roadblocks at every turn, Greg was unable to find such a program that not only collected data but also allowed elite decision making and animal comparison. So, he developed his own. Fast-forward 23 years and this family-owned and run company is changing the industry via their BreedELITE Sheep System as the need for sheep genetic selection and objective measurement reigns supreme. “Dad was so determined to empower the way people approached sheep breeding that he wrote the code that can now record over 800 pieces of data per sheep” says Greg’s son and BreedELITE CEO and co-founder Tim Johnsson. “Our software is the key tool underpinning any operation by recording data straight from the hardware and presenting that data in a way that allows for easy and powerful decision-making.” Turning data into dollars Up until 2015, BreedELITE’s main focus was continuing to improve their recording software for the small group on

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Kangaroo Island, during which it inadvertently became the most capable program on the market. Releasing to the market later that year, their clients’ notable gains from using the software were soon being thwarted by the absence of integrated technology. “Breeders need to focus on breeding sheep and making great decisions, it’s what their specialty is, not wasting time forcing bits and pieces of technology together or trolling through session files and excel lists,” says Tim. So, in 2015, BreedELITE identified the debilitating concerns of hundreds of stud and commercial breeders across Australia to create a list of needs for creating a unified solution. The ultimate goal was for breeders to achieve production and efficiency goals faster than ever before by combining the three pillars needed for technology success: Software, hardware and support. Two and-a-half years later the result was a seamless plug-and-play system connecting capability and adaptability via easy-to-use data-collecting analytics technology helping breeders thrive. “You can’t guess your way to success and our system enables our clients to have the confidence and clarity in every decision they are making,” says Tim. “Empowered decisions make good businesses and if something is easy to do, you’ll likely do more of it.” Total integration The BreedELITE Sheep System is a fully integrated data management, technology, and hardware system supporting every data collection need breeders have allowing for the real-time implementation of high-quality decisions. The unit comprises pedigree and performance recording Software, a rugged computer, stick reader, fleece weighing equipment, tags, auto drafter, support, and training all of which work seamlessly and can be purchased separately depending on operational requirements. The expandable grow-with-you system incorporates EID technologies catering from beginners to the most advanced producers in the industry. Tim says his focus is on making the hardware as rugged, reliable, and durable as possible, while frequent software updates ensure breeders remain at the forefront of industry dynamics. And, with BreedELITE’s support staff available to guide users on the job in real time or through industry leading training, Tim says the system is as nurturing as it is revolutionary. “Our software and hardware design criteria and standards have defined the optimum outcome to meet the needs of sheep breeders in implementing EID technologies quickly and cost-effectively,” he says. “So often, Australian farmers are fearful of digital technologies so stay behind and others are living a clunky nightmare. I believe we have created a system that can be a sheep breeder’s best friend, not their worst enemy.”

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Real success A lot of sheep breeders will tell you the hardest part of their job is not just getting to but staying at the top of their game. Remaining successful takes innovative thinking, technology, and advanced breeding techniques. Fifth-generation breeder and Roseville Park Merino Stud owner Matthew Coddington says BreedELITE changed his business and his family’s life for the better. “By using BreedELITE’s easy-to-use system we can tailor our rams to do any job our clients want in meeting their breeding objectives to increase their productivity and profitability,” he says. “Before investing in BreedELITE we spent a fortune on two previous systems that didn’t get used because no one knew how to use them. They’re still sitting there.” Tim’s wife Cherie, who runs the farm’s administration, describes BreedELITE as a saviour. “Gathering so much data used to be so complicated with it stored in so many places that you would go back to the house and forever be working,” she says. “We’ve had two great years of ram selling seasons because the data is instantaneous, the decisions are made, the rams are thrown onto the ute that afternoon, and away we go.”

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SPOTLIGHT:

NORTHERN AUSTRALIA

LARGE-SCALE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IS THE CANVAS FOR INNOVATION INNOVATION A NECESSITY IN NORTHERN AUSTRALIA FUELLING NORTHERN AUSTRALIA’S GROWTH HOW TO LEVERAGE INNOVATION IN UNEXPECTED LOCATIONS - By Harley Paroulakis VENTURE CAPITAL PACKING A PUNCH - The Darwin Innovation Hub PUTTING IT ON THE AGRICULTURE AGENDA: BUSH FOODS AND BLOCKCHAIN SUSTAINABLE SEAFOOD DARWIN’S POTENTIAL FUTURE THE FUTURE STATE OF THE INDIGENOUS ESTATE

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LARGE-SCALE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IS THE CANVAS FOR INNOVATION How is the government planning for the future of Northern Australia? We interviewed Shaun Drabsch, CEO of the Northern Territory Department of Industry, Tourism and Trade, to illuminate the Territory’s vast economic potential.

n his role, Drabsch is responsible for innovation, and he is one of the Territory’s most senior civil servants. He is undertaking a PhD at Griffith University in infrastructure studies, a field in which he has considerable experience as a former director of PwC. Most southerners have a limited understanding of the NT’s current activities and potential. What would you tell them? SD: The Northern Territory has a vast amount of arable land and more water availability than is often recognised. We are working on new growing systems and harnessing rainfall for improved irrigation. If we were able to harness just 15,000 gigalitres of the 2 million gigalitres that is the NT’s annual rainfall, we could roughly double the amount of productive arable land in the whole country – an additional 1.5 million hectares. The NT is known mainly for beef cattle. What else is important to its economy? SD: To start, remember that soybeans, cotton, peanuts and chickpeas are all either tropical or semi-tropical crops. You also have to think about aquaculture, a further potential boom area, with companies like SeaFarms looking very prospective. They are involved in an innovative development worth $1.5 billion in prawn

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aquaculture. But the mining industry is the Territory’s largest industry and the single largest generator of export revenue, valued at $4.4 billion in 2019-20. We’ve been reading about the first steps into the Space Industry . SD: Yes, this is very exciting, with the construction outside of Nhulunbuy of the Arnhem Space Centre. We have attracted involvement from the European aerospace company ArianeGroup. This, as you know, is seen as a fast-growth industry of the future, expected to be worth $12 billion in Australia within a few years. But, more specifically to the NT, it will synergistically attract related growth industries. What other physical attributes are significant fulcrums to growth? SD: You would have to point to the only functional deep-water port between Port Hedland and Cairns. And, of course, the proximity to Asia is an advantage. An example that not many people realise is that we are a very viable competitive location to Singapore for data centres. Singapore has natural constraints in land and in energy. Like Singapore, we are stable and trusted, with other advantages in high-security data storage and transmission through undersea cables, to and for Asian clients.

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You mentioned energy capability in connection with data and competition with Singapore. SD: Yes, it is called Sun Cable. I believe that by building in the Territory the world’s largest solar farm, the world will see the Territory, as a place to invest but as an important source of low-emission energy. Sun Cable is on track for launch in 2026 and will be so large, at 12,000ha, it will be visible from space. And this will be an earner. This energy will be needed offshore – Singapore being one of the prime users – as well as, of course, locally. And you have a fairly new innovation hub for incubation? SD: Yes, and it is gaining momentum. It has the right partner foundation – AusIndustry, with Paspalis as the venture capital arm, and the NT Government and Charles Darwin University. It has an excellent inner-city location and all of the ingredients necessary to encourage and properly incubate new businesses. What role is Charles Darwin University playing? SD: Universities are essential in the makeup of any fully functioning innovation hub. They can generally muster research facilities to meet any requirement brought forth by a new company. They have the resources and talent. And there is another side to this – international connections, access to collaborators. This is particularly relevant in our case, as we have a focus on Asia, specifically Singapore and China. They are an invaluable partner. On another subject, infrastructure – something you know a lot about. What are the big items underway or planned for the Territory ? SD: Let me underline that infrastructure is not just about building structures. It is also about

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

creating networks of connectivity that enable economic exchange. Infrastructure, properly thought out, brings efficiencies and adds directly to a region’s competitiveness, its economic wellbeing. Two of the larger goals that will be achieved as a result of infrastructure are 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030 and immensely improved connectivity. This latter area includes high-speed connectivity via a Darwin hub to both Asia and the US. And, of course, a lot of individual projects are either being examined or are underway. Terrabit Territory and the Darwin Data Centre projects both have significant meaning to creating jobs and building efficiencies and competitiveness. Of course, we hear a lot about tourism in the Territory. What’s happening with infrastructure in that space? SD: A lot is going on. Some of this is the continued city beautification in Darwin and the State Square redevelopment. On a bigger scale there are plans for destination resorts that link our pastoral history and heritage, and glamping-style experiences that include an innovative "foodie" experience. There is more scope for guided walking trails and guided mountain bike riding. Developing an industry around servicing superyachts also has potential. Tourism will always be a mainstay here, for obvious reasons. There is no place on Earth like the Northern Territory. I guess that’s how the new slogan arose: “Different in every sense”. And you have another Territory slogan, don’t you? SD: Yes, one that is grammatically quirky but delivers the spirit of the place, now. It's “Boundless Possible”.

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INNOVATION A NECESSITY IN NORTHERN AUSTRALIA Innovation – imagining, building and realising more effective ways of doing things – is part of the DNA of those who live and work in Northern Australia.

By Professor Simon Maddocks

t is just as well that innovation seems to be intrinsic to Territorians, for it is an essential quality if we are to continue to unlock the potential of this vast continent’s north. The Territory has an immense footprint. It is the third largest geographical area in Australia, yet home to just 1 per cent of the nation’s 26 million residents. The Territory’s remote location, stretching from the far north of Australia down to its central deserts, coupled with its small population base, presents its own challenges, but also offers an environment ripe for innovation. Necessity, as the saying goes, is the mother of invention. And many North Australians carry or develop a powerful resilience and creative ingenuity because of their isolated existence. One must learn to “do it yourself” or go without. Many in the North value their isolation from the mainstream issues that dominate the lives of their southern cousins. But isolation has also been a significant barrier to opportunity, and it explains the lack of development in Northern Australia compared with the south. The lack of population density from which to draw local taxes means thousands of kilometres of roads remain unsealed, with seasonal flooding making them impassable for almost half the year. Federal tax structures that pay GST revenue to states based on population size leave much of the North inadequately funded. The lack of infrastructure makes digital

communication, righty taken for granted in the south, simply unknown in much of the North. For six months of the year there is no fresh water supply; for the other six months there is too much, and natural ecosystem flooding of thousands of square kilometres of open country is incompatible with modern industry development. The cattle industry depends on live export markets, but road closures in the wet season make it nigh impossible to keep supply up to local abattoirs that need to run throughout the year. Without supply, they cannot keep their workforce nor meet product demand. Those who live in southern Australia rarely glimpse these problems, and most would consider them irrelevant to their own existence, let alone as justifying national investment. And yet, geopolitically, Northern Australia is critical to Australia’s security and economic sustainability. Darwin, Australia’s northern capital city, is closer to six Asian capitals than to any Australian metropolis. This gives it the Australian “Gateway to Asia” label. Australia’s economic future lies in trade with our nearest northern neighbours. That is, without doubt, why Chinese interests grasped the opportunity to lease the commercial Darwin port for 99 years. Innovation in Australia’s North is best powered through partnerships. If local people are not involved, then the critical element of local knowledge is missing and failure is likely.

Professor Simon Maddocks is vice-chancellor and president of Charles Darwin University.

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HOW TO LEVERAGE INNOVATION IN UNEXPECTED LOCATIONS The Northern Territory is becoming an object lesson in intelligent investment attraction, leveraging geographical location, and local advantages. When combined with careful selection skills, things start tracking.

n the last 6 years the Northern Territory has quietly developed the foundations of a vibrant innovation ecosystem. A highlights reel would show you companies like SPEE3D creating new innovations in 3D metal printing and advanced manufacturing, up-and-coming start-ups such as Corrosion Instruments and Universal Site Management developing unique technologies to support the Mining, Equipment, Technology and Services sector and innovations in the Information Communication Technology (ICT) sector with companies such as Hold Access developing a digital wallet that empowers First Nations people to hold diverse identification with access to full capabilities in their control. Recently, the Territory is looking to become Australia’s first manufacturer and exporter of the iconic Albatross G-111T, an amphibious aircraft which can take off and touch down from land, snow, ice, and water. Amphibian Aerospace Industries (AAI) is relocating its refurbished aircraft and establishing a new facility and office at Darwin International Airport. AAI first caught the eye of the Darwin Innovation Hub when it took out first prize at their annual Croc Pitch event in 2021. AAI is a great example of how early-stage technology investment in an aviation manufacturing company can not only provide a technology proof of concept but also unlock a pathway towards later stage capital investment, modern manufacturing, skilled jobs, and industry growth. International collaborations are also solidifying

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

By Harley Paroulakis

in this growing innovation ecosystem. The potential of leveraging the geographic position and vast hinterland of the Northern Territory has caught the eye of international research institutions such as NASA and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University. In July 2022, three NASA rockets successfully launched from Arnhem Space Centre in the Northern Territory. The launch marking the start of Equatorial Launch Australia (ELA) as a multi-user commercial Space Launch company, providing world-class launch services flown to and from all space orbits. Singapore-based space-tech company, Aliena, aims to provide high-resolution data to terrestrial businesses by enabling a fleet of imaging satellites

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to fly closer to the Earth using proprietary electric propulsion engines. Through relationships with the Darwin Innovation Hub, Aliena will provide datasets specific to the Northern Territory, which can be used for advanced crop monitoring for smart farms, fire detection for disaster mitigation and hazard response, and other security and defence sector applications. Further showcasing that Australia’s Northern Territory is ideally placed to host key infrastructure and services for the global space industry. The fundamental key to realising these commercial opportunities lies in applying relevant technology to our North’s rich industrial sectors. Typically, regional locations such as the Northern Territory are not thought of as hubs of innovation or centres that attract meaningful levels of venture capital investment due to lack of population. Lack of deal flow, distant from key financial centres can hinder. The solution lies in careful examination of inherent strengths ,finding the right investment, and subsequent effective nurturance: first the deal, then the enterprise. Based on our first six years, I believe in the next 25 years the Northern Territory will expand upon its position as one of the fastest growing innovation ecosystems in the world. There are three

main factors contributing to the durability of this growth. First, the continued leverage of the Territory’s massive land and geographical advantages as a sand box for global entrepreneurship and innovation, by offering developers of technology valuable test bed and demonstration sites. Second, the aggressive pursual of the best innovations across Australia and around the world that can be applied to the rich industries found in the Northern Territory. By expanding its’ vision, the Northern Territory will be able to tap into an unlimited global deal flow. Third, private capital must be raised to both entice the talent and enable such projects to be established, bringing valuable labour and business operations to the Northern Territory. Such capital will be available given correct foundation establishment of appropriate investment opportunities . It is the combination of Northern Territory geographic position, land, enterprise, labour and capital that will drive economic growth. And it is the abundant natural resources and high industrial output per capita that will provide the fuel for this growth.

The Arnhem Space Centre, located in the Northern Territory's East Arnhem region, is the only commercially owned and run multi-user equatorial launch site in the world. Harley Paroulakis, CEO – Paspalis Group of Companies and Darwin Innovation Hub

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Image of 1951 GRUMMAN HU-16B Albatross (fixed wing multi engine). The Albatross is a large amphibious flying boat used primarily for search and rescue.

VENTURE CAPITAL PACKING A PUNCH A key role of any innovation hub worth its salt is to attract high-growth companies seeking to commercialise technologies in growth sectors. For the Northern Territory, one of these growth sectors is advanced manufacturing.

he Darwin Innovation Hub provides high-growth companies support through access to direct venture capital investment, expert advice and highly valuable grant programs, such as Accelerating Commercialisation, which will match private sector investment on a dollar-for-dollar basis with a Commonwealth Government grant up to $1 million per project. Amphibian Aerospace Industries (AAI) has been recently supported and invested in with $1.5 million early-stage investment funding through the Paspalis Innovation Investment Fund No 2. The investment funding will be used by AAI to leverage co-investment from the Northern Territory Local Jobs Fund and kickstart a program to refurbish and build a new version of the legendary Albatross flying boat – an aircraft that can take off and touch down on land, snow, ice and water. The “new” G-111T Albatross will feature, on the proven airframe, new Pratt & Whitney PT6A-67F engines providing substantially improved performance, fuel economy and reliability. AAI is relocating its refurbished aircraft from Melbourne to Darwin, establishing a new facility and office

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at Darwin International Airport. AAI is a good example of how early-stage technology investment in an aviation manufacturing company can not only provide a technology proof of concept but also unlock a pathway towards later stage capital investment, modern manufacturing, skilled jobs and industry growth in Darwin. AAI first caught the eye of the Darwin Innovation Hub when it took out first prize at our annual Croc Pitch event in 2021 impressing the judging panel with its aspirations to create a modern assembly and manufacturing facility for the Albatross in Darwin. Modern manufacturing is a goal for Australia. Why not have a go? Manufacturing companies such as AAI attract a supplier base around them, and companies who have not explored the NT before, as an aviation manufacturing base, are now looking at what can be created here. We believe this project will also be able to leverage other grant programs consistent with Australia’s desire to relaunch modern manufacturing and high value jobs in Australia.

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Putting it on the agriculture agenda: bush foods and blockchain Alice Springs and the deserts of Central Australia don’t sound like a food basket, but they are for businesswoman and bush foods innovator Rayleen Brown.

s the chairperson of the First Nations Bush Food & Botanical Alliance Australia, she has been working in the native food industry for almost 25 years. Rayleen is now part of an alliance lobbying for a merge between bush foods and blockchain to verify traceability across the food value chain. It’s also about the ethics of non-Indigenous people profiting from intellectual property (IP). Indigenous women as food foragers have developed this knowhow over their people’s 65,000-years of living on Australia’s ancient soils. Men’s role is to carry the harvest and they also have connection with story and songlines. Rayleen’s ancestry is intertwined with that. Her mother’s clan is Mulvian clan Muringar people, based at the top-end of the western side of the Northern Territory. “Nana was removed from her people and put into an Alice Springs mission, so that’s how we came to be here. My mob is the strength I draw from and makes me want to work on projects to connect with my people up north,” says Rayleen. After finishing high school in Alice Springs, she and her husband had five children and lived on a hobby farm over the border in South Australia. When she returned to Alice Springs, Rayleen worked as a project officer for the Aboriginal Land Council, helping distribute royalty funds from mining on Aboriginal lands. The work involved flying out to remote areas to help with cultural meetings and women’s law. And that’s where her life pivoted. “A friend at the council asked me to help him run a workshop for 100 Indigenous teachers, and I spent a week cooking for them in a tiny domestic kitchen,” says Rayleen. Despite being sore afterwards, the experience

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sparked her to then set up and run a food business with an Indigenous friend. It took a year to turn that idea into Kungkas Can Cook, a café and catering service, to celebrate bushfood. “When setting up the business in 2000, we really wanted to have that point of difference by showcasing our beautiful bushfoods,” says Rayleen. “We wanted to change people’s perception of bush foods and not for people to think of it as roadkill or weird-looking grub.” Their business infused flavours of wattle seeds, bush tomatoes, local quandongs (a small desert tree), and “anything we could sustainably source from local Indigenous people”. “The ladies from whom we sourced had English as a third or fourth language and were harvesting in a traditional sense the same way that had been done for many thousands of years with just bare hands and simple implements.” For them, wild harvesting could involve shaking or brushing an acacia tree to release and collect the seeds, then carrying them in a coolamon – which is simply an Aboriginal container made of wood or bark. And with the bush tomato, they always leave some fruit for the bush turkey to eat – each type of plant has its own animal totem and story.” “Those women were so resilient in carrying that story forward from generation to generation. I felt that what was missing from the bushfoods industry was the history behind the plant and its use. It goes back to humans surviving on land without a lot of water.” At the time, already major food manufacturers were innovating with products sitting on Coles and Woolies’ supermarket shelves around Australia. “A lot of our native seeds have travelled away from this land in agricultural and harvesting techniques

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very different to the way it’s done here. Indigenous women don’t understand why plants are grown in a straight line, and require water, fertilising, spraying and tending or even genetic modification when those same plants on country have built up their own resilience and don’t need those regimes.” “We need to protect the biodiversity in this country or risk, as we have seen already with lemon myrtle and macadamias, foiling a huge economic opportunity to overseas. That’s why we’re looking to the blockchain which can prove the provenance of ingredients as they move across the food-value chain.” The COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions of 2020-2021prompted Rayleen to close her café and catering business, putting off her 20 employees. She now sells Indigenous food products online, runs seasonal educational tours, and has taken more of a national purview to spotlight intellectual property rights for the bush food industry. As the chairperson

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

of the First Nations Bush Foods & Botanical Alliance Australia, Rayleen’s helping organise a national conference to be held in April 2023. It aims to address the many issues and barriers that Indigenous people face around the world regarding intellectual property and intellectual ecological knowledge. “This industry was built on this knowledge, yet we only represent a very small percentage of business and there are very few benefit-share agreements in place across Australia. Our organisation hopes to support and strengthen indigenous businesses in the industry and build an ethical framework for industry to work within,” Rayleen says. Among her supporters is Natalie Somerville, a South Australian broadacre cropping farmer, former agronomist, and now the president of Australian Women in Agriculture (AWiA). The AWiA was set up in 1993 to raise the visibility of women in agriculture so they could formally contribute to the agenda.

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“Thirty years ago, farming women weren’t legally allowed to call themselves farmers, only farmers wives. We’ve come a long way,” says Natalie. The most recent government statistics estimate that women account for a third of people employed in agriculture. However, just 1 per cent of agricultural workers overall identify as Indigenous. Natalie recognises that Indigenous women’s knowledge and skills are crucial for the bush foods industry. “With my indigenous and agronomy background, I appreciate that First Nations people have intricately bred bush foods for many thousands of years without financial reward and more broadly acknowledged. Yet, when we purchase, grow and market a lot of our wheat and canola, for example, we sometimes have to pay royalties to the companies that own the breeding rights. Why aren’t we using as similar reward and recognition system when we use bush foods?” “I very much support Rayleen’s interests in blockchain to move Indigenous agriculture forward as well as our broader agricultural sector. Consumers are increasingly demanding to know where their food comes from, how it’s been grown and produced, so we need to start providing that evidence if we are not already.” For the bushfood sector it has been a bumpy road, though. “In the past, when organisations have attempted to do this, it hasn’t been done in a culturally appropriate way, or followed the correct process or been transparent about what happens to the data once it’s been captured - we need to follow protocols,” says Natalie. The Indigenous Food Traceability System project was one of 16 successful applicants in round one of the Federal agricultural department’s Traceability Grants Program in 2020. All up, there were 168 applicants for the total funding pool of $4 million. The Indigenous project aimed to transfer, apply and trial FBK FoodTrakR Digital Farming Platform for food authentication, provenance and social matters. The application has since been withdrawn. Another project, focusing on the native superfood, the Kakadu plum, will create a blockchain-based Indigenous certification and accreditation system for better traceability. In mid-2021, the Northern Australia Aboriginal Kakadu Plum Alliance won a $455,100 grant from the Federal Government to undertake the work. The grants aim to curb food and ingredient fraud in overseas markets. The plum also has prom-

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ise for use in cosmetics and nutraceuticals. Meanwhile, another bush food with medicinal potential is the native quandong, a type of fruit, currently selling for $25 a kilogram. Being rich in antioxidants, it has many health benefits. But, too often, say Rayleen, “bush foods like the quandong are relegated to chutneys, sauces and teas.” “Bush foods are more than that - Indigenous peo-

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ple have used it over the years to give us energy and endurance.” She likens protocols for protecting Indigenous IP about bush foods as “like a mining licence”. “It’s like a technology where the IP stays within the [Indigenous] language group, but if others wanted to use and further test the bush foods to develop into products, we’d have the ability to do a bene-

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

fit-share agreement.” Rayleen is looking to QR codes to be the “biggest gamechanger” and that blockchain will help the Indigenous food industries establish their brand and provenance. “The technology is there. It’s about linking with the right people and understanding our values.”

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DARWIN’S POTENTIAL FUTURE Darwin’s future is bright, with its proximity to Asia, and geological stability both key factors. Federal, state, and local governments must work together for the city to achieve its potential. By Scott Waters

arwin is interestingly located the same distance from Jakarta and Singapore as to its closest capital city in Australia, is smack bang in the middle of Indo-Pacific. It is well recognised that the Indo-Pacific region is going to play a vital part in shaping the world over the next century, economically, socially and politically. And Darwin will have a critical role to play due to its geographic location and I want to be a part of it. It's interesting to consider how Australia may have evolved over the past 50 years if our big cities were in the north and not the south. Looking ahead to the next 50 years, it’s exciting to ponder the possibilities for Northern Australia's economic development given, for example, its relative proximity to the world's two most populous countries, China and India. We are at a cross-roads in the evolution of global trade with the major players being India and Japan. Historically, Australia's major merchandise exports to Japan include natural gas, coal, iron ore, beef, copper ores and concentrates and aluminium. This mix will look very different in 10-20 years from now. Darwin's ties with India, compared with the southern cities, are particularly strong given their relative proximity. Darwin’s bonds with China go back to the Gold Rush of the 1870s and continue to strengthen through a range of Sister City agreements, educational and cultural exchanges. Seismically, Darwin is one of the most geologically stable urban centres in the SE Asian

region, colloquially known as the rim of fire. This makes it ideal as a hub for data centres, as data is the new oil. With a rising middle class across SE Asia, the demand for secure data storage will grow exponentially in the coming 10-20 years. Defence and military applications are also a major part of the top end's industry landscape, especially with the United States Marine Corps' annual rotation. For Australia to become a major player on the world stage, it needs, much like the way major economies of Europe do, to cooperate much more with its regional neighbours in SE Asia. And now is a key juncture in modern history with a compelling opportunity that must be seized. The North's mineral, oil and gas industries are a strength but there are issues with capitalising on these due to supply chain logistics, including water and land-based transport. Many products are currently being transported to southern ports for subsequent export. Adapting to climate change including longer hotter summers is critical to economic growth, along with securing steady population growth. Targeted migration has a role to play, including faster pathways to citizenship. Darwin's destiny, which is a national responsibility, is ultimately in the hands of the Federal Government and a collaborative approach with all three levels of government will help provide the platforms to encourage and secure investment in the North, which is urgently needed.

Scott Waters is the CEO for the City of Darwin.

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THE FUTURE STATE OF THE INDIGENOUS ESTATE The knowledge and expertise held by Indigenous Australians can drive innovation across the economy – if we can recognise and nourish it for the generations to come.

leven kilometres. You might drive, walk, run, ride or swim that far. For many Indigenous Australians, it’s the distance between their mission designated area and the nearest local town. It is a horizontal measure, a single line of sight and focus that determines how we see ourselves. For me, it’s the survival zone of all things living on the planet. It’s the natural balance of our planet within what the astronomers call the Goldilocks zone, where life is possible. A vertical perspective within the sphere of life. What does this mean for Australia’s Indigenous people, and for what we might call the Indigenous Estate? What may it mean in the future? As I see it, Australia’s Indigenous culture is a 360-degree sphere of life, joining the earth and all of its inhabitants. The current state of the Indigenous Estate is precariously positioned. For the vast majority of Australians it is not an estate, nor is even in a sustainable Goldilocks zone that preserves and protects its future state. Indigenous people see the entire landmass as the habitable zone where life has endured for 65,000 years, as distinct from the past couple of hundred years of mostly coastal living. We know the difference between our current state and future state. The future receives our current state and is handed to the next generation in perpetuity – in aeternum. The Indigenous Estate in Australia comprises both tangible and intangible assets held by or for the benefit of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people by various means. The tangible assets are relatively simple to identify and define. They are the land and waters and the resources

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

located on or within them. The intangible assets include cultural and intellectual property rights; such forms of expression as arts, dance, music, and language of, traditional culture, environmental and bioscience practices; and the individuals, groups, clans, totems and peoples that own and believe in their right to the Indigenous Estate. These intangible assets include the inherent potential within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to bring new perspectives, knowledge and innovation to the wider economy. The deep purpose of our very existence is interwoven into the vast treasures of information that we have mastered in our daily lives. If we ignore them, itwill be an opportunity lost over the course of our most precious commodity: our collective life and everything within it – nostrum vita. As technology advances it is taking us further away from the intuitive lessons of life and the knowledge gathered over 65,000 years. This separation is also moving us away from the landmass that has provided us with our physical and mental well-being in its rawest form. It also means that many of us have turned a blind eye to what has been happening. We need leaders who can reset the dial and build upon the endeavours needed. The present state of many Indigenous matters is challenging. Many Indigenous communities are dysfunctional, beset with institutional inequality and disconnected from both the past and the future. As Matt Wilson of Innoprac observes, “Indigenous disempowerment and poverty is big business. Many champions in government and private enterprise have dedicated blood sweat and tears to help our

By Eddie Fry

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‘mob’ with some great achievements, but generally, overall having limited success. “Meanwhile many companies have their whole focus on making money off this chaos, with the Australian public generally conditioned through negative press and inferred guilt being discouraged from asking, questioning or digging too deep into how this whole industry is to be managed and how this chaos continues to roll. Seemingly unlimited resources and effort produce the odd highly publicised success story, but generally with little evidence of holistic change once the money tap is turned off, leaving us First Australians in no better condition than before the tap was turned on.” We need a new paradigm to reset the Indigenous Estate so that its current and future state will utilise and optimise its tangible and non-tangible assets. Generational management of the current state is required to maintain the various inputs that will ensure that the Indigenous Estate remains a habitable zone. That will result in the thinking, design, renovation and critical critiquing that should be feature of each current state. Broadening skillsets within the current state will underwrite the future state and will become a feature of the Indigenous Estate. Our objective should be altruistic pursuits that enhance psychological well-being in Indigenous

communities, and which add value to life at an individual, community, regional and national level. We are, after-all, merely humans living on a planet we call Earth situated within a habitable Goldilocks zone where life only exists because of an astronomical phenomenon. The future state is our horizon setting. We should never underestimate the importance of being indigenous to the land which we have inhabited for so long. Our past lessons in life and living are the fabric of our thinking in the current state, and are the lessons we apply to the future state. Our indigeneity within the global habitable zone is mutually inclusive to all. There is no other Indigenous life form in our solar system. We are all, as human beings, globally Indigenous. We are defined by our culture, our land, our communities, our values and our beliefs, regardless of where we are on the globe. As people existing and living for thousands of years prior to Captain Cook and Governor Phillip, Indigenous Australians seek no more than a fair go. We seek equity and the ability to sustain and grow our lives, all within the mutually recognised habitable zone we all call home. That should be the future state of the Indigenous Estate we call Australia.

Eddie Fry is chair of the Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation and Indigenous Business Australia. Born in Darwin, his mother is a Northern Territory Dagoman woman. He has a wealth of experience in the resources sector, specialises in financial and human resource management, Indigenous and Native Title issues, and has extensive corporate governance expertise.

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WOMEN IN STEM This section was first created in the 2nd edition of this book, published in 2011, to honour Elizabeth Blackburn, our first female Nobel Laureate – and to encourage young women to consider STEM subjects and a career in science. That effort was enthusiastically received, with a major event devoted to this vital topic held in Melbourne. Gender parity across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, more commonly known as ‘STEM’, is crucial for Australia to reach its innovation goals, and potential as a nation. Currently, Australia is nowhere near reaching parity. It is often said that ‘You can’t be what you can’t see’, and that for young women considering a career path, STEM is often missed. These pieces are written by a mixture of Australia’s emerging talents, and senior leaders in the wide field of STEM. Many have made profound contributions to the country, and positively impacted the lives of millions. They are honest about the structural barriers that we must tear down to build a society in which talent, hard work, and passion are the determining factors of long-term success in STEM, and not gender.

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SCIENCE SOLVING GENDERED STEM SHORTFALLS - Lisa Harvey-Smith PROSPERITY DEMANDS EQUITY - the Hon Karen Andrews UNLOCKING THE NATION’S TALENT - Professor Tanya Monro SHOOTING FOR THE STARS - Elizabeth Jens BEHIND THE NUMBERS - Professor Caroline Finch DRIVEN TO MAKE THE DIFFERENCE - Julie Bernhardt VALUES-LED LEADERSHIP - Dr Marguerite Evans-Galea VARIETY AND THE MAGIC OF SCIENCE - Holly Vuong OPENING DOORS - Kate Cornick FROM THE LAB TO THE BOARDROOM - Dharmica Mistry TURNING TRASH INTO TREASURE, TYRES INTO STEEL Professor Veena Sahajwalla MAKE THE HOURS COUNT - Marina Sara, NO BETTER TIME, NO BETTER CHOICE OF CAREER Josie Downey FIGHTING TO #INCLUDEHER - Kathyrn Ross SELLING THE SCIENCE - Anastasia Volkova THE CONCRETE CEILING - Muneera Bano’s BRIDGING THE GENDER GAP - Louise Adams PIONEERING ONLINE MENTAL HEALTH SUPPORT - Professor Helen Christensen SCIENCE MEETS POLICY - Kylie Walker CHANGING THE STRUCTURE - Professor Jodie Bradby TIME FOR A CHEMICAL REACTION- Rebecca Lee CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS FOR A CURE - Professor Vasso Apostolopoulos A BLOOMING SOLUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE - Dr Alex Thomson ADDING VALUE WITH SCIENCE - Anne Harris SHINING A LIGHT ON STEM

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SCIENCE SOLVING GENDERED STEM SHORTFALLS Women make up only 17% of people qualified with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills in Australia. At the same time, these skills are becoming increasingly vital in the jobs market. This mismatch is setting up a challenging future for millions of young Australians, who risk missing out on employment opportunities and economic independence. By Lisa Harvey-Smith, Australia’s Women in STEM Ambassador

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hat actions can we take to stem the tide of gender inequity in the scientific and technical disciplines? Since the purpose of this volume is to celebrate the Australian Nobel Laureates, it is perhaps interesting to view the lack of women and girls in STEM through the prism of the Nobel Prizes. At the time of writing, only 3% of all Nobel Laureates were women. A 2019 Nature paper found that, even after accounting for the unequal numbers of men and women working in the fields, the Nobel Prizes are unfairly biased towards men.1 This is a symptom of a wider problem; after all, the Nobel Prizes are by no means the only part of our reward system that displays systematic bias. But in their role as the most reported and celebrated scientific prizes in the world, the bias inherent in the Nobel Prizes is significant because it perpetuates a feedback loop whereby the "lone white male genius" is celebrated. This amplifies the stereotypical norm of academic success, confirming that STEM is seen largely as a "male" pursuit, and thereby cements inequity in our STEM system. Alfred Nobel stated that, with no regard for nationality (or presumably, gender) the Prize should be given to “the worthiest recipient”. As Liselotte Jauffred, one of the authors of the Nature study, said in an interview for Science: “[Since] we are creating a very, very small elite group of white

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Women in STEM men [...] maybe we’re missing a lot of interesting research”. As the Australian Government’s Women in STEM Ambassador my role is to improve the participation of women and girls in STEM education and careers across Australia. We work with governments, industry, the education sector and the public to change attitudes and behaviours to attract more girls to study STEM subjects. Through targeted national projects we plan to transform the systems and practices that drive women to leave STEM careers. In the Australian research sector, there is increasing understanding of the need to scrutinise exactly what we choose to reward. As science becomes a connected activity, collaborative and collegial approaches become even more important in driving excellent science. In my discipline (astrophysics), global projects relying on high-quality data from telescopes distributed across the globe, with hundreds of scientists working on major projects of distinction every day, have become the norm. So why are we still selecting 1-3 people from these enormous teams and celebrating

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

My team is focused on catalysing systemic change that will make the STEM sector more inclusive and ensure Australia’s global competitiveness. them as if science were still a lone pursuit? Why do we perpetuate the "principle investigator" model when most of the scientific work is actually conducted by students, postdocs and early-mid career researchers? Currently, men are more likely to reach the most senior academic positions and are also more likely to receive research funding. That’s not because men are intrinsically better at scientific research; nor are they better leaders. It’s because our systems are tuned to reward those who have no significant caring and domestic responsibilities. Unequal contributions to domestic labour, coupled with unequal parental leave and the gender pay gap, exacerbate the gendered nature of career progression.

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Even for researchers without children, implicit bias in refereeing processes leads to inequitable career outcomes. Success depends to some degree on a researcher’s gender and cultural background. As a consequence, the pipeline to leading to the pinnacle, in this case a Nobel Prize, is riddled with inequity. After adding further layers of bias in the nomination and decision-making processes, is it any surprise that the Nobel Prizes reward largely white male scientists? Fortunately, there is a fix. In science prizes, we need to remove inequities in the application and decision-making processes in order to capture more of the best scientific breakthroughs. This was achieved with the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science, where gendered language that can discourage women from nominating was removed from application materials, women were actively encouraged to apply through a social media campaign, and judging panel members were reminded at the beginning of meetings to be aware of unconscious bias. These simple actions quite organically produced the first ever gender-equal cohort of recipients in 2019. Another way to remove bias (which goes

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much further than just academic prizes) is to anonymise application materials. NASA adopted this approach in allocating time on the Hubble Telescope, with successful results. For the first time in 18 years, proposals led by women had a slightly higher success rate than those led by men. My team is working with national research facilities to implement this method in Australia in a structured scientific trial, which will provide a strong evidence base for the STEM sector to take action on more equitable processes in future. If international experience is anything to go by, it will immediately reduce gendered and cultural biases that exist in such decision-making processes. If we are to reap the rewards of the best possible STEM research, we need to reward the very best researchers. Not the most available, or those with access to domestic help, or a surname and career path that matches the norm. As scientists, let’s continue to demand scientific rigour in the ways we do things – and that includes equity in scientific grants, scholarships and prizes. Lunnemann, P., Jensen, M.H. & Jauffred, L. Gender bias in Nobel prizes. Nature 5, 46. 1

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Women in STEM

PROSPERITY DEMANDS EQUITY Advancing women in STEM safeguards our future economy.

ustralia’s future in the global economy is intertwined with the ability of our workforce to evolve and take advantage of opportunities. In an ever more digitised world, skills in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are increasingly important for Australia to maintain social wellbeing, productivity and prosperity. STEM skills play a crucial role in innovation, which is a key driver of economic growth. As a nation we can’t afford to miss out on the opportunities that come from being able to draw on the knowledge, talent, skills and imagination of all Australians. STEM knowledge has been central to my career and I want to see more young people studying these subjects and pursuing the opportunities that flow from them. We need to see our best and brightest from all backgrounds achieve their full potential, but to overcome the barriers girls and women face in these fields, we need a concerted effort. As a woman, an engineer and Minister for Industry, Science and Technology, I understand the challenges facing girls and women in STEM. Helping overcome the barriers is a priority of mine. Of the STEM qualified population, women comprised only 17 per cent in 2016. In engineering, women represented only 12.4 per cent of the workforce in 2016. In IT, women made up only 28 per cent of the workforce in 2017. We need to improve. The New Work Smarts: Thriving in the New Work Order report from the Foundation for Young Australians estimated that by 2030,

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

we’ll spend 77 per cent more time using STEM skills than we do today. Many of the jobs of the future will be built on science and technology. Denying girls and women equal opportunities in these areas reduces the pool of talented people who can make advances of benefit to us all. These are not issues that have simple solutions, nor will we see an overnight change. I want to drive cultural change in schools, universities and firms, as this will provide better career opportunities and pathways for women with scientific and technological knowledge and skills. Tackling underrepresentation will involve addressing ingrained social and cultural issues, in order to access the benefits associated with gender equity – for business this is market success achieved through accessing a broader talent pool with a greater diversity of ideas. We need to evaluate what works, implement those approaches, and measure the relevant data across the full pipeline – from childhood to senior leadership participation – to track our progress. Empowering girls, and supporting their teachers and parents, to see a future for themselves in STEM, will be crucial to ensuring a future pathway for women in STEM. The Advancing Women in STEM strategy, released in April 2019, sets out the Government’s commitment and vision for an Australian society that provides equal opportunity for all people wanting to learn, work and engage in STEM. It outlines the Government’s strong

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leadership role and support in three key areas: enabling STEM potential through education; supporting women in STEM careers; and making women in STEM visible. The Government also recognises that increasing the participation of girls and women in STEM requires a system level response with long-term strategic action from across the sector – government, industry, academia and education – to address the cultural and systemic barriers. I was pleased to launch the Women in STEM Decadal Plan last year, which sets the direction for the STEM sector to take action on gender inequity. Developed by the Australian Academy of Science in partnership with the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, it is a valuable framework under which organisations will be able to take collective action. The Government’s broad array of actions – now and in the future – directly support the opportunities and many of the recommendations outlined in the Decadal Plan. This includes the Girls in STEM Toolkit, developed by Education Services Australia to help school-aged girls understand what a STEM career can involve, and assist them to match their interests to a STEM career. It also includes the appointment of a Women in STEM Ambassador. I was thrilled to appoint Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith as the inaugural Women in STEM Ambassador. In her role, Professor Harvey-Smith is acting as an advocate for gender equity in STEM, raising awareness of issues and prosecuting the case for change. My department is also supporting a digital national awareness raising initiative, led by the Women in STEM Ambassador, to show young Australian women the importance of STEM to their future of the nation. These initiatives come on top of the Women in STEM and Entrepreneurship initiative. Through this initiative, the Government has invested over $13 million to encourage more women to study STEM subjects and then stay in STEM research, careers, start-ups and entrepreneurial firms. Together these initiatives will help us reach the objective of equal opportunity in classrooms, universities and workplaces so we can draw on the full potential of our future STEM workforce. There will be more female Industry Ministers, more female engineers, scientists and industry leaders – and, provided they are given fair opportunities, the future for girls and women in STEM is bright. This won’t just advance Australia’s women but also safeguard our national prosperity for a future economy built on science, technology, engineering and maths.

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UNLOCKING THE NATION’S TALENT For Defence, the lack of women in STEM degrees and within the pipeline is a capability issue. A diverse and inclusive workforce is key not only to the nation's prosperity but also to its security. Defence is one of the largest investors in R&D and novel technology, and it is crucial that the staffing of Defence reflects the society we want to build.

efence has historically been regarded as a male domain, yet today there are 21 female Defence ministers across 159 countries. In Australia, we have a female Minister for Defence, a female Minister for Defence Industry and a female Chief Defence Scientist. A first for our nation. While these achievements are to be celebrated, I look forward to the time when such appointments no longer make headlines. It is clear to me that while we may have achieved a number of successes with female appointments to leadership roles – including 30% of all ASX200 board positions – we require fundamental social and cultural change to achieve true gender equity. Nowhere is this more true than in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Women comprise 46 per cent of the Australian working population, and only 16 per cent of the STEM workforce. Defence is actively working to

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

bring more young women into its workforce. At a time when 75 per cent of the fastest growing occupations require STEM skills and knowledge, women represent only 20 per cent of students completing a tertiary STEM education. As Chief Defence Scientist, this is an issue that is particularly close to my heart. For Defence, it’s a capability issue. An inclusive lens on STEM engagement is essential. We must ensure that we are accessing the best talent from all parts of our diverse Australian community. When I returned to work at four days a week after having my first child, a manager agreed to call it “full time”. It was not about the money, but the recognition that you can deliver results in a flexible way. This recognition gave me so much energy and made me want to give back. Once we have a diverse and inclusive STEM workforce we will be able to fully unlock the talent of our nation.

By Professor Tanya Monro FAA FTSE FOSA FAIP, Chief Defence Scientist

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In May 2020, Defence released More, together: Defence Science and Technology Strategy 2030. At the heart of this strategy sit three foundational pillars, with ‘Brilliant people, collaborative culture’ being one. This pillar is intended to support the scaling up of the broader Defence science and technology program by developing a highly skilled and collaborative workforce. To ensure Australia can meet the future Defence and national security challenges, it’s critical that we build a world-leading, STEMcapable workforce. This will only be achieved by increasing the depth and diversity of the talent pool, and increasing the participation rate of women is critical to achieving this. Data from the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources (DISER) suggest women are poorly represented in STEM. The reasons for this are many and complex. To attract and retain women we need to address factors such as unconscious bias and stereotyping, career insecurity, flexible work arrangements, and the lack of female role models. These areas have been demonstrated to greatly influence girls’ and women’s decisions to enter and remain in STEM education and careers. Role models are particularly critical. We need our senior leaders to support the talent pipeline and celebrate women’s achievements. I was 14 when a wonderful physics teacher

inspired me. I came to realise that physics combined my love of maths with my drive to be creative and solve problems. However, I did not have a female lecturer or supervisor throughout my studies, and I know that was not unusual. While there are more female professors today, we need to progress to a point where this is the norm. As a significant employer of STEM-skilled personnel, we in Defence recognise that we have a critical role to play in shaping the conversation and policy around STEM at a national level. Defence has formed the Defence STEM Council with senior executives from the Defence Groups and Services and key stakeholders from DISER and the Department of Education, Skills and Employment, ensuring both a One Defence and broader whole of government approach. I have the privilege of chairing the Defence STEM council. In 2019, we launched our strategic vision for our STEM workforce: “Moving towards a hightech future for Defence”. Through this vision we hope to address some of the key challenges confronting our nation. Although the participation rates of women in Defence STEM occupations have been slowly increasing, it is clear that we need a systematic and comprehensive approach to increasing the depth and diversity of the talent pool. In February 2020, Defence was recognised for its commitment to gender equity, receiving the SAGE Bronze Award, recognising organisations that are committed to advancing the careers of women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM) disciplines. Defence has also recently become an organisational Champion of the Women in the STEM Decadal Plan. In Australia, there is a growing dependence on the STEM workforce to drive innovation and ensure we remain competitive in a tough global economy. Unless we take action in the coming years, our demand for STEM talent will not be met. A society that embraces research and science, and incorporates the best scientific knowledge into its defence arena and other public policies, is a society where everyone benefits.

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A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover onboard launches from from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Photo: NASA/Joel Kowsky

SHOOTING FOR THE STARS Elizabeth Jens knew from the age of 12 that she wanted to be an astronaut. Now living in the US and working at NASA, she shares her experience, and a newfound sense of optimism of Australia’s growing space industry.

am a propulsion and systems engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. I share my time between systems engineering for Mars missions and propulsion technology development for small spacecraft. I am currently working on a small cold-gas system that will be used on the Perseverance Rover. This system sits on the rover’s arm and is used to clear dust from the surface of rock samples so that they can be imaged and analysed by the rover’s scientific instruments. I am also a system engineer for the Mars Ascent Vehicle. The Mars Ascent Vehicle is a part of the proposed Mars Sample Return effort, where we hope to bring samples collected by the Perseverance rover back to Earth. The Mars Ascent Vehicle is the rocket that is being designed to launch from the surface of Mars and deliver the samples to Mars orbit.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

I have wanted to be an astronaut since I was around ten or twelve years old. A couple of events occurred around this time that set me on my current path. The first was a gift from my dad, a book titled Mission to the Planets by Patrick Moore. The book was filled with gorgeous images of our solar system, descriptions of each of the planets and moons, and discussions of the missions that taught us about them. I loved reading about the various robotic missions and realising how much more there was for us to discover. Around the same time, my family went to hear the Apollo astronaut Charlie Duke speak. Listening to him talk, in front of images of him standing on the moon, made me realise that as incredibly talented as astronauts are, they are also human. I left that talk wanting to be an astronaut and just kept thinking: “Why not me? If I work hard and stay

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healthy, why could I not be that person standing on the moon one day?” The combination of the book and the talk made me realise that I love learning and exploring. I still hope to be an astronaut one day, but I also really love my engineering role at JPL and would be more than happy spending the rest of my career helping humankind to explore our solar system in this capacity. I knew that I wanted to pursue further study in aeronautics and astronautics when I completed my undergraduate degrees at the University of Melbourne. I loved Australia but was captivated by the idea of playing an active role in space exploration, and so I moved to the United States for my graduate studies. I arrived at Stanford University and threw myself into academic life there, thrilled to

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finally be taking classes on topics like rocket propulsion and orbital dynamics. The academic transition was fairly smooth. I found that my undergraduate physics and engineering education put me on equal footing with my peers at Stanford. The move from academia into industry was more of a challenge, however, as it was difficult to find roles in this field as a foreign national. Thankfully, difficult is not the same as impossible, and I was lucky enough to intern at JPL during my time at Stanford. I now work in the same group at JPL that I interned with nearly a decade ago. I’m often asked for advice to pass on to those who are also interested in a career in the space sector. In general, my response is that if you are passionate about a career in this field, then do not be daunted about pursuing it. Do not be afraid to receive some rejection, just remember that you only need one “yes”. You need to be prepared for the roadblocks and remain willing to work hard and stay motivated whilst you look for your opportunity. It is worth highlighting too that it is such an exciting time right now for Australians who are passionate about space exploration. We are seeing rapid growth of the Australian space industry and with it, a wealth of new opportunities in the sector. It is an uncertain period for the world right now, and it is easy to get down about the state of our planet and species. Space exploration is one area we can look to for some uplifting developments. In 2020, multiple missions to Mars will be launched. Amongst these is the NASA rover, Perseverance. It will be travelling to Mars to search for signs of life, and to collect rock samples with the goal of follow-on missions potentially bringing those samples back to Earth for analysis. I’m excited about the possibility of discovering alien life, and how that might change our thinking of our place in the universe. Even if we do not find evidence of past or present life on Mars, then I’ll be keeping an eye on Titan and Europa. Both of these moons could potentially support some form of life, and both have missions in development now to enable us to learn more about them. As individuals, many of us are sheltering in place right now, but as a species, we’re continuing to explore and reach into the cosmos with these missions.

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Women in STEM

BEHIND THE NUMBERS From collecting stamps and organising dolls as a child, a fascination with order and patterns has led Edith Cowan University’s Professor Caroline Finch to rise to the top of the research world in sports injury prevention and recovery, using her mathematics knowledge to codify injuries into datasets that could be used by institutions around the country.

tatistics is a type of mathematics concerned with analysing data to identify patterns in it and answering questions that can only be answered with objective evidence. Throughout my career, I have specialised in biostatistics and epidemiology, which is where statistics is applied to addressing health issues. The important role of epidemiology in monitoring health has been brought to the public’s attention recently through COVID-19 updates in the media and

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

through government and health advisory bodies. But I have done my most important work in sports medicine and the prevention of sports injuries. Sometimes I am asked “Why did you become a statistician/mathematician?” To be honest, the question takes me a bit aback because I do not think I ever “became” a statistician/mathematician, rather I always was one – it's who I have always been. As a child and adolescent, I was very interested in the

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natural world around me. I often asked the “why is it so?” type questions and answers came to me naturally by observing what I saw, keeping an eye on the detail, looking for patterns, noticing when things were different to normal, documenting and ordering things. I loved all forms of puzzles, categorising and ordering my prized possessions (whether it was my stamp collection or books or dolls or my wardrobe), making and designing clothes, conducting cooking experiments and was an avid reader of the history of science/medicine, especially of the place of women in this. I think that many girls and young women would also have similar interests and hobbies to these – a career in statistics could also be ideal for them! I went to an all-girls school, where only 6 of us in Year 12 undertook double maths subjects, so it was not a big focus there. While I tended to be better at mathematics than other subjects without really trying, my favourite subject was biology, especially when topics covered what diseases people got, who was more likely to get them and why. All classic questions that epidemiologists ask, though I did not know it at the time. When I was studying at university in the early 1980’s there was not yet wide-spread recognition of the value of applying statistical approaches to health. It was only in my final year of study that I discovered there was a whole field called biostatistics, which was statistics especially applied to medicine. I’d found what I wanted to do! I went on to undertake a Masters by Research degree that involved using statistical models to describe how cells in the body changed how they replicated themselves to end up making cancers. After that I switched my disease focus to diabetes and for my PhD in Statistics, I applied new analysis approaches to determine when to diagnose diabetes based on the level of sugar in blood when doing large-scale population screening for the disease. As is often the situation for young researchers commencing their post study career, I needed to change the focus of what topic I worked on to suit where a job opportunity arose. In the early 1990’s, I was fortunate to be appointed as researcher in Australia’s (and

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indeed one of the world’s) top injury research centres. Very soon, I was sure that I would spend the rest of my career doing injury prevention research. It was not long before I then identified that my primary interest would be in sports injury and its prevention. Personally, I’d had some history of injury associated with my own participation in different types of social sport. But I had not been aware of what I could have done to prevent them or to recover better from those injuries. I now had this knowledge and wanted to pass that on to others to make sure that other people did not suffer musculoskeletal injuries like I had. But it was also apparent that not much was known about who, other than elite athletes, got sports injuries because there was little or no data readily available. So, this is where my background in statistics was really valuable and meant that I could do something that no-one else had done before. I was the first person to describe the most common types of sports injuries across Australian community sport. I developed new ways to collect sports injury data and to report them in a way that made sense to sports bodies, government agencies, sports medicine professionals and injured people. I established new databases for sports injury and set future standards for how the data should be coded and classified. I still do this sort of research and am recognised as one of the top people world-wide who does this work. Perhaps the highest recognition of the importance of my statistical approach to sports injury data was the invitation to be part of an expert group led by the International Olympic Committee that, in 2020, published the first ever international guidelines for sports medicine professionals on how to collect and report data on injury and illness in sport. Looking back over my career, I can see how everything has led to where I am now. Advice to my younger self would be to remain true to your own core values, innate strengths and interests. In my experience, it has been when these have matched well with the area I have worked in, that career success as a statistician was guaranteed. And, do not overlook the power of having strong mentors to support you and positive role models to emulate – you learn a lot from them.

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Women in STEM

DRIVEN TO MAKE THE DIFFERENCE

Seeing patients suffer, and not being able to help, drove Julie Bernhardt towards researching the brain to help stroke patients recover. Improving the talent pipeline for women in medical research brings science closer to finding the answers that can help save lives.

f I think back on my younger self, could I have predicted that I would pursue science as a career and love it? Perhaps. I certainly have a strong recollection of an early and deep interest in understanding the world around me, a healthy scepticism and questioning of accepted "truths" and a joy in discovering something new. Yet my pathway to a science career was not linear. I considered a career in hairdressing, because I liked people; as a teacher, because I

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

valued great teachers; as a translator, because I liked languages. In the end, life pointed me in the direction of neurological physiotherapy. Why? Because my uncle had a stroke at the age of 50, when I was 16. I became fascinated with the brain, an organ I hadn’t given much thought to before. The problems that arise when our brains are injured, and the job of helping people, retrain and overcome these problems seemed exciting, and my early

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path was set. Science subjects are a pre-requisite for physiotherapy, and early detailed study of how the brain and body works was simply riveting. I loved the training and challenge of this broad career but was not surprised to find that within two years of graduation, I’d once again gravitated back to working with people with brain disorders – neurological physiotherapy. The complex presentation, the challenge of developing and executing training programs and the strong, sustained personal connection you form with patients and their families, often over many weeks and months, was deeply satisfying. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment in the early 90s when I started on a more singular scientific path. But I do remember my growing frustration with what I didn’t know. I felt that my ignorance was stopping my patients from having the outcomes they deserved. Why couldn’t I help that person recover their ability to use their arm and go back to playing the piano? Why could we only get so far in recovering from injury? It rarely felt far enough. Going back to the books, I realised that we just didn’t know, and didn’t understand how the brain worked in health, let alone in disease. It was time to start learning how to turn my clinician-driven questions into research questions, and to develop the skills to answer them in a rigorous way. My PhD was completed part time over many years while I kept working. It was at times hard and lonely, but I loved learning how to do research! I felt transformed from a questioning, frustrated clinician to an enthusiastic, informed

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early phase researcher. The crisis came at the end. With a PhD in hand and a young child, what would I choose to do next? I gave myself permission to take time to decide, declining offers to teach, or go full-time back in the clinic. In a light bulb moment, I realised that I needed to be true to my reasons for learning about research in the first place; I needed to work towards developing new understanding and testing new treatments to help stroke patients achieve better recovery. For the past 18 years I have pursued that goal. Diversity of thought, skills and approaches is something I value deeply as a pathway to better science and scientific discovery. My work crosses disciplines, boundaries and countries, and as a woman who has always believed in equality, it was natural for me to advocate for women in science and diversity more broadly. It is not always easy being a woman in science or medicine, but I do believe things are slowly changing for the better. Just last year, at the first organising committee meeting for a major world conference, younger men were advocating for gender balance on the programme and room for young researchers to showcase their talent – not me. We must work together to advocate for and champion diversity. It is a privilege to be a scientist. We have a responsibility to rigorously test important questions, and to clearly communicate what we do and what we find to the public, who largely fund our work. Scientists must be truth-tellers. I am grateful to be one of them.

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Women in STEM

VALUES-LED LEADERSHIP

Image Credit Adrienne Bizzarri Photography

Dr Marguerite Evans-Galea AM, IMNIS Executive Director, Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering Cofounder and CEO, Women in STEMM Australia, is a leading advocate for a connected, more inclusive STEM ecosystem to drive Australia’s prosperity.

y STEM career has spanned continents, disciplines and a range of different types of research. I enjoyed almost 20 years in fundamental and pre-clinical research in Australia and the USA. In the last decade, I worked at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute developing cell and gene therapies for Friedreich ataxia, a devastating neurodegenerative disease.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

As a strongly committed advocate for STEM research, inclusion and career development, I knew I could influence positive change within the STEM sector and have greater impact outside of research. I am now the IMNIS Executive Director at the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering. IMNIS is the flagship industry engagement initiative of the Academy that connects PhD

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students and early-career researchers with influential industry leaders. It fills a muchneeded gap in the sector and I know it is making a difference. I am also cofounder and CEO of Women in STEMM Australia, a non-profit organisation that has created a diverse, inclusive network of STEMM (extra M for medicine) professionals at all levels of academia, industry, education, business and government, and includes all women in STEMM regardless of their discipline and profession. Why science? I loved nature as a child, especially animals, and had an innate, insatiable curiosity. I constantly asked “Why?” My curiosity and thirst for knowledge only grew stronger at high school. I was the only student in my senior year to take all three sciences and a high level maths – and I remember every one of my science and math teachers. They loved it and shared their enthusiasm! At the start of Grade 11, I read James Watson’s book about the solving the structure of DNA – it was called The Double Helix. That was when I first fell in love with DNA, and with molecular biology more broadly. I have never lost this child-like curiosity nor my love of learning – science is the perfect place to satisfy both – whether in research or not. Mentors, impact, and growth Three mentors have made an enormous impact on my life and my career. The first was my Mum. As a single parent, there was no getting away from me. Every time I asked her “Why?” (e.g. about an animal, a plant, or the weather) she would say “Go find out for yourself. Look for the evidence and you tell me.” So Mum started me in research way back then! She also encouraged me to "take everyone as you meet them", and whenever I faced a challenge she would say “Put yourself in their shoes”. This inclusive, empathetic ethos stayed with me and has only grown stronger throughout my life. The second was a friend of my family. He

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was a Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Growing up in Mackay, this was the first time I’d ever met anyone from a university, let alone a professor. From a young age, he nurtured my intellect and painted a picture of a future I had never imagined, and I desperately wanted more. This is why I always knew I would go to university from a young age. The third is the mentor I’ve searched for my entire career. A past Director of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Professor at the University of Melbourne. He’s now retired, but seems busier than ever. He’s helped me to professionally develop in completely new directions – policy, media and advocacy. He’s empowered me to leave my comfort zone and he regularly challenges my thinking. Love it! All of these experiences I pour back into my own mentoring of others. I pay-it-forward with gusto and actively take an inclusive approach. As a values-led advocate leader, it’s important for me to mentor others, and in many cases, also sponsor them. I now actively mentor women in STEMM from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. It’s been a wonderful journey of cultural exchange and development, and they have embraced every opportunity with gusto! It’s an exciting time to be a woman in STEM and see our future leaders coming through. Thanks to the multiple initiatives that have been introduced across the STEM sector in the last five years alone, the next generation of women in STEMM will be exposed to more role models in a wide range of careers. Students in our schools, especially girls, now have a higher chance of seeing successful women scientists as part of "the norm". This will also be a future workforce that has a climate crisis looming on the horizon. They will live and behave differently, and work with purpose; they will leave their roles if they cannot meaningfully contribute or feel like they don’t belong.

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Women in STEM

VARIETY AND THE MAGIC OF SCIENCE

Dr Holly Vuong discusses how her science education has taken her around the world, working in diverse fields in multiple roles.

y family immigrated to the United States as refugees from Vietnam. At the time, there were eight of us kids and two parents. I was number seven. My two youngest sisters were born in the US. Like many immigrants, our parents always stressed the importance of getting a good education to improve our chances of having a career and living a better life. Growing up poor and working odd jobs at home with our parents taught us the value of working hard, working together, and working towards a higher degree. When I was 16, my high school began a program for young girls to experience the outdoors. Yosemite National Park was my first taste of the mountains, and I became inspired to become a biologist, just like our knowledgeable and comedic ranger. I became a sponge and soaked in scientific knowledge about plants and animals and their interactions. Ten years later, I began my PhD studies at Rutgers University, New Jersey, working on the ecology of Lyme disease. I was the first in my family to study biology, move out of the family home for graduate studies, and obtain a PhD. My journey to my current career took several side roads from my belief I would become an academic, researching and teaching in university. My first postdoc was in Canberra at the CSIRO working on plant-microbe symbiosis to understand drivers of genetic diversity of rhizobial symbionts with native legumes. After four months I felt like this was home, yet, I pursued another postdoc in the States working on whooping cough ecology.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

I realised that I missed my life in Canberra and wanted to do more than just conduct research. I wanted to implement science and evidence to improve policies that would help our environment, health, and society. I moved to the Washington D.C. area where I volunteered with the American Institute of Biological Sciences policy division. Having gone from a paid postdoc to an unpaid volunteer was difficult for my ego, but the role helped develop my ability to apply science to support evidence-based policies. Soon after, I landed a paid science policy position with Research America which gave me the opportunity to examine how scientific evidence can reduce the opioid crisis we are experiencing in the US. I returned to Canberra 20 months after leaving it. First, coordinating science programs for high school students and teachers, then, a role with the Threatened Species Recovery Hub at the Australian National University. My other part-time role at the ANU is with the Humanitarian Health Research Initiative, part of the Research School of Population Health. These two roles have brought me to where I want to be at the moment in shaping evidence-based policies that support our environment, health, and society. In both roles, I am being stretched in my capacity to overcome and deliver on responsibilities I hadn’t experienced before. I am sure my career will continue to progress and I look forward to taking some new roads on this journey in STEM careers.

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OPENING DOORS

Kate Cornick is the CEO of LaunchVic, Victoria’s startup agency, providing support to early entrepreneurs through funding, networking, and connecting early-stage companies with potential investors.

f you’d said to me 25 years ago I’d be an engineer and then a CEO I would probably have laughed. Not one for humanities or computers at high school, I stuck to subjects that came naturally to me – science and mathematics. Following the completion of high school, I moved to Australia with my family. I’d achieved decent grades that would get me into university… once I knew what it was I wanted to be! In fact, the path I chose happened by chance while I was reviewing the course guide. I stumbled across electrical engineering at the University of Melbourne and thought it sounded okay, although I didn’t know an electrical engineer or really understand what it entailed. It was also during the dot com boom and the internet was taking off, so I figured I’d probably get a job. I can’t say that I loved electrical engineering. The course was delivered by an assortment of lecturers – all highly skilled – but some definitely more adept at teaching than others. However, I did meet wonderful friends along the way and "bumbled" through my degree. One particular lecturer did inspire me and he recommended I take a specialist class in photonics (fibre optic communications). The lecturer was amazing – and incidentally one of the only female lecturers I had. She suggested that I consider a PhD, and brought up the possibility of an internship at a large telecommunications firm in the US. I enjoyed her class, loved the idea of travelling to the US, and jumped at the chance. Three years later, after multiple internships in the US and lots of travel around the world to attend global conferences, I received a PhD. Like many PhDs students I sought a research fellowship after graduating – to begin my research career. I lasted less than six months. My brother in law came to visit me a few months after finishing my PhD, with a newspaper in tow. A job advertisement called for a Telecommunications Adviser for the Shadow

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Minister for Telecommunications in the Australian Federal Government. I knew absolutely nothing about politics, but thought it could be interesting, so I applied. A few weeks later I started a completely new journey as a political adviser. I used my general knowledge of telecommunications a lot during that time, as I helped advise the Hon Steven Conroy to conceive and navigate the rollout of the National Broadband Network. And I finally learnt about the importance of humanities as I had to write numerous speeches, briefs and memos. Since then, I have gone on to navigate a career in management in university, business and government. I am often asked how useful my degrees are, and at this point in time, not particularly. But what they did do was open doors for me that I might not have considered. My experiences in government and politics were a springboard to management – I would not be where I am today without making a decision two decades ago to study electrical engineering.

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

Women in STEM

FROM THE LAB TO THE BOARDROOM Dharmica Mistry discovered a novel blood test for breast cancer, and cofounded a company to try to bring that technology to market, impacting lives. She discusses what she learned through the transition from laboratory to boardrooms, science to business.

was always captivated by biology and how things worked. I enjoyed problem solving and finding solutions, so it was an organic process. The way of learning through scientific subjects interested me: the asking of questions and searching for the answers. In health and medicine many advances have been made, but so many other things remain the same way for years and years, like breast cancer detection for women under the age of 40 via physical examination. I started out as a laboratory technician and through a series of events came up with a discovery that shaped my career. As a result I became founding scientist, and was chief scientist, of BCAL Diagnostics where I was developing a simple blood test to detect breast cancer earlier and more accurately. This approach had the potential to revolutionise the detection of breast cancer as the technology enabled accessibility to a routine method of screening for women of all ages, and had multiple applications in screening, diagnostics, treatment and monitoring. Taking an innovative idea out of the laboratory and commercialising was a whole new world for me as a university trained scientist. I spent a decade trying to bring my small research idea to life and went from science to business quite exponentially. It was scary, but I am impact driven and there is nothing more motivating than making the transition from bench to boardroom, which has been challenging but ultimately fulfilling. I had to arm myself with more than just scientific skills to succeed. It was a steep learning curve but allowed me to be multiskilled and successfully

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

navigate the membrane between academia and industry. I progressed by keeping an open mind. I set about learning on the job, saying yes to anything that was thrown at me, failing at new tasks, learning from my failures and multiskilling myself, adding value to my role. Importantly, I asked for what I wanted. I asked to work closely with other people from different areas. I can’t stress the importance of multiskilling yourself enough. Network, find mentors, join groups, enrol in programs and consider doing some part time interning along the way. Overall I learned this: Don’t let a lack of self confidence stop you from seizing an opportunity. You deserve it, you should take it and give it your best shot! Let failure be your friend. Learn from it, iterate quickly and keep going. What kept me in science was learning that what I was researching or doing day-to-day had the potential to be impactful to the world. A degree in the sciences is one of the most powerful degrees in the world. You have a foundation for making a change. Creating revolutionary ideas. Impacting the world. Making a dent in the universe. For many years I didn’t realise how powerful my degree was or what diverse pathways it could take me down. I am excited by the multidisciplinary approach to the problems we face as a global society: the move to build smart, healthy cities and sustainable futures. By working together to solve the really big problems, we can make a change that can help everyone, not just a sector of the population.

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TURNING TRASH INTO TREASURE, TYRES INTO STEEL By Professor Veena Sahajwalla

Veena Sahajwalla

grew up in Mumbai and was always interested in the world around me, especially the awe-inspiring factories where things got made. They were busy places with lots of people and things happening. I remember the Cadbury building in Mumbai – I’d think "Wow, I wonder what that would be like". I didn’t know at that time if they were doing manufacturing or if it was just an office, but my imagination led me to connect the products we consume with the fact that they had to be made somewhere and somehow. Even before I knew what happened inside a factory in a practical sense, it was always my imagination that inspired me. I loved breaking complex things to see how they were put together, and tried to stop my family from throwing away things that weren’t working, which I thought might work again. It’s exciting that we’ve got the opportunity to take advantage of what science and engineering brings into our everyday lives. It’s quite interesting to think about how the services, products and materials we consume have changed over time, and how our expectations have changed. My field of specialisation is recycling, and we’ve been a little bit slow in

adopting that change and transformation. It’s almost like we’re disconnected from the fact that our products have evolved and become really complicated. What’s exciting for me is imagining that if you do pull a phone apart, you don’t have to put it back in the exact same way. My passion is to bring sustainability into our everyday conversation, so we don’t just throw away old phones or tyres but see the opportunity to make them into something new. My research is all about joining the dots between products and materials that we currently throw away and resources needed for manufacturing new things. One of my greatest successes so far has been inventing Green Steel, and forming partnerships with OneSteel to put the process into practice. Instead of using coke and coal in electric arc furnace processing, Green Steel uses end-of-life tyres as a source of carbon and has saved millions of tyres from going to landfill. But it wasn’t just about doing the science and engineering in the lab, it was also about working with the world of business to commercialise the research. Winning the Eureka Prize for Science was a fantastic celebration of this research, but I wasn’t happy to stop at that. The sweetest moment of success for me came a few years later. I brought OneSteel on board as an industry partner and the science came to life, being produced at mills in Sydney, Melbourne, and around the world. I’d tell my younger self that as much as you are going to love what you are doing, you will be facing sceptics and people saying that this isn’t going to work. The best way you can prepare is by equipping yourself with knowledge and being ready to answer really challenging questions around what your work could mean, and its impact on the world. ARC Laureate Professor Veena Sahajwalla is the founding Director of the Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) at the University of New South Wales.

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Women in STEM

MAKE THE HOURS COUNT Marina Sara, chemical engineer at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, uses science to address inequity

ver the course of a 40-year career, we can each expect to spend 80,000 hours at work. Depending on how your week is going, this might either seem inspiring or demoralising. The reality is, we each have a finite amount of time to make a difference in our professional lives – how can we make it count? I first stumbled upon this 80,000 hours figure as a bright-eyed student researching potential career paths. Unsurprisingly, STEM careers feature heavily in rankings of the most impactful careers. As the child of migrants who grew up in Lebanon during the civil war, I have been instilled with a sense of gratitude and appreciation for electricity, clean water, medicine and safety. I visited Lebanon when I was 10 years old, and was told there was no drinking water in the house, or clean water that could be used to even brush my teeth without getting ill. This shocked me and filled me with a zeal to pursue a career where I could help contribute to the needs of those without access to the basics of modern life. For the past four years of my career, I have had the opportunity to apply this passion at ANSTO, working on key nuclear science projects – but not necessarily ones you’d expect: I have contributed to ANSTO’s investigation of chronic kidney disease of unknown cause, or CKDu for short, a serious, non-communicable disease. In our focus country of Sri Lanka, over 50,000 people have been diagnosed with end stage kidney failure, with dialysis and transplant the only treatment options. For the past two and a half years, I have been working closely with Sri Lankans to address this. The quality of drinking water has long been associated with the development of CKDu, and my work has focused on safe and sustainable access for at-risk individuals. While treatment

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

plants deal with some of the problem, there is still the outstanding issue of treating the waste runoff that pollutes the country’s rivers. The work I am doing with Sri Lankans has the potential to improve the lives of over 300,000 Sri Lankans through access to clean and safe drinking water. I also hope this will provide a blueprint for tackling issues associated with CKDu globally, which has the potential to impact hundreds of millions of lives across South Asia, Central America, and North Africa. I’m currently 8,000 hours into my career — or rather 10 per cent of the way to retirement. I am grateful for the opportunities that my STEM degree and time at ANSTO have afforded me. I encourage young professionals in STEM not to count the hours (unlike me), but make the hours count.

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NO BETTER TIME, NO BETTER CHOICE OF CAREER

The Managing Director of Merck Healthcare ANZ reflects on an exciting career in science and provides advice to new STEM graduates looking to make a difference.

By Josie Downey

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or graduates of the STEM disciplines, there may be no better career choice than the biopharmaceutical industry. That is one of the many lessons I have learned in the course of three decades working in life sciences. As a science graduate, I didn’t pursue a career in the pharmaceutical sector. In fact it was the furthest thing from my mind. I knew very little about the industry and, if I’m honest, the prospect of joining it did not particularly excite me. Had it not been for a stroke of serendipity, my career would almost certainly have taken a different path. Thirty years later, I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have fallen into an industry that continues to advance human health so rapidly and profoundly. I work in an industry in which career opportunities are limitless for people with a passion for science and patient wellbeing.

As we enter a post-COVID pandemic world, I would like to think that the life sciences would now top the list of employment sectors for not only STEM graduates but for anyone who is passionate about science and the opportunity to make a difference to people’s lives. Without question, the pandemic has shone a spotlight on the often-overlooked ability of the biopharmaceutical sector to deliver not only life-changing and life-saving medical advances for individual patients, but to deliver untold social and economic benefits. A likely flow-on effect of this will be increasing numbers of STEM graduates and professionals in the early stages of their careers seeking employment in this dynamic industry. The biopharmaceutical sector is already fortunate to attract a large number of STEM graduates, often with majors in chemistry, physics,

Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

Women in STEM Women in STEM biochemistry, medical sciences, chemical and biochemistry, medical sciences, chemical biomedical engineering and even maths.and For biomedical engineering and even maths. For analytic minds, career opportunities in biopanalytic minds, are career opportunities biopharmaceuticals endless, and I am in just one harmaceuticals are endless, and I am just one of many, many example of that. of many, example of that. It wasmany not long ago that the worlds of acaIt was long ago worlds of academia andnot industry werethat verythe clearly delineated. demia and industry were very clearly delineated. These days, those lines are much more blurred These days, thoseabout lines differences are much more blurred and old notions in the ‘qualand old notions about differences in the ‘quality of science’ have all but gone. Collaborations ity of science’ all but gone. Collaborations between the have biopharmaceutical industry and between biopharmaceutical industry academicthe institutes are commonplace, withand the academic institutes are commonplace, with the shared goal of addressing unmet medical needs shared addressing unmet medical needs as bestgoal andof quickly as possible. as best as possible. Oneand of quickly the greatest differences I have One of the greatest differences I have observed in the scientific pursuits of compaobserved in the scientific pursuits of companies and academia is the timelines in which innonies and academia is the timelines in which innovations are progressed and accomplished. Drug vations areisprogressed and accomplished. Drug discovery being accelerated because we invest discovery accelerated because weIn invest so heavilyisinbeing research and development. fact, so heavily in research and development. In fact, there are now more than 7,800 products in clinithere are now more than 7,800 products in clinical development globally, with nearly 70 per cent cal development globally, with nearly 70 per cent of clinical projects focused on potential first-in1 focused on potential first-inof clinical projects class therapies. 1 class therapies. Only through sustained investment in the Only through sustained in the long and often fraught roadinvestment to drug discovery long and often fraught road to drug discovery has it been possible to increase life expectancy has it been possible expectancy so significantly over to theincrease past 30 life years. so significantly over the past 30 years. During my career, I have had the privilege I have had privilege to During work onmy thecareer, development andthe introduction to on theand development andmedicines introduction of work life-saving life-improving for of life-saving and life-improving medicines for medical needs as diverse as infectious diseases medical needs as diverse as infectious and cancer to fertility issues, diabetesdiseases and carand cancer to fertility issues, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. diovascular One of thedisease. greatest highlights and honours of One of the greatest and honours an of my career was leadinghighlights a team that introduced my career was leading a team that introduced an entirely new way of treating cancer. We did this entirely of treating cancer. this resolutenew thatway no patient should be We left did behind. resolute that the no patient should be left behind.is That is what biopharmaceutical industry That is what the biopharmaceutical industry is really all about – harnessing scientific and medreally all about –for harnessing scientific andwe medical innovation the benefit of people will ical innovation for the benefit of people we will most likely never meet. most likelycome nevertomeet. I have realise that, like many of my I have come to realise like many my colleagues and peers, thethat, scientist in meofloves colleagues and peers, the scientist in me loves being at the forefront of transformational medbeing at the forefront of transformational medical innovation. But what really gets people in ical gets ispeople in this innovation. sector out ofBut bedwhat everyreally morning knowing this out of bedand every morning knowing thatsector these advances, what we doiswith them, that these advances, and what we do with them, help Australian families live better, healthier and help Australian families better, healthier and longer lives. Nothing is live more rewarding. longer lives. Nothing is more rewarding.

A career in biopharmaceuticals comes with career in biopharmaceuticals comes pracwith theA opportunity to help advance medical the opportunity to help advance medical practice; work closely with doctors; inform, coorditice; closely with doctors; inform,and coordinatework or undertake clinical research; have nate or undertake clinical research; and have direct access to the earliest clinical data, allowdirect to theanalysis earliestofclinical ing foraccess important how itdata, couldallowaffect ing for important clinical practice. analysis of how it could affect clinical practice. It also comes with the significant opportunity also comes –with the significant opportunity forItprogression regardless of gender, sexuality, for progression – regardless of gender, sexuality, colour or creed. The pharmaceutical sector is colour or creed. The pharmaceutical is steadfast in its commitment to removesector barriers steadfast in its commitment to remove to diversity, equity and inclusion for thebarriers benefit to diversity, equity and inclusion for the benefit or all. And this is one of the major reasons why I or all. And is one hold of thesuch major reasons why I believe lifethis sciences strong prospects believe life sciences hold suchAs strong prospects for female STEM graduates. an industry, we for female STEM graduates. As an industry, we are leading the way on gender equity. are My leading the ongraduates gender equity. advice toway STEM and those early My advice to STEM graduates and those early in their science career is to: in their science career is to: • Be confident, curious and open to new • Be confident, curious and open to new opportunities. opportunities. Thoroughly explore the range of career • Thoroughly exploreto the range career • options available you. Theofjob you options available to you. The job you have long dreamed of may not prove have longfit.dreamed of may not prove the right the right fit. your employment search • Avoid limiting • Avoid limiting your employment search to roles traditionally deemed suitable to roles traditionally deemed suitable based on your study major, experience based on your or gender. Thestudy worldmajor, is yourexperience oyster. or gender. The world is Seek strong mentorsyour andoyster. sponsors. • Seek strong and career sponsors. • Secure themmentors early in your and Secure them early in your career and maintain these relationships as your maintain these relationships as your career progresses. career progresses. And finally, seriously consider a career • And finally, seriously consider a careerIt • in the biopharmaceutical industry. in the biopharmaceutical industry. It is full of opportunity and immensely isrewarding. full of opportunity and immensely rewarding. A graduate-level role within a biopharmaceuA graduate-level role within a biopharmaceutical company can be the first step to a successful tical company can be the first step a successful and varied career here in Australiatoand overseas. and varied career here in Australia and overseas. I am one example of that. Will you be the next? I am one example of that. Will you be the next? References: 1. Pharmaceutical Research and References: 1. Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). Innovation Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). Innovation in the Biopharmaceutical Pipeline. December in the Biopharmaceutical Pipeline. December 2021. Available at: https://phrma.org/-/media/ 2021. Available at: https://phrma.org/-/media/ Project/PhRMA/PhRMA-Org/PhRMA-Org/PDF/G-I/ Project/PhRMA/PhRMA-Org/PhRMA-Org/PDF/G-I/ Innovation_in_Biopharmaceuticals.pdf Innovation_in_Biopharmaceuticals.pdf

Josie Downey is Managing Director of Merck Healthcare Australia and New Zealand. Josie Downey is Managing Director of Merck Healthcare Australia and New Zealand.

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FIGHTING TO #INCLUDEHER Astrophysicist Kathyrn Ross is on a mission to have women recognised in NSW science courses.

rowing up, my family used to sit and watch Star Trek together. Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Starship Voyager was my all time favourite character from any book, movie, or series. She explored the universe, tackled complex problems, and conversed with aliens. All while calm and perfectly coiffed. I was enthralled. Looking back, this was because Janeway was the only female scientist I saw. I grew up in a society that only celebrated the “lone white male genius” (think Einstein or Darwin) while systematically cutting scientific contributions of women from collective memory. This isn’t just an issue for science fiction, it’s built into the very curricula used to teach science in high schools. In mid-2018 I worked with other researchers to design resources for high school physics teachers. We painstakingly went over every word in the syllabus, and what we found was deeply disturbing. There was a complete disregard for the contributions of women. Where I expected to see Marie Curie’s name I was met with a blank space. I dug a little deeper, hoping to find the omission was a once-off, but as I searched I discovered how far the bias spread. Across six science courses for year 11 and 12 students, men are mentioned over 100 times and women … only twice. In the major science courses (Biology, Physics, and Chemistry), that number drops to zero.

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To say I was shocked is an understatement. I was horrified. Here was the evidence for why I had to resort to Star Trek just to be able to imagine myself as a scientist. It felt like confirmation of my Imposter Syndrome: evidence I didn’t belong in science. And the issue here isn’t only a lack of role models for young women in science. When we teach only the contributions of male scientists all students suffer. It normalises the idea that science is only for men. It perpetuates the unconscious biases that hinder the progression of women. It incorrectly teaches women that their careers in science end at high school. I hate to think of future generations of scientists being told there is only space for the male elite; that women have never had and will never have a place in science. I wanted to see it changed. And so I started the #IncludeHer campaign to correct the science courses around Australia. I refuse to accept that we can’t improve the syllabus to include the contributions of women. Since starting the campaign, I have been bullied, black mailed, abused online, told I “wasn’t a real scientist”, discredited and humiliated – all while undertaking a PhD in Astrophysics. But I have also been thanked and rewarded beyond all words. I hear of teachers taking the pledge to include women in their classrooms of their own volition. I have been contacted by young students deciding to study science after learning of female role models in my campaign. Watching someone’s eyes spark as they find a role model like them is unparalleled. I know the struggles of searching for a role model in a world that only celebrates male scientists. I am lucky to have made it to my PhD, but there are many more women who could have been here with me. #IncludeHer is a campaign that aims to correct the blatant gender bias in science and inspire our next generation of female scientists. Science is a human endeavour, not a male endeavour, and we should be teaching it as such.

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SELLING THE SCIENCE Anastasia Volkova is the founder of satellite farming startup Flurosat, a precision farming platform that allows farmers to automate the monitoring of crops.

s a little girl, hearing the word “engineer” or “scientist” from my parents around the dinner table made me feel in awe of what those people did, but I never saw myself becoming one of them. They were hard-working, but certainly, also very intelligent people – the type of people I had not seen myself belonging to. My granddad was the head of an office of civil engineering, and mum had a degree in electrical engineering and worked on some electronics for the defence prior to the collapse of Soviet Union, after which she had to move onto a new career in management, earning herself a place at the local city hall. Surrounded by these success stories, I escaped the pressure of becoming “someone” by thinking that I would be able to forge the path of my own and did not have to choose a particular discipline to do it in. It took me ten years, and four degrees in aeronautical engineering interwoven with industry experience to fully earn the title of engineer, the title that I previously had given only to experts in their field with well-established careers. Studying wasn’t all I did with my time, in fact, I saw it more as a means to an end. Academia, no matter how excited about the learning I was, wasn’t practical enough for me, and I saw so much unrealised potential for the academic research to be applied to real-world problems that I couldn’t imagine any better application of my talents than learning how to commercialise innovation. And so, I set out to learn more about the world that needed this technology, the world beyond the university campus. The first step was simple and meant more involvement in outreach events and meeting more people from the industry who came to technology showcases held within the university walls. Then it turned into attending conferences and networking events to learn more about the possible applications of the technology that I was developing. Most exciting of all, however, I

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

found the idea of bringing the technology directly to those who need it, instead of seeking intermediaries in the market. This “direct commercialisation” apparently lived within the domain of entrepreneurship. And the university was holding courses for students with invited entrepreneurs and business leaders speaking about commercialisation. And so, I joined! I met some entrepreneurs whose goals I was excited to help realise, and they became my first employers who helped me gain the hands-on experience and learn the DIY nature of the startup world. The world where technology serves the needs of people and solves real problems, the world where I felt I belonged. So if I were to do this again, I would repeat exactly the same steps: 1) learning about the big problems to solve, 2) getting involved with the technology that makes it possible, and 3) acquiring practical experience of commercialisation, which in many cases means learning how to build a company from scratch. And here I am now, the founder of a global agtech startup that enables “farming with satellites” by combining technology and data into decision support tools for sustainable and profitable agriculture.

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THE CONCRETE CEILING Muneera Bano’s work focuses on designing technologies that will help in creating an unbiased, fair and inclusive AI-based future for all people. Throughout her career, she has challenged existing biases in computer science and proven a point: given equal opportunity, girls can outperform men in any field.

glass ceiling allows you to see through it, you just can’t move up. A bamboo ceiling allows you to hear what is happening on the other side, even if you can’t see it. Where I came from, the ceilings were metaphorically and literally made of concrete. When I was 10 years old my father made me realise that, unlike my brothers, my education was a privilege. Education was denied to every woman in my mother’s generation including her, and many in my generation in the early 90s in north-west Pakistan and Afghanistan, because of gender. Both my parents moved to the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad, where I was born and raised. I am the youngest and the fifth child, and the only sister of four elder brothers. My parents raised me as equal to my brothers in every aspect including education. I chose the male-dominated field of computing. I did my Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science in Pakistan and eight years ago I came to Australia to pursue my PhD in Software Engineering at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). My decision was met with obvious resistance. A single, Muslim, Pashtun woman travelling abroad for education. It was a strange notion to many. I had never lived without my family before. Not only did I have no family in Australia, there was not a single person in this whole country I could call my friend. The homesickness, cultural shock and loneliness were at their peak in my first year

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of being an international student. The only place I felt a sense of belonging was my university, where I spent my days in the lab in isolation. However, it was my education that kept me on track with a sense of purpose. It was during my PhD I learned how to live my life independently, how to manage my own finances. I travelled around the world to present my research in China, New Zealand, Brazil, Sweden, Italy, Canada, Malaysia, France, Germany, Spain and South Korea. Three years later I graduated with a PhD in Software Engineering and broke my concrete ceiling as a Pashtun woman. I came to Australia as an immigrant, single, Muslim, Pashtun woman from Pakistan. I was told that each of these identifiers is a barrier that reinforces and enhances the others in a vicious cycle. I never considered them as barriers. These are my badges of honour and authenticity. To break any ceiling, you need your “superpower of authenticity”. My pursuit of a PhD was not for a piece of paper, it was a transformational journey of my life towards empowerment. That day I felt this enormous sense of achievement, resilience and fearlessness, so much so that I knew there would never be any ceiling, glass or bamboo, that I am not capable of bringing down, for I am the breaker of my “concrete ceiling”.

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BRIDGING THE GENDER GAP Louise Adams is the chief executive of Australia and New Zealand at Aurecon Group, an international engineering company based in Australia. A civil engineer by trade, she is also a member of Chief Executive Women, and a graduate of the Wharton Business School.

always shared a fascination for bridges with my grandfather and used to look at his photos from around the world and ask him endless questions about how they were made. I think this shared love was where it all began and I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be an engineer. I was lucky enough to grow up knowing that was what I was going to do. I think back now and I feel extremely fortunate to have shared a passion with my grandfather, and that passion has led me to a rewarding professional career that I love. One of my favourite quotes is “you can’t be what you can’t see”. As such I’m very mindful that I have a particular role to play, as does any female leader in our industry, as a role model to aspiring young women. There are not enough of us, so those of us who are here have to really carry a greater share than what we might otherwise expect. It’s about standing out there in the industry through being on panels, speaking at industry events, and being a visible female leader who other people can look to as a female role model. I love the concept that Dr Kirsten Ferguson drove with her 2017 initiative on “Celebrating Women” – we need to get behind each other and ensure that once we succeed we work hard to make it that much easier for those following in our footsteps. The old stereotype that women can’t support other women is in the past – it simply isn’t true and we really must stand together. With the complex engineering challenges that are facing our world today and tomorrow, our engineering pool needs to reflect the

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

diversity that exists in our schools, universities and communities. Diversity of thought provides the best innovative solutions to the problems that our communities face. Diversity across teams nurtures and stimulates the creative tension that comes when you create teams that celebrate what makes each of us different. If you have a group of people who are similar to each other and they have worked together and looked at problems together, the chances of them coming up with an idea that is unique is zero. The biggest problem for businesses is people hire people who look, think and act like themselves. For women working across science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, we need to champion diversity and climb new heights for innovation for our industry. It’s an uncomfortable truth that our sector has a significant lack of cultural and gender diversity today. For decades, our industry has been positioned as a male-centric profession. Promoted with images of hard hats and heavy machinery, a profession most suited to men. I believe this has narrowed our thinking, our perspectives; it has created a gender imbalance, siloed cultural profiles and above all – stifled potential for diversity of thought and, in turn, innovation. My experience is that innovation requires diversity of thought and this only happens when difference is embraced across an organisation. People in diverse workforces will also be the people best able to cope with changing futures.

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PIONEERING ONLINE MENTAL HEALTH SUPPORT Scientia Professor Helen Christensen, Director and Chief Scientist at the Black Dog Institute, brought Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) to the internet in the 90s, helping to spark a wave of accessible mental health resources.

went to university in the 70s in Australia. Brought up in a big family (nine!), with restricted income and opportunities, I wanted to learn about the world, its people and what made it tick. I was shy, very conscious of my appearance, and deeply unconvinced of my abilities (plenty of young people think the same about themselves now). It was a fluke that I was awarded a Commonwealth University Scholarship, my only opportunity to get to university, I thought. I enrolled in Philosophy, Social Theory, Anthropology and Psychology, and completed an Arts Degree with Honours at Sydney University in Psychology. Hardly the foundation for work in STEM. Following a stint in psychological practice, I started my career, in clinical research in the 1980’s, and never looked back. At first, I was appalling at research, but I found my niche. I liked software, setting up questions that data could answer, and having the results come back through a mainframe – not on your own computer (then) – but chugging away on big printers in another wing of the hospital. I was hooked. I used a so-called portable computer (about the size of a reasonable suitcase) to undertake the field research for my PhD. When this finished, I took off to work in psychiatric epidemiology. In the 1990s, the Internet was just developing. We were just starting to have browsers. And my colleagues and I hit a problem: as many as 20% of adolescents were experiencing mental health problems but could not be offered psychological therapy. Therapy that we knew from

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the research evidence would help them. There were very few psychologists available, and for the most part these services were private – and inaccessible and unaffordable for the majority. This therapy is called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and it still is the best and most effective treatment for depression, using techniques to challenge the normal assumptions people make about their thoughts. Because people have “privileged access” to their own thoughts (these conscious thoughts are theirs) they immediately assume these are correct. However, CBT teaches people, that their thinking may be distorted, and that these thoughts can be questioned and disputed. More accurate, and less biased assessments of oneself, the world and situations have consequent improvements in anxiety, and depression. Because CBT can be learned, we figured that putting “books” up on the Internet was a way of achieving the volume of therapy required to have real impact. A website could deliver the information (the book) across the world to everyone who needed it, improving access. However, even back then, we recognised the technology on people’s devices enabled by the Internet could do much more than display information. We could make websites "info-tainment", we could ask people to complete self-report quizzes, we could see through analytics what aspects of the programs were best, we could tell whether our "interactive" therapy was making people better. Most importantly, we could go to scale. Before too long, a

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million people were using our website. And the data that we collected showed that these websites were effective. Our first randomised controlled trial, in 2004, which we deliberately designed for high quality, employed a placebo control group, similar to those in pharmacological trials. The trial demonstrated the power of content on the Internet to emulate what is done in face-to-face therapy around the world. We could change people’s lives directly through the Internet. Why did I go into science? For me, the cause was important – the prevention and early intervention of adolescent mental health disorders. It is possible, and cost-effective, and empowering to use internet tools. And hand in hand, I was motivated beyond the discovery. It was the practical and often data-driven outcomes that can make a difference. Two things: the energy, time and money that goes into scientific discovery are wasteful if not put into practice. And discovery is about solutions and their implementation.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

What can I tell you about success in STEM? Women often lack confidence and worry about their capabilities (when they shouldn’t!). Academia breeds comparison and competition. So how do we overcome this? 1. Find friends and colleagues in business and outside your bubble: Businesswomen are entrepreneurial and confident. Seeking partnerships with like-minded people helps build personal capacity. I’ve met some of my closest, smartest, friends and colleagues through mother’s groups and community events. 2. Find the cause that your research will contribute to – then it is less about you and more about what you are trying to achieve. Ego disappears, and confidence comes through the expertise you build. 3. Do not give up. Motivation is probably more important than any other factor. 4. Embrace your inner competitive streak for good.

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SCIENCE MEETS POLICY Kylie Walker leads the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, following her leading role at the Academy of Science, leveraging her background as a journalist to understand the complex collision of science and policy.

ver the last decade I’ve created public explainers and campaigns to enhance understanding of science, on issues including climate change, immunisation, cutting-edge medical technologies, and autonomous vehicles – alongside a significant body of work to advocate for federal evidence-based policy- and decision-making. Now, as Chair of the Australian National Commission for UNESCO and CEO of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE), I am building new opportunities to advocate publicly for science and technology Journalists and scientists have this in common: a curiosity-based approach to uncovering and disseminating truth. I’ve always been science-curious rather than science-qualified. Coming from the plain-language background of Press Gallery newswire journalism in the context of the federal Press Gallery gave me the skills and confidence to ask the "dumb" questions

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of the deep subject-matter experts, and ensure that I fully understand whatever I write or say about science and technology, before I open my mouth in public. Scientists are not taught to be natural advocates for the application of their work: in fact, they’re often encouraged to expect that the work will speak for itself. But in a crowded political space with multiple competing interests and tugs on time and budgets, the professional voices of science and technology are important. We insist on protecting the independence of researchers and research, we make the case for investing in the people and facilities that make it possible, and we speak out in favour of applying the lessons and technology that are the fruits of scientific endeavour. We also bring deep subject matter experts together with decision-makers in all spheres, to inspire, educate and guide decision-makers. I’m excited by our potential in quantum computing, space science and technology, medical tech and personalised medicine, as a clean energy exporter, electrified transportation, and lots more. Australia’s already an outstanding scientific and technological innovator, and I’m inspired by the work that’s being done on many fronts to include people from marginalised groups at all levels of research and application. I’m looking forward to continuing to grow opportunities for women, members of the LGBTQI+ community, Indigenous people and those with culturally diverse backgrounds to participate in Australia’s future STEM talent pool. As Australia’s STEM sector opens up and welcomes in more and diverse people, we have so much more potential to create a sustainable, connected, inclusive, technologically-enabled world.

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CHANGING THE STRUCTURE Professor Jodie Bradby is the President of the Australian Institute of Physics. Her research focuses on crystal structures, and the changes they undergo after forces are applied. She says the skills needed in the physics world are not defined by gender, and that more work needs to be done to promote the career paths available to physicists.

recently moved house and one of the odd things I unearthed was a card given to me by my fellow physics students at university. The card says "Happy Secretary’s Day" on the front and was signed simply "To Jodie, From the blokes". The card was, of course, a joke. I don’t remember thinking much about it at the time but was quietly horrified to reflect on what it represented 25 years later. I always found physics satisfying to study. I enjoyed "cracking the code" to solve questions. Still, I was not fully hooked on physics as a career until I got to use an electron microscope and ion-accelerator as an undergraduate. After that, my goal was to be a research scientist, and for my PhD topic I studied how a perfect silicon crystal responded to being poked with a tiny sphere. Silicon crystals are probably the most important and underappreciated crystals in our modern world. They are silicon chips and solar panels. They are in our phones and computers. We can grow them so perfectly that they are an ideal system to study and amazingly, by applying very small forces, I could change the actual crystal structure and end up with rare forms of silicon that did things like absorb sunlight better than normal silicon. My research now is now trying to get carbon atoms to form new types of crystals – some that might be even harder than normal diamond by

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

using pressures like those experienced in the centre of the earth. As President of the Australian Institute of Physics, it is a great honour to lead this organisation and I am working hard to make sure physics is seen as a great career choice for everyone – regardless of their background or gender. I was lucky enough to be the 2015 Women in Physics Medallist and it was a great honour to visit schools all over Australia and talk about my work. Some of the students I met have kept in touch and have gone on to study PhDs in Physics. We need people who are skilled in leading teams. We need people with technical skills and mathematical abilities, and these skills are certainly not defined by gender. We need to do better to make sure girls in schools know that these careers are absolutely open to them and are a great choice. But importantly, we also need to fully support women once they start these careers. It’s not good enough for physics organisations to only have photos of men on the walls, to only organise Friday "beers" or golf as the social outlets, or to employ only male lecturers. We have a long way to go, but I feel we are making progress. Finally, I looked up ‘Secretary’s Day’ to see if it is still around. It was renamed in the year 2000 to "Administrator’s Day", probably to avoid the gendered tone. I was glad to read that.

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TIME FOR A CHEMICAL REACTION The Managing Director of Merck Life Science ANZ reflects on lessons from Germany and the role of chemistry in tackling everything from cancer to climate change. By Rebecca Lee

recently had the opportunity to do two of my favourite things: visit a customer – in this case, the nuclear medicine facility at Lucas Heights, run by ANSTO (Australia's Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation) ¬-- and play golf. While golfing, however, I was surprised by how many of my companions weren’t aware that Australia has a nuclear reactor at all, let alone one of only five global facilities producing radioactive isotopes for MRIs and cancer treatments. This lack of awareness, to me, encapsulates a concerning trend of Australian chemistry: worldclass resources, undervalued by industry and government. As Managing Director of Merck Life Science ANZ, I collaborate with talented scientists and researchers across all disciplines who are innovating in life sciences. Before this role I trained as a chemist, and while living in Australia I spent many years working for German companies in the chemistry industry. I noticed that German industry and research communities take a deeply collaborative approach in fostering innovation; and I would like to see that same level of industry-research collaboration happening here in Australia. So many of our biggest global problems

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– clean energy, carbon emissions, pollution – are fundamentally problems that could be solved with chemistry. Take recycling for example. Paper can simply be mechanically recycled: it’s pulled apart and mashed back together again. Plastics, however, are a far more complex, persistent and far-reaching problem, as they degrade into microplastics that pollute every corner of the globe; even reaching the Mariana Trench, around 11 kilometres below sea level. It’s an urgent environmental issue that is gaining concern in government, research and with the public in Australia, and chemical recycling offers a real solution, especially for chemically-complex multi-plastic products. In fact, Australia is bursting at the seams with ideas and technology. Look at Mineral Carbonisation International, which was named COP26’s Best Clean Energy Startup in 2021 for their technology to capture carbon emissions in building material. Their Chief Operating Officer, Sophia Hamblin Wang, was also recently named one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders for 2022, joining a who’s-who of politicians, entrepreneurs and technology pioneers. It’s also clear the renewable energy revolution

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hinges on chemistry advances, from batteries that push the physical capacity of lithium and graphite technology, to the ultra-high efficiency electrolyser technology from Hysata. Hysata, a start-up spun out of the University of Wollongong in 2021, is a great example of Australian innovation commercialising breakthrough research. This journey from research to production highlights a process I’ve seen among German industrial companies, who foster many on-going relationships with universities to support research and development. I see these long-term partnerships as crucial to Australia’s future innovation, yet currently they are sadly under-developed. There is no doubt that Australia is a world leader when it comes to pure research, with nearly 50 universities ranked in the top 1,000 institutions globally. We produce chemists in the mould of Sir John Cornworth, awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the key to cholesterol and unlocking effective treatment for deadly heart diseases. Translating pure research into industry innovation requires strong links between companies and universities – and for some reason, chemistry is being largely left off the table. This contrasts with other Australian sectors, particularly in pharmacology. For example, The Translational Medical Institute in Brisbane recently welcomed start-up Infensa Bioscience to its commercial incubator, as they work to develop a treatment to limit the damage caused by heart attacks

and strokes. The drug-candidate was identified in funnel-web spider venom by a University of Queensland research team. It's this transition between research and industry that chemical sciences and the university sector must address. COVID has created a hard reset for universities, who have been forced to diversify their funding from relying heavily on international students. Collaboration with industry offers a viable and beneficial alternative. To unlock this capacity, I would love to see Australian universities become more flexible about the use of intellectual property. Entrepreneurship and commercialisation are not the antithesis of pure research. Instead, they are engines driving solutions to our generational problems. A flexible and dynamic sector can also follow in the footsteps of other industries and become more diverse, bringing a broader range of experience and problem-solving skills. As a young woman in the chemistry industry, I certainly experienced my fair share of factory floors and board rooms where there were no other faces like mine. This tallies with AusBiotech’s 2022 Sector Snapshot, which found early-career gender parity declines towards leadership roles. We need to build deep partnerships between industry and researchers, to invest in scientific discovery and tackle our complex, interconnected challenges. Australia is filled with clever, capable people – let’s bring them together to support new ideas, agile thinkers, and real innovation.

Rebecca Lee is Head of Science and Laboratory Solutions and Managing Director of Merck Life Science ANZ

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CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS FOR A CURE From an interest to maths, to exposure to the cutting edge of research, Associate Provost (Research Partnerships) of Victoria University Professor Vasso Apostolopoulos is working at the nexus of biology and engineering to solve complex health problems, with over 25 human phase I, II and III, clinical trials under her belt.

am an immunologist, and I study how the immune system functions in healthy and in diseased states. Originally my research involved the development of vaccines/immunotherapeutics to cancer, which led to its translation to over 25 human clinical trials. My interest rapidly evolved into developing vaccines and drugs for autoimmune disorders and more recently into infectious diseases, such as the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In addition, my research has expanded to other diseases, in order to determine the role of the immune system leading to metabolic diseases, autoimmunity, cancer, drug addiction and mental health. By understanding what has gone wrong we can design improved treatments for these disorders. All throughout my primary and high school years I was very good at maths, so naturally I went into the science field. When I was in third year at university, one of our lecturers gave us a research paper which he had recently published and told us he would have questions relating to the paper in the exam. Those were buzz words, which made all of us to read the paper. That was the first time I was exposed to research, and I was so fascinated by it. At that point I decided that I’d become a researcher, so I went on and did honours and then a PhD. Remember that paper? It

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was not even in the exam! I have been at Victoria University for six years. I was the immunology program leader within the Centre for Chronic Disease, and then the mechanisms and interventions in health and disease program leader within the Institute for Health and Sport. In 2018–2019 I became the interim Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) and since 2019 I have been the Associate Provost (Research Partnerships) at Victoria University. These leadership roles have allowed me to bring my research expertise and knowledge to develop research strategies and new partnerships for the University. Research is evolving at a very fast pace and I am excited about what the future brings. RNAsequencing in the last couple of years has revolutionised our understanding of the mechanism of action of drugs, and even diseases themselves, and how they progress and what genes they express. Great advances have occurred in recent years with the digital world entering into the research world, “where engineering meets biology” with artificial intelligence applications, 3D bioprinting and wearable technologies to prevent and treat diseases. The development of new and improved drugs and vaccines will continue and many diseases will be treated and prevented in the years to come.

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A BLOOMING SOLUTION TO CLIMATE CHANGE Dr Alex Thomson, Manager, Deep Green Biotech Hub, University of Technology Sydney, moved into science with the desire to fight climate change. Now, she is building Australia’s capacity to innovate with algae.

can’t remember the first time I learnt about climate change, but I do remember how I felt: scared. I was probably a teenager, and I remember thinking “what can I do to help?”. I grew up in a household where science was important, and I was constantly encouraged to ask questions about the world around me, and this was one question that I wasn’t given a clear answer to. When I was in high school, I had a keen interest in science, but wasn’t sure where it would take me. Like many school-leavers, I was unaware of the variety of career paths STEM could offer. After stumbling upon a guest lecture by a researcher at my university, I thought, “Maybe there’s a way I can contribute to helping climate change?” I changed degrees, started studying environmental science, and was completely hooked. To say I did well at university would be a lie: I struggled and some things I just didn’t understand, but I realised that as long as I was passionate and enjoying what I studied, that would make the biggest difference. I completed my PhD in blue carbon ecosystems, looking at how our coastal and estuarine seagrass meadows can capture and store massive amounts of carbon, and ways that we could better manage them to help mitigate climate change. I looked specifically at how animals living within these seagrass meadows could change the way these meadows capture and store carbon, and how our interactions

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

with these environments can set off a cascade of effects, potentially impacting the way our coastal ecosystems contribute to carbon emissions and storage. When I saw an opportunity to support and enable businesses and startups to utilise research and develop products addressing global sustainability issues, I dove right in. I now manage the Deep Green Biotech Hub, at the University of Technology Sydney, which helps businesses and startups to work with algae, and innovate within their businesses. I helped to found the Green Light accelerator program, which is the first algae accelerator program in the world, and we have successfully run three cohorts with a total of 10 graduates in 18 months. Algae is an amazing organism with fantastic potential for addressing a multitude of sustainability issues. Its carbon capturing, water recycling, oxygen producing processes mean that it produces products like oil, in much more sustainable ways than traditional extraction. Moving from research to innovation was exciting. The pace is very different, but the help I can provide is very similar; everyone just wants to understand where they can help and how they can make a difference. The best advice I could give to anyone wanting to make a difference to climate change, is just to start. See where you can help, ask questions, have conversations, and dream big.

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ADDING VALUE WITH SCIENCE Anne Harris is the Australia and New Zealand Managing Director of global biopharmaceutical company Pfizer, one of the largest in the world. Her career path started in microbiology research, moving to sales, human resources, and then, eventually, senior leadership.

hen I was 16, I worked as a receptionist at my father’s medical practice. As a family GP he taught me the importance of science’s ability to directly impact the lives of people in our local community. I learned that science is egalitarian yet often complex, and it is therefore a practitioner’s responsibility to translate scientific knowledge into advice and that solutions to a patient to give it tangible meaning. Science has always fascinated me – the beauty of discovery and the process of unravelling, analysing and working through a problem. My curiosity led me to major in microbiology and biochemistry at university. The rigour of the scientific method, the reliance on facts and independent analysis, and the knowledge that there is always more to learn, were the basis of its intellectual appeal. I did not know what job my degree would lead to, but I trusted that science would open up opportunities for interesting and engaging work that could make a real difference to people. After graduating from university, I worked at a microbiology laboratory in a teaching hospital. I was impressed with the people who worked in this area, but I soon realised laboratory research was not the right environment for me. When considering job options, I spoke to several people who worked in the pharmaceutical

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industry to ask about their experiences, and the perception of "big pharma" as driven purely by a profit motive. I learned that there was a universal purpose to lead through science and foster a better world by improving patient access to quality medicines. I came to understand there is value in diverse financial models to translate research into access to medicines, including those supported by government, not for profit organisations and industry. Taking the time to learn more helped me understand that I could find my place in a commercial industry which has a bold vision to improve the health and lives of my community and across the world. I started out like many in the innovative medicines industry, "carrying the bag" as a sales rep and meeting general practitioners to discuss new medicines in chronic disease areas, like cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity, and visiting hospitals to meet with mental health specialists to discuss their challenges in treating patients with depression. My role enabled me to inform health practitioners about new data, scientific breakthroughs, clinical trials and approved medicines that deliver improved health outcomes to patients. Through this experience I became very interested in training salespeople to be better prepared when they meet with doctors to add more value to the engagement. I pursued further studies in HR, studying human

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development, learning and communication, and honing these skills as a field-force effectiveness manager. I then moved on to other opportunities in marketing, commercial development and executive leadership roles across ANZ, Europe and Asia. When I first entered the workplace, it was overwhelmingly male dominated, particularly in leadership roles, but as I moved through my career this reality have been redefined. I took inspiration from senior managers with leadership capabilities I admired. Throughout my career I actively sought feedback and advice from these leaders which has been invaluable in shaping my own leadership and career journey. I never saw my gender as a reason not to aspire to new opportunities and challenges. I was as open with my mentors and managers on my aspirations as they were on where I added value to the organisation and where I needed to improve. The modern-day pharmaceutical industry boasts a strong representation of women in senior management roles. This is evident in Pfizer’s leadership team, which is 60 per cent female in Australia and 75 per cent female in New Zealand. I am the second female Managing Director for Pfizer ANZ, being fortunate to follow the trailblazing legacy of my predecessor Melissa McGregor, a senior female leader in science and technology in Australia, who was recently appointed Vice President of Pfizer Europe’s Hospital Business Unit. My own path to leadership has helped me understand why diversity in thought and approaches is important to solving challenges and fostering innovation. I am proud to work for a company whose purpose is breakthroughs that change patients’ lives. In order to deliver on this bold purpose we need the very best of our colleagues and our partners. From my personal and professional experience I have learnt that diversity in all its forms, be it gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, education or economic status, ensures we hear all voices and have the best ideas, as this also represents the very community we serve. My advice to young women considering a career in science is to choose science because you are genuinely interested in it.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Career paths into research and academia are well known, but I also encourage exploring the many industries that value foundations in science and technology. An understanding of science will open up an array of career options, including in biotechnology, medtech, manufacturing, environmental science, climate change, food science, engineering, technology, artificial intelligence, mathematics or psychology. I emphasise the need to be your authentic self in your engagement with others, rather than feel the need to change yourself to fit into an organisation or industry. There is no one type of leader, no one view of the world, and no one person alone with the best ideas. We should all learn from our experiences in order to grow in our outlook and abilities. The challenge is to grow into the best version of ourselves – not anybody else. The best ideas come from our ability to understand the people and groups in our community, appreciate our differences and collaborate with a diversity of minds. This will bring the best solutions to the biggest health, economic and environmental challenges of our time, all of which will need science to solve them.

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SHINING A LIGHT ON STEM

If want to encourage more brilliant young people from a wide diversity of backgrounds into science and technology, they need to see role models from backgrounds just like theirs working at the highest levels of our sector. By Misha Schubert

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t’s hard to be what you can’t see. So observed the American civil rights leader Marian Wright Edelman. And she’s right; the evidence makes the case. Since the late 1950s, social researchers around the world have been tracking children’s perceptions of scientists. When asked to draw a scientist, two in three Australian primary school children draw a man. And, in recent years, media monitoring research has shown only one in ten of the quotes attributed to scientists in Australian news media were from women. These insights were pivotal to the idea for Science & Technology Australia’s acclaimed Superstars of STEM program – a game-changing initiative begun in 2017. The program inspires young women to pursue degrees and careers in science, technology, engineering and maths by elevating the profile of relatable role models in a variety of STEM jobs all around Australia. STA works with Superstars to elevate their profiles as role models for Australian girls and women, and to provide significant professional development

and publicity for them and their institution. It does so by delivering advanced communications training, mentoring and high-quality opportunities to speak on stage, on screen and to the media. And it makes introductions for the Superstars to high-powered leaders and mentors, including, senior Ministers, private sector CEOs, journalists and research trailblazers. The program has worked with 90 women scientists in its first three years – and another 60 will be selected in a rigorous competitive selection process in 2020. Already it has already generated substantial profile-raising opportunities – with more than 3,800 media mentions, and a reach of 330 million plus media viewers, and has engaged more than 18,000 school students in conversations about STEM subjects and STEM careers. The program’s major supporter from the very beginning has been the Department of Industry, as part of its strategic vision to grow and diversify

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Australia’s STEM capability and workforce. Valued industry partners from the private sector also play a crucial role to support the Superstars program and enhance its reach. At STA, we want young women and girls to see the vast opportunities offered by a career in science or technology – and to know it can take them places they might not expect. Our inspiring Superstars are living proof of those possibilities. They work at the very edge of wonder. Australia’s scientific expertise is crucial to the health, wealth and prosperity of our nation. To fulfil that important role, we must draw on the very best talent from across the full diversity of Australia’s community. That’s why we must recruit the very best talent from every part of Australia’s diverse population. Raising the visibility of women in STEM and inspiring young girls into careers in STEM through the Superstars of STEM program has become an important vehicle to help achieve this goal. Our Superstars embody both brilliance and diversity.

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Seeing these successful, enthusiastic and passionate female STEM role models helps to inspire the next generation of women scientists and technologists through mentoring and science outreach. And the backing of every supporter of our work to raise the profile of Australian STEM and encourage girls and young women to pursue a career in STEM is a powerful contribution. It helps to speed gains towards greater equality and ensure Australia can attract brilliant talent from the full diversity of backgrounds into study and careers in STEM. We are enormously thankful to all our partners for their commitment to this work, for investing their personal leadership in it, and for enabling their institution’s Superstars of STEM to seize these opportunities to take their public leadership to its next level. For as the events of a global pandemic have reminded us once again so powerfully, the world needs their expertise – and that of our STEM community – more than it ever has.

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THE INNOVATIVE HOUSEHOLD The home has always been seen as a sacrosanct place. Now, the pandemic has re-inforced profound sentiments about its purpose and meaning – and spurred entirely new ways of looking at this multi-dimensional thing called “home”. We believe its both a philosophy and a practice, not just shelter. Technology and innovation have advanced to create many beneficial, exciting and pleasurable products and services to aid us, yet consumer awareness has not kept pace. Many advances range from life enhancing to life saving. Knowledge about them can only improve quality of life—on numerous levels. So we devote a growing chapter in this “living book” called The Innovative Household. We feature as our pilot article a piece from an expert on Home Automation an area too little understood. It's not just luxury; it can aid sustainability, contribute to children’s education – it is re-defining how we organise our time and our lives for the better. The bigger view of the innovative household sees an emerging nexus of design, technology, new materials, connectivity, convenience and creativity for better living. It includes the kitchen, bath, bedroom, study, the garden – every living space, every activity and human purpose. There is a subtle revolution occurring and those maximising life will embrace it. We will evaluate, research, and explore this new terrain. Join us.

A GET WIRED, VERSION 3.3 – YEAR 2022+ Audio visual and automation specialist Len Wallis leads us through the history, current reality, and near future prospects in home automation. There is more than might be expected on hand.

he term Home Automation, freely thrown around by manufacturers, retailers, builders and more importantly, by the associated marketing industry, is widely misunderstood. Any product that can automate lighting control, allow remote security monitoring, provide advanced networking etc. is invariably

promoted under the Home Automation tag. The truth is that none of these products in isolation represent the true meaning of Home Automation. While most will ‘automate’ something, there is no continuity in overall control. The idea of switching between aps every time you wish to dim the lights, check who is at the

Tablets provide all around views including medical monitoring and security. Systems can range from simple to very large.

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door and change channels on your TV will become very tiresome very quickly. In reality Home Automation is the amalgamation of the various sub-systems in your home. It is not about central control of any specific function – but the ability of all these systems to talk together and interact with each other. These sub-systems include lighting control, security, access control, irrigation, audio and video distribution, blind and curtain control, heating and air conditioning, networking and communication. A simple example is when you activate a garage door on your return home from work. The system disables the security, turns on the lights in pre-designated areas and activates the heating system. Or it may be as easy as selecting ‘movie’ on your controller to turn on the AV system, select the correct input, dim the lights and close the curtains. The options (and the potential) are almost infinite. Irrespective of how complex or basic any automation system is, the primary objective should always be to make it simple and intuitive to use. In fact, with a well-designed system many events should occur without any input from the user at all. For this reason, when working with a system designer one should decide on what is important, and not be seduced by a ‘wish list’. The more you ask any system to accomplish, the more complex it will become, and the more unwieldy the control could be. The roots of Home Automation go back decades, initially championed by the Audio Visual Industry. Early control devices allowed well-heeled clients to turn on their projector, drop the projection screen, dim the lights, close the blinds and play a movie without the need to leave their chair. From this early start it was a simple process to expand the capabilities of the technology to what we are offered today. During this early period it was the consumer who drove the market – in the beginning the building industry was wary of making a radical departure from the traditional systems of independent control. At the time builders did not comprehend the technology, and the majority of architects shied away from recommending the concept as they were ultimately responsible

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

for the completed project, and any complications that arose. This hesitation has now disappeared. Home automation (correctly designed and implemented) has proven to be reliable, and of benefit. Acceptance has been further promoted with the advent of IoT (the Internet of Things). There are billions of devices around the world that connect to and can react via the internet. Many of these are in the typical domestic home. Light fittings, fridges, ceiling fans, security devices, children’s toys, on-line gaming, etc. All fall under the broad umbrella of Internet of Things. The media hype around this concept has piqued the interest of the consumer – leading to greater demand. Home Automation wraps all these technologies into one simple control device.

There are billions of devices around the world that connect to and can react via the internet. Many of these are in the typical home.

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The acceptance of Home Automation has also been boosted by the cost of admission. Thirty years ago it was the exclusive domain of the most expensive home builds. Today it is within the reach of any modest project, and from my point of view at least some basic form of automation should be incorporated into any new build – the benefits will always outweigh the cost. For example the cost of the basic automation of the average home is around $30,000 (over and above the existing costs of necessary services such as electricity and networking). This is a small proportion of the overall build cost. At the other end of the scale it is possible to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for some of the more advanced and creative kit-outs. While there are some major players in the automation space including Savant, Lutron, Crestron and the Australian developed C-Bus, the final consumer choice is sometimes made for an unexpected reason. Unlike most technologies, home automation is by-and-large invisible. The physical components are cable (hidden in the wall), processor (tucked away in a rack out of sight) and the wall switches. We find that on many occasions it is the switch on the wall that determines the automation system chosen. Most consumers have no understanding of how automation actually works – and it is not necessary. All that is important is what the end result will bring, and how the switches fit into the proposed décor. The next frontier of Home Automation will be AI – Artificial Intelligence. Current technology allows us to program homes to react to certain triggers. Curtains will open or close at designated times, exterior blinds retract at a predetermined wind velocity, or pressing the away button near your front door turns off the lights and heating and activates the alarm. These are all pre-programmed commands. AI will take this one step further – your automation system will learn your habits and make subtle changes accordingly. Development of AI is already well advanced in the motor vehicle industry, our industry will not be far behind. Australia is one of the quickest adopters of technology in the world, and Home Automation is no different. It is estimated that 2.4 million Australian homes already have some form of smart home technology, and that the market is growing at around 13% per annum. This market is tipped to be worth A$6.4 billion by 2027. The precise breakdown of what constitutes ‘smart home technology’ in these homes is difficult to determine, but interest will continue to be driven by the increased demand for energy efficient devices and solutions (including the rapid take-up of solar), improvements in voice activation, smart TV and

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IoT is about systems communicating with other systems effectively distributed audio. Also, Covid 19 has created a new trend, called cocooning; we have already witnessed a distinct spike of interest in automation during these lock-down periods. One of the greatest drivers in the future will be health. Governments around the world are looking to enable people to remain longer in their homes as they age. Automation will play a big part in this quest. Fall detection, remote monitoring via sensors on beds, chairs, doors etc., fire monitoring, improved communications will all play their part. However it is remote monitoring of medical

Embedded monitors for multiple purposes

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conditions which will provide the most crucial benefit. It is now possible to remotely access key indicators such as blood pressure, heartbeat and glucose levels. Even regular medication can be dispensed remotely. A good example of this is PainCheck – developed by staff at the Curtin University in Canberra. This invention uses AI, facial recognition and smartphone technology to remotely recognise pain by analysing facial muscle movements indicative of pain – and can identify that pain even when not evident. The future of Home Automation is rolling,

for reasons of entertainment and convenience, and particularly for its social and health implications. The field will evolve rapidly. It is dependent upon progress in AI which is moving apace, and as internet speeds inevitably increase, driven by immense demand. Quantum computing is another driver, an area in which Australia is amongst the research leaders internationally. The convergence of these technologies are creating remarkable new landscapes for living, and expanding the definition of what “being wired “ means.

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LEADERS SPEAK

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Short, sharp insights on innovation from leading thinkers and entrepreneurs across the nation.

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LEADERS SPEAK

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“Geoscience is the foundation of the Resources Industry, which in turn is the most important part of the Australian economy, and likely to increase in significance as our nation plays an increasingly critical role in helping the world meet the challenges of decarbonisation. However, despite this, the level of engagement in the broader Australian community with geoscience is relatively low, particularly when compared with the life sciences for instance. The Australian Geoscience Council, the peak body for Australian geoscience organisations, is seeking to change this with our National Geotourism Strategy. A key plank of this strategy is harnessing the technologies of the digital age to provide access to the wonderful geoscience heritage of our country for as many people as possible.”

Chair National Geotourism Strategy Reference Group, Australian Geoscience Council

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Dr Jon Hronsky OAM

“Innovative Manufacturing CRC (IMCRC) is an enabler for companies willing to seize the abundant opportunities of Manufacturing 4.0. It’s clear we are a very inventive nation – but we want to engender innovation, which in our definition means to sell products and services and bridge the gap between invention and positive cash flow.

“

The idea that Australian manufacturing suffers inevitable decline is entirely misplaced and misguided. With the application of new technology and business models, it can be argued that there has never been more opportunity.

One of our roles is to stretch the thinking of our partners. We want to find companies flexible enough to adapt to new technology and push their business models.

When people ask me when Manufacturing 5.0 will arrive, I say never, because things are moving exponentially from here on out. That’s an accurate assessment of the current reality. Think, we have around 7-8 billion people in the world, and within a few short years we are forecast to have more than 200 billion connected devices and machines. What are the ramifications and opportunities of that fact?”

David Chuter CEO, Managing Director, Innovative Manufacturing CRC

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"Defence is traditionally thought of as tanks, missiles, ships, and guns. While they have a place, sophisticated technologies are increasingly becoming part of warfare and counter-terrorism work. It ranges from robotics, to drones, to electronic and information warfare systems. The defence technology industry, or DefTech, is rapidly growing and it’s now possible to be a global leader in your niche being based here in Australia. The R&D, engineering and commercial talent and related infrastructure are second to none and Australians have a “can-do” attitude and a culture of rapid innovation as well. The US is naturally the largest market for any DefTech company and fortunately Australia is very well perceived there due to historical ties for nearly 100 years."

Chief Executive Officer - Droneshield

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Oleg Vornik

“During the COVID-19 pandemic, state-wide lockdowns and lockouts severely disrupted domestic tourism while international visits came to a halt. Local travellers had no choice but to holiday closer to home. By thinking outside the box, and throwing out long-term strategic plans and goals, innovative tourism operators nation-wide were able to refocus on delivering results in the immediate and short-term. This involved completely reimagining world-class tourism attractions by building new and improved accommodation, refurbishing existing product, and even launching visitor experiences that can be enjoyed from one’s own living room.”

Tourism industry specialist

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Rodney Harrex

LEADERS SPEAK

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“Innovation requires up to date knowledge and education, and we see part of our role as helping food scientists and grow and learn, while connecting them with others in the industry, potentially allowing them to collaborate. Our members are individuals working in a broad spectrum of disciplines across the food industry. We need to educate them on the trends that will define the next 10-20 years: such as alternative proteins and reducing food waste to build a sustainable future.

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The challenge is that people are time poor, so we are rethinking how we can deliver the information and education our members need by delivering it to them in different ways.”

Managing Director, Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology

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“Practising sustainability in water becomes clearer when tying it into the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs were compiled as a follow up to the Millennium Development Goals formulated around the millennium, which set out to improve the world. To achieve the SDGs by 2030 will require everyone to do their part: individuals, civil society, governments and the private sector.”

Francois Gouws Managing Director at TRILITY Group of Companies

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Fiona Fleming

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“The automotive and energy industries are going through a once in several generations transition: from polluting internal combustion engines to low emission vehicles capable of being powered by 100% renewable electricity. The challenge for us all is this: how do we make the next generation of entrepreneurs recognise the same thing? How do we make 'energy' more exciting than ‘food delivery startup’? By first providing evidence that we, as a country, believe it.”

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“Thanks to a burst of development of Wollongong's economic and social infrastructure over the last 5-10 years, as well as above average cooperation across the wider business community, the city's interest in and appetite for innovation is now accelerating. For me personally, after spending my early life in Australia’s tenth largest city, it was an easy decision to return to settle in Wollongong and propel my career as a leader in the city's state of the art health care system. With an enhanced image that is attracting world class talent and industry investment more and more, and a local lifestyle without peer, Wollongong's thriving innovation ecosystem is uniquely positioned to advance significantly in the coming decade."

David Crowe CEO, Wollongong Private Hospital (Ramsay Healthcare)

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Chief Executive Officer of JET Charge and Chair of EV Council

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Tim Washington

LEADERS SPEAK

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“Few people do science the way we have. We started with a business outcome in mind, then leveraged existing science in a disciplined manner on low budgets. The result after six years is that we have a general platform applicable to all industries which produce C02 and waste. From here we can create usable, useful and saleable materials. The governing philosophy which drove this was different than that of science research in general: industrial companies would not actively reduce C02 emissions without an economic incentive.

“

What we are doing has nothing to do with the renewable energy pathway, which is a great development, progressing through consumer and public demand, and positive. Our approach addresses industry, the major CO2 producers with an entirely new way of dealing with CO2 and waste from a sound economic, process, and material creation basis. This is a solution which is scalable globally.”

Marcus Dawe CEO and Managing Director, Mineral Carbonation International

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“To achieve its maximum economic potential, Australia needs to define what its innovation culture is. Traditional top-down management structures in our large corporate institutions are now incongruent with the basic tenet of innovation, especially when we have a young generation of entrepreneurs who are our country’s best and brightest innovators. There are five chief innovation enablers in the broad economy – private industry, academia, R&D, government and finance. While they are each powerful, putting them together as an integrated and harmonious whole will drive exponential growth for Australia’s innovative outcomes. Although in Australia we have surely progressed, we need to encourage more cross-disciplinary collaboration, where everyone benefits, to properly harness our innovation potential.

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If the human race, and Earth are going to achieve long term sustainability through mining the moon and exploring space resources, we must establish an education system that not only nurtures skills and experience in STEM disciplines but also encourages creativity and imagination.”

Jeff Lang Managing Director, Titomic

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"In an age where pseudo-science abounds or the science seems to end up telling two opposing stories, those affected by scientific endeavours must scrutinise the ethics and credibility of the chosen research method – both its design and implementation. Like the principles and values found in leadership, practicing integrity, asking the hard questions and welcoming different opinions results in more robust and reliable scientific outcomes. Fertilizer Australia’s member companies are committed to employing proven scientific methods which ensures the sustainable and responsible use of fertilisers across the agricultural industry. This fierce adherence to rigour and quality protects the social licence for growers to use fertilisers safely and effectively and assists Australia to feed and clothe the world."

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“The private sector has an increasingly important role to play in early career development which starts with companies providing professional support to our tertiary student population. Australia should not rely on our universities alone to produce sufficiently qualified graduates. Vocational skill requirements in many industry segments, especially those focused on STEM disciplines, have evolved sufficiently to demand involvement in workforce preparedness from employers to maximise job productivity and employee satisfaction for these new recruits.”

Russell Palmer CEO, Yokogawa Australia

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Executive Manager, Fertilizer Australia

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Stephen Annells

LEADERS SPEAK

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“We are all capable of innovation. The basic principles centre on continuously striving to do better through evolving, open mindedness, and self-reflection. Most try to over-complicate it, limiting it to just one area of their business, when it should be everywhere, all the time in the workplace. Having a passion for creating a uniquely satisfying customer experience, which any business can embrace, is just one innovative idea that works.”

Founder, Boost Juice

“

Janine Allis

“The speed of change today demands absolute alertness. That is a driver of innovation, and something I’ve learned over 40 years of business. Leadership principles within a company create the right framework for creativity and collaboration — and part of that is precise recruitment. Being aware and ahead of disruptive change is crucial.

David Kaplan CEO, Sleepcorp

“

That ensures that we are relevant to them both now and into the future, with products, service and training that they can trust. Underlining this is strong customer satisfaction and loyalty."

“

“Mining is no longer about just digging rocks out of the ground. The industry is rapidly changing and embracing innovation like never before. It is not limited to introducing advanced technologies like autonomous systems. We are also upskilling our workforce to be the world’s best engineering practitioners and most socially responsible corporate citizens.”

General Manager, Sandvik

“

Harry Hardy

“Private companies will develop the technology to make recycling profitable, but there needs to be a reason or incentive. That may be funding, grants, or R&D tax incentives to make it economically viable. “R&D incentives have steadily decreased in Australia, and that is affecting organisations, there are not enough incentives for us to put on more scientists. Recycling used to be someone else’s problem, it is now our problem. When it comes to building a circular economy in Australia, there are great lessons you can take from overseas. We are behind but can take a giant leap in front, and we have a moral obligation to our future generations to move towards sustainability.”

CEO, Close the Loop

“

Marc Lichtenstein

LEADERS SPEAK

“

“If you have been successful as a disruptor through new methods, it makes you more acutely aware of disruptive forces which may be threats down the line. This breeds a healthy attitude of paranoia, forcing you to think. The disruptions we anticipate will arise because we are a global automotive industry force. We look constantly at the inevitable impacts of EVs, automated vehicles, and changes in our core industry, five and ten years ahead. The philosophy is to know who you are and how your industry works philosophy.”

CEO. Carsales.com

“

Cameron McIntyre

"The great technological revolution in recent years has seen the advancement of artificial intelligence and machine learning for the benefit of a whole range of industries, including hospitality. The digitalisation of food delivery, for example, was a huge step forward – but it’s only the beginning. Inspired by the 2019 ”Future of food, How technology and global trends are transforming the food industry” report by Deloitte APAC, I saw an opportunity for an entirely new model to address the contemporary consumer’s needs. Realising it is too easy to be one of many with a slight point of difference, I embarked on a business venture where the intersection of cultural, environmental, digital and safety principles would effect a meaningful disruption to the dining experience."

Co-founder and CEO of Foodifox

“

Shawn Yi

“

“Some companies are unsure about what Industry 4.0 means, what it can do for them and whether it’s worth the fairly significant investment. The basics involve generating and using more data to aid decision making, but Industry 4.0 assists with operating costs, safety, precision, repeatability, waste, planning and modelling, workplace diversity. Industry 4.0 better matches the Australian skilled work force and leads to better job satisfaction and staff retention rates. It needs to be done properly across the whole business for a transformative and enduring change in company operations, maximising long term ROI.

“

When done correctly, it can achieve efficiency improvements in the factory by a factor of 10.”

Project Director, DuluxGroup

“

“Hard work, extra hours and pushing boundaries are all important for building a high performance company in Australia, but can only do so much to ensure commercial success year after year. To safeguard the company’s ongoing survival, one needs to plan for its long term future. A commitment to blue sky R&D and the continual generation of novel products over a 5-10 year life cycle is the key piece of the corporate sustainability puzzle. Investing in R&D in Australia, however, can be challenging, especially given government grant allocations are often based on company size or even luck.”

Samantha Cheetham CEO, SDI

“

Kevin Worrell

LEADERS SPEAK

“

“Australia needs to intensify knowledge exchange and translation between universities and industry. Innovation in Australia requires connection with international partners including China and other Indo-Pacific countries that bring scale, broader market opportunities and a variety of partners that can help researchers turn ideas into practice and transform societies worldwide. By collaborating with Chinese industry partners, UNSW-invented high-efficiency photovoltaic solar cells did not merely deliver a world record in our University laboratories but have been widely used globally, resulting in energy savings and reduced greenhouse gas emissions every day.

“

This same collaborative spirit has resulted in decentralised solar-powered desalination systems, being trialled in China, that can provide safe drinking water to communities in remote regions of central Australia and other parts of the world."

Head, UNSW Torch Innovation Precinct

“

“I feel fortunate to be living in Australia, a country with huge potential and so much to offer the aspiring innovation practitioner and entrepreneur. We need to start planning for 10 to 20 years into the future. When it comes to creating tomorrow’s innovators and entrepreneurs, we need to start the journey today. Many Australians still tend to be conservative, especially when it comes to taking measured risks. Teachers and parents are ideally placed to counsel adolescents on the principles and realities of thinking big, trying something new and bold, as well as being comfortable with the emotions of uncertainty and failure.”

Mina Nada CEO and Co-Founder of Zoomo E-Bikes operating in the US, UK, Europe and Australia

“

Dr. Yuan Wang

“

“Australia is an energy export powerhouse, and domestically we are transitioning to renewable energy at the world’s fastest rate. Our world-best wind and solar resources present an opportunity to future proof Australia’s exports by becoming a renewable energy export powerhouse – either for electricity via undersea cables, or by creating clean hydrogen from water as an export fuel.

Director, Energy Change Institute, Australian National University

“

“It is trite to say that law never keeps up with technology. What is more concerning is that law seems constantly surprised by innovation – we lack systems to manage the processes of clarification, extension and enactment that are required to adapt law to an evolving set of possibilities. New industries need legal certainty, but that requires more efficient law reform. This goes beyond regulation – law should not only restrict harmful technologies; it should provide incentives and co-ordination for beneficial ones.”

Professor Lyria Bennett Moses Director of Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation, UNSW

“

Professor Ken Baldwin

“

We can create carbon-free exports such as green steel by exploiting the co-location of our world-best renewable resources with the world’s largest iron ore deposits.”

LEADERS SPEAK

“

“Transportation and rail more specifically – both passenger and the freight task – is moving towards increased sustainability and the reduction of carbon footprints wherever possible across the entire supply chain. Be it battery trains, renewable and regenerative energy applications and in some markets hydrogen powered vehicles. Within the businesses themselves, the evolution of our industry is also happening at pace with in relation to diversity and inclusion. The diversity for many of us is already present and well underway - but is progressing at different rates, and in markets where skills are at a premium with the opportunity to pair with unprecedented transport and infrastructure investments, these areas of focus must be at the forefront of our collective planning and implementation – and continuing commitment.”

“

“To achieve the national target of 100% diversion from landfill will require a major, whole of economy effort. We need to start considering waste as a resource. Investment in technology is fundamental to genuinely closing the loop, as is learning from our international peers, especially in Western Europe. We are well positioned to adopt advanced recycling methods and the increasingly sophisticated products they can generate for Australian society.”

Daniel Tartak Managing Director, CEO, Bingo Industries

“

President and MD of Bombardier Transportation A-NZ

“

Wendy McMillan

“

“My father was seen as a quack and was belittled by all and sundry. He was thrown out of a club for saying he was a naturopath. He suffered a lot of prejudice in his life. He was called a snake oil salesman. It is like water off a duck’s back. The culture and DNA which has made Blackmores the company it is today is very much embedded in the future direction of the company. I remain the largest shareholder and am confident that I am leaving the day to day management of the company in good hands.”

“

“The Murray Darling situation stems from a lack of a national strategy that incorporates the competing priorities, which are all highly interdependent. This undermines the uptake of novel solutions, including smart meters for real-time data gathering. Innovative management practices such as systems thinking can address the complexity of the problem, incorporating mixed opinions.”

Rob Kerin CEO, PPSA

“

Director of Blackmore Foundation

“

Marcus Blackmore AM

LEADERS SPEAK

“

“With small businesses, economists tend to see them as economic units. They’re not, they’re individuals with ideas. When you look at innovation in small business, it is driven by expertise, ideas, and a desire to do things better. Governments need to engage with small businesses as individuals to be able to locate, support, and grow innovative companies at the local level.”

“

“Our industry has been labelled a 'lagger' or slow adopter when it comes to technology yet we have some very innovative developments happening now such as autonomous vehicles, road to air vehicles and Uber Air taxi services. Our Governments are focussing on congestion and infrastructure whilst our developments are going to the air. Would we not be best focusing on the 'George Jetson' theory? We are looking at our soon to be air taxi traffic and drone environments and how this will impact on the domestic and international air space.

“

CEO, COSBOA

“

Peter Strong

CILT Australia encourages its members to continue their development throughout their career in order to continually remain relevant to the industry. Let’s continue to look beyond the windscreen and not in the revision mirror when it comes to innovation, technology, development and change.

Karyn Welsh CEO, CILT Australia

“

CEO, Everty, Board Member, Electric Vehicle Council

“

“As a 33-year-old now leading an Australian solar company that has turned over more than $130M within the first 6.5 years of operation, some might be surprised that I was not a particularly high performer at university and my under-grad qualification was not in science and technology disciplines. But solar energy was a skill and passion I was able to develop thanks to hard work, discovering new talents, understanding my strengths and weaknesses and surrounding myself with experts.”

Jack Hooper CEO, GEM Energy and Board Member of Clean Energy Council

“

Carola Jonas

“

“Move over fossil fuels! The future of transport is electric. Cars, motorbikes, bicycles and scooters have already made the switch, and next are trucks, trains, ships and planes. Car manufacturers are rebranding into technology and software companies and consumers benefit from better product experiences. Electric vehicles are key to more liveable cities in a future low-carbon world with exciting developments in connected autonomous vehicles and wireless charging. The next decade excites me when it comes to innovation in transportation and energy.”

“

“Culturally, Australia has the unfortunate attitude that we cannot do manufacturing here. People even ask me when I will be moving my company’s manufacturing off shore. With this mindset, Australia will struggle to produce, for example, more healthcare giants like Cochlear, ResMed and CSL. And our relatively small size is no excuse when you consider how advanced the manufacturing industries of Scandanavian countries are. By better integrating Australia’s STEM output with global market forces, aspiring manufacturing companies will be in a stronger position to identify and fulfil unmet needs.”

Paul Brennan CEO, Polynovo

“

LEADERS SPEAK

“Domino’s may not stand out as an example of a highly innovative company. Yet since 2005 we have engaged in over 100 individual projects which utilise technology and place a premium on creative customer driven thinking. Here’s how we work: project by project – in any given year we do about 10-15. See an opportunity, set up an organised project.

But the track record is strong: over 70% of the projects are put in place as a functional system within the company. And they evolve as needed. Business is about evolution.”

Don Meij CEO, Domino’s Pizza

“

A unique team is assembled to move each of these forward. This includes internal staff and outside collaborators as needed. It is more about tackling an individual problem, opportunity or goal.

“

“Good science is neither a consensus nor a political expedient, it is integral to the frontier of our being and continued existence. Whilst science is a disciplined way of gaining understanding it is vulnerable to subversion. It can gain much by commercialisation but must never be subservient to it, and If ever deemed immutable ceases to be science and is rendered a belief.”

“

“COVID-19 has triggered a seismic rethink of the way we live and work, and it's regional towns and cities like my home base in Toowoomba that could reap the rewards. Companies across Australia now understand that they don’t need to have everyone together in a high-rise complex to get their jobs done. Now, work-from-home technology means location is not such an issue any more. The lifestyle advantages of regional Australia have started to outweigh concerns about longer-term career options.”

Peter Lock CEO, Heritage Bank

“

Former Executive Director, Australian Dairy Products Federation

“

Dr Peter Stahle

LEADERS SPEAK

“

“Disruptions to global supply chains have exposed Australia’s reliance on international packaging and machinery components, and in doing so, have focused attention back to domestic production and reinforced the need to innovate and adapt in a post-COVID environment. As a nation, we will need to balance the future risk of import reliance and domestic production; market forces will influence that ratio.”

“

“From the billions of dollars Australia spends every year on research, much of the economic potential is missed. It is critical that we find a way to create businesses directly from research rather than relying on licence deals and interactions with existing business. It’s also critical to find a way to commercialise research from researchers who don’t want to run a business themselves.”

Tom Kenyon General Manager, Innovyz Institute

“

Chairman, APPMA

“

Mark Dingley

“

Boral Group President, HSE, Sustainability, Innovation & Operations Excellence.

“

“Australia’s automotive landscape has changed from a manufacturing and export hub into an engineering and design powerhouse. This shift has created a new industry of highly skilled designers, engineers and technicians. Innovation and human centred design are at the core of our work as we seek deliver vehicles that meet the needs of people in different countries. Our skills are laser-focused on finding solutions for the future mobility and vehicle needs of consumers. Australia has a bright future as a global hub of automotive engineering and design.”

Cleo Paradisis Engineering Innovation Manager, Ford Australia

“

Ross Harper

“

"Our country's construction industry has been a relative laggard in terms of the need for change. On the one hand it maintains a responsible and conservative role in society. On the other, change is an indomitable force. There has been a lot of hype around sustainability in particular but fortunately we are now seeing real advancements, such as automated rheology and low CO2 concrete. With strong leadership, a genuine commitment to diversity and planning for very purposeful technology, the timing is ripe to build a more innovative future for the Australian construction industry."

LEADERS SPEAK

“

“The recent explosion of AI is driving significant changes in the way agriculture can benefit from digital technology. Increasing amounts and better quality of data, rapid advances in algorithms and more powerful computing hardware are enabling researchers and entrepreneurs to rapidly develop solutions that can be applied throughout the supply chain. The challenge is to design robust solutions with the end-users in mind, that can be integrated with existing workflows and can be adapted to work across industries and geographies.”

“

“The future of Australia, for a cleaner and more prosperous society for our grandchildren, is here and now. The opportunity for less air pollution and lower transport costs are a today reality thanks to the intersection of renewable energy sources, smart energy ecosystems and the humble powerpoint. We are now witnessing around the world the rise of the Electric Vehicle and its eventual replacement of the internal combustion engine vehicle, the latter which will soon be consigned to the dustbin of history. Electric Vehicles will become more important and useful than the most advanced modern smartphones offering the motorist unimaginable technology in far greater safety than today’s fossil fuel smokers.”

Greg McGarvie Managing Director ACE-Electric Vehicle Group

“

President of Society of Precision Agriculture Australia

“

Frank D'Emden

“

Country Manager/Director of Emerging Markets and Global Expansion at Intuit

“

“Australia greatest asset are its people. It is rich with entrepreneurial people coming from all parts of the world and who call Australia home. Ninety eight percent of businesses are small businesses with 1/3 being migrants. Their contribution is immense being the single largest employer in the private sector. They are prepared to give it a go however, the system needs changing. Good policies at all levels of governments are required that will allow small businesses to thrive, grow and compete in a global market. With suitable policies, Australia can become the entrepreneurial capital of the world.”

Anne Nalder Founder and CEO of Small Business Association of Australia

“

Shaun Shirazian

“

“Innovative thinking, like any formal workplace practice, needs a framework for it to become embedded in company culture. The methodology starts with deep customer empathy and understanding customer problems, which then allows one to brainstorm solutions and then to test them rigorously. Having a codified apparatus dedicated to innovation instils confidence within a company to seek out new challenges and opportunities."

LEADERS SPEAK

“

"South Australia’s spirit of enterprise is a key driver of the state’s rising R&D capability. The state's broader health and medical research sector in particular enjoys many natural advantages – a smaller, more manoeuvrable, more liveable city with strong healthy networks and a drive to innovate. Indigenous health, artificial intelligence, data science and proton therapy for cancer research in particular will have the biggest influence in advancing South Australia's healthcare delivery in the next decade."

“

“In the face of security risks from an increasingly remote workforce, organisations will increase investment into access security, analytics, and automation to protect sensitive information. Failing to cover end devices with rigorous security policies has proven to be costly and many organisations have paid the price for that in 2020. As the attack surface continues to expand in 2021, we can expect more organisations to keep a tighter rein on intra- and inter-organisational data flow, with defence measures encompassing context-based access controls, geo-fencing of employee remote work location, and encryption. Security analytics and automation will become mainstream to help organisations detect anomalies in user behavior and deploy quick remediation to block malicious activities..”

Peter Fuller Managing Director, Micro Focus Australia and New Zealand

“

Executive Director, South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute

“

Professor Steve Wesselingh

“

“Australia is a gateway for technological innovation, fostering geopolitical and economic relationships, and advancing insight, knowledge, and capabilities. We are now central to shaping the fourth industrial revolution but don't necessarily need to be at the front of it. It’s about being the liaison between other nations and around designing the global educational curricula, rather than teaching the majority of students. By immersing ourselves into the centre, through co-creating the platforms, research, standards and insights, Australia will be the most significant benefactor and beneficiary of the Fourth Industrial Age. We’ll be leaders by being at the centre of it all, instead of distracting ourselves by wanting to be the first to crack it."

“

“When selling products internationally, it is about getting it right first time. Just because it works in Australia, does not mean it will work in Asia. Changing processes and thinking while developing the products, the ingredients, recipe, and packaging to ensure it is internationally ready at the start. It is doable, but a lot easier if you get it right at the start. It is about diversification, being less reliant on domestic Australia, not overly exposed to one country, one commodity, and putting all your eggs into one basket.”

Allan Hood CEO, Bulla Dairy Foods

“

Founder and Group CEO, Lakeba Group

“

Giuseppe Porcelli

LEADERS SPEAK

“

“A review of how we manage risk in the workplace in industries like mining, is overdue. Safety is a non-negotiable but we have taken various regulations too far in some instances, unintentionally stifling independent thought with rigid and inflexible processes. The consequence is that larger companies may be less willing and able to innovate, because of the risk of failure. A culture of innovation, where diversity of thought and breaking from status quo is encouraged and used to one's advantage, requires risk to learn and grow. I think the freedom to try new things, something that start-ups enjoy, is key to innovation.”

“

"The Climate Pledge, founded in 2019, is a cross-sector community of companies, organisations, individuals, and partners, working together to crack the climate crisis and solve the challenges of decarbonizing our economy. The Climate Pledge asks organisations to commit to achieving net-zero carbon by 2040 – a decade ahead of the goals set in 2015 by the Paris Agreement. Since then, a growing list of major companies from IT, energy, mobility and advanced manufacturing industries have joined The Climate Pledge. These signatories play a critical role in stimulating investment in the development of low-carbon products and services."

Adam Beavis Managing Director Australia & New Zealand - Amazon Web Services (AWS)

“

CEO of OZ Minerals

“

Andrew Cole

SPONSORS The publishers extend our profound thanks to the fine and forward-looking companies and organisations who acted as sponsors of this book and its attendant “knowledge campaign”. Without their involvement, the scope of this effort would have been significantly reduced. In our view, they have made a positive contribution to Australian society.

Platinum

Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources

The Australian Technology Network of Universities

Gold

Blackmores Ltd

ResMed

Entoura Pty Ltd

The CRC for Transformations in Mining Economies

Johnson & Johnson Medical Pty Ltd

Titomic Ltd

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

765

SPONSORS Silver ANCA

Australia Post

Aerometrex Ltd

Australian Ethical Investment Ltd

Alertness CRC

Beston Global Food Company Ltd

Amiga Engineering

Bombardier

Aspen Medical

Boral Ltd

AstraZeneca

Brickworks Ltd

Bulla Dairy Foods

Business SA

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Australia’s Nobel Laureates VOL III

SPONSORS Canberra Data Centres

Casella Family Brands

Cisco Systems Australia Pty Ltd

City of Bunbury

Cochlear Ltd

CRC for Water Sensitive Cities Ltd

Device Technologies

Defence Science and Technology

Diamantina Institute

DiverseCo

Elders Ltd

Electro Optic Systems Pty Ltd

Esri Australia

State of our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

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Australia's Nobel Laureates III State of Our Innovation Nation: 2023 and Beyond

Articles inside

Australia's Nobel Laureates III State of Our Innovation Nation: 2021 and Beyond

Australia's Nobel Laureates III State of Our Innovation Nation 2021 and Beyond

Australia's Nobel Laureates III State of Our Innovation Nation 2021 and Beyond