Mining the creative thread

The new government has a chance to prove itself a supporter of innovation in Australian industry, writes SIMON MARGINSON WHILE much of Australia spent January at the beach Kim Carr, the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, has been busy. In one of his first statements, he guaranteed the independence of the Australian Research Council. On 7 January he appointed a six-member Australian Research Council advisory council to replace the ARC board jettisoned by the last but one minister Brendan Nelson. Having announced that the previous government?s research quality framework would be dumped, Senator Carr emphasised his commitment to basic or fundamental research within the set of research and development activity, and assured research communities that policy would not be driven solely by commercial considerations. He also remarked on the role of research in the humanities and social sciences. Having cleared the policy clutter and made the right noises, the minister got down to business. Last week he announced a review of the national innovation system, to be chaired by CSIRO director and innovation policy expert Terry Cutler and supported by a panel of seven including the universities, business and the chief scientist. Feeding into the main review, former University of Adelaide vice-chancellor Mary O?Kane will chair a review of the Cooperative Research Centres program. Senator Carr emphasised the Rudd government?s intention to ?restore public benefit as one of the primary objectives of the CRC program.? The terms of reference of the national innovation system review distinguish between ?research programs? and ?other innovation initiatives.? While its primary interest is the policy mechanisms supporting new developments in knowledge-intensive industries, it will also position public research programs such as the ARC and National Health and Medical Research Council. A green paper is due by the end of July. The review has a rationalisation and federal?state agenda ? Senator Carr identified 169 programs at all levels of government designed to support innovation and industry assistance ? and a policy building agenda. It will define what the Rudd government means by ?innovation,? a slippery concept now commonplace in government around the world, and whether the Rudd regime will recycle conventional policy ideas or move ahead of the global play by breaking new ground. This review is a key moment in the life of the government. The holy grail of standard innovation policies is the junction between industry and commercial ideas. It is assumed there will continue to be researchers with creative imaginations who produce ideas. Policy sets out to ensure that a greater proportion of these ideas can be commercialised and that industry supports them. Today?s innovation policies had their genesis in the Thatcher government in Britain in the second half of the 1980s. Her government developed financial incentives and product formats in research, designed to harness university work more closely to industry. In their famous Mode 1-Mode 2 model Michael Gibbons and collaborators argued that the future belonged to university science driven externally by industry, markets and government. The argument was influential, underpinning instrumentalist approaches to research policy in many countries. More recently, within the overall research and development policy set there has been a partial swing back to basic (blue-sky or curiosity-driven) research shaped by researchers and research communities. This ?back to the basics? trend is supported by the continuing dominance of US universities and research funding agencies in science and commercial biotechnology. The US institutions never really bought the Gibbons argument. The rising Asian science powers China, Singapore, China Taiwan and Korea have followed the US in emphasising basic research and industry applications. Many leading companies also now emphasise autonomous creativity. Google sets aside one day a week of employee time for work on self-directed projects. Reputedly, this time creates the most value for the company. Researcher autonomy and economic utility are seen as congruent not mutually exclusive. All this has modified standard innovation policy. Independent basic research in universities has once again become crucial to the innovation system, provided it networks with industry, and both parties look for potential synergies in ?hot? zones where there are direct opportunities for commercialisation, such as life science programs that feed into biotechnology. These hot zones do not constitute the whole of useful new knowledge. Much of what happens in the hot zones is conditioned by new ideas emerging in other fields of research. No doubt Senator Carr?s review will assert the principles of researcher autonomy and university-industry partnership. The harder question is which new directions it will identify: where it will take innovation in practice. There are three ways to take innovation policy forwards. One is to focus on the hard-edged economic problem, the shortage of risk-taking entrepreneurs with access to venture capital. This is difficult policy terrain. It gets governments into picking winners and investing resources in high-risk schemes. Singapore has done it successfully. In Australia, Treasury does not like it. How the Rudd government will handle the venture capital problem is unclear. The review will examine research tax concessions but tax concessions unsupported by more targeted policies do not have a happy history. The second way forward is to take the message about innovation, defined not so much as science and technology but as the principle of continuous and reflexive transformation, into every corner of public and private sector organisation. This is the line advocated by Allan Fels and Fred Brenchley. The third and arguably most groundbreaking approach is to emphasise the fostering of creativity: the generation of breakthrough ideas. As noted, standard innovation policies take it for granted that researchers with creative imaginations will continue to produce ideas. Policy focuses instead on commercialisation. But new ideas cannot be taken for granted. Certain nations, cities and organisations exhibit very strong creative cultures. It is more than a question of money. Silicon Valley was fuelled by venture capital. Yet Amsterdam and Copenhagen exhibit strong creative cultures with a fraction of the financial incentive. On the other hand, in Japan finance seems to flourish better than science. This suggests there are gains to be made, possibly major gains, in moving beyond the standard policies (which will continue) to a policy focus on creativity itself. Richard Florida hit this with his argument about the ?creative economy.? Florida floated some foolish correlations and overblown rhetoric but for middle-sized nations like Australia the point is highly strategic. A policy focus on creativity takes us to the drivers of the imagination, in different fields of knowledge and its applications. It takes in the organisational conditions and larger locations (nation, city, policy space, work space) where creation happens. It means examining the factors that attract highly creative people to particular places in numbers and diversity, and the freedom they need to produce brilliant ideas and talk about them in an engaging manner. It is about their interactions, for example between creative people in the sciences and the arts. It is about programs and reward systems that attract and hold top-flight people and emerging stars, and more effectively utilising global networks. In short, being creative about creativity provides the national review with its best opportunity of being innovative about innovation. ? Simon Marginson works in the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne. He recently released Prospects of Higher Education: Globalisation, Market Competition, Public Goods and the Future of the University. This article first appeared in the Australian?s Higher Education section. Photo: Rafal Zdeb/iStockphoto.co