Australian universities play an outsized role in the local innovation system compared to peer economies and should attract a larger portion of system funding to support that effort, UNSW vice-chancellor and president Attila Brungs says.
And while the idea that Australian universities are “great at research but bad at commercialisation” has become a well-worn trope, Professor Brungs says structural differences in local industry meant Australian universities actually progress research translation further than international peers.
He says the Strategic Examination of R&D expert panel should be applauded for recognising the central role that universities play in Australian universities so that resourcing can be better planned to underpin it.
In this episode of the Commercial Disco podcast, InnovationAus.com publisher Corrie McLeod covers a broad range of university topics with Professor Brungs, from the use of AI across the student population, to research funding and translation, to the role of alumni in startup formation.
The University of NSW is the only Australian university currently ranked within the global top 20 universities. With an annual budget of about $4 billion, it makes up a big chunk of the Australian innovation landscape.
The university produces more student startups than all of the universities in Australia put together.
But here’s the issue. Professor Brungs says the output of UNSW is “pretty close” to that of the great Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – “not quite” he says but getting close.
Both institutions are giant research and innovation engines. But where UNSW makes up almost 4 per cent of the Australian innovation ecosystem, MIT is just 0.13 per cent of the US innovation system.
If the UNSW fell over, or failed to deliver, that creates a relatively big gap in the Australian system. But if MIT disappeared tomorrow, Professor Brungs says the US system would barely notice.
“It’s not just us, that’s the role that all Australian universities play,” Professor Brungs said.
“We are much larger part of the innovation system than any other country, and that’s one of the great things about the [SERD’s] Ambitious Australia report is that it recognised that universities are such a big part of our ecosystem.”
“In the past, sometimes [industry] reports always looked to US, Europe, UK, and ignored the very different ecosystem that we have here, and how the role of the university is a much larger part of it,” he said.
The structure of industry is also significantly different in Australia, with its disproportionately large numbers of SMEs.
“In the US, UK and Europe, industry often does a lot of the heavy lifting around what we call research translation,” he said.
“In Australia, because we’ve got so many SMEs, universities have to do a lot of that heavy lifting to make things even more ready to be used and commercialised in industry than they do in other countries.”
That’s the breakthough in the Ambitious Australia proposals – recognising the role that universities play in research translation.
“I think the Ambitious Australia report has now sort of broken open that egg and said not only should universities be supported to do the research, but they are also doing a lot of the heavy lifting around that research translation,” Professor Brungs said.
“[Right now] we all scramble around to find the money that we need to do that, because while research itself is very important, unless you commercialise it, unless you solve a societal problem, unless you create that innovation, it has not reached its potential,” he said.
“That’s a big part of what the university’s responsibility is. And looking to the future, we need to do even more of that.”
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Well said Atilla – Universities are key to innovation and economic growth