Commercialisation advisers tender abandoned after rules breach


Joseph Brookes
Senior Reporter

A government tender for highly paid research commercialisation advisers has been abandoned after an investigation found procurement rules had been broken, including “communications” with incumbent suppliers.

The Department of Education on Friday terminated its tender for priority managers to help deliver Australia’s Economic Accelerator (AEA), a $1.6 billion university research commercialisation program.

The tender launched last May but had been frozen for the last six months following a complaint about an alleged breach of Commonwealth Procurement Rules and subsequent investigation.

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1 Comment
  1. rooconnor@csu.edu.au 4 weeks ago

    Yet more reason to call the AEA program into question. The policy and economic rationale for AEA was weak, most of its goals could have been achieved by tweaking existing programs such as CRCs, and the case for having it run by the Department of Education was all but nonexistent. The DoE had no capability or experience with commercialisation programs, as has been made clear by the repeated hiccups with the implementation of AEA, including this latest stumble (which is also symptomatic of some broader capability problems within the Department).

    AEA has long since passed the ‘throwing good money after bad’ point and should be wound up. Unfortunately, with an election coming we’re more likely to see both major parties double down.

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