The next stop in the Innovation Study Tour was a visit to the CSIRO offices in North Ryde, a wonderfully eclectic collection of buildings in the classic research campus style (including my personal favourite – a building simply titled ‘Laboratory’ above the entrance).
CSIRO has a proud record of achievement from eradicating the Prickly Pear cactus to inventing WiFi. The presenter, David Burt, spoke about a change in approach underway at CSIRO for fostering the next generation of achievement.
The conventional path to commericalisation is:
- Researcher works on BasicScience™ or AppliedScience™ project
- Researcher makes a discovery, develops a new concept, or builds a new gadget.
- Researcher gets lots of citations in the LeadingJournal© of her field.
- Researcher’s managers decide her NewThing is worthy of becoming a BigThing™.
- Discovery, concept, or gadget is handed over to an ‘innovation management’ team of development experts such as patent attorneys, marketers, accountants and business managers to work their dark arts.
- NewThing becomes a BigThing™, sells well and joins the other BigThings™ on the CSIRO poster of BigThings™.
- Or not. Actually, it’s more often not… BigThings™ are like giant ore deposits: rare, not always obvious, highly dependent on economics, and take decades to get to market.
CSIRO is now taking a different approach with the ON Accelerator program. Here the premise is that the Researcher, or more likely Researchers, are pretty smart and could learn the dark arts of patents, marketing and venture capital. What’s more, the Researcher is most likely to be highly passionate about her NewThing and is therefore the most driven to see it become a BigThing™. So now the researchers can undertake an intensive course in developing business models and how to find and spruik their idea to potential investors.
As you can see in the links here and here there are some brilliant ideas being guided along this path.
For instance, I vaguely knew that vaccines were developed in eggs, but I didn’t know that one vaccine dose can take one or two eggs to develop. It means there is a vast alternate production and supply network of millions of eggs worldwide, but highly constrained by the basics of egg production. While others have focused on increasing production (and you can only imagine what that means for animal welfare), a team at CSIRO have created a genetically modified egg that increases vaccine growth – more vaccine from one egg. The challenge now is find a way to scale up from the laboratory to a pilot production plant – especially as there is not much idle capacity in the vaccine manufacturing business to try new things. (Which led to a rather frank and fearless discussion among the audience about the constraints on scaling up R&D in Australia. It ain’t pretty out there.)
There is an automated fruit fly trap that has image recognition and sends a signal if it sees Bactrocera tryoni crawl in. 80% of visits to check traps find nothing, which is a lot of wasted resources – imagine being able to focus those resources quickly on the areas of infestation rather than driving around to empty traps. Interestingly, the marketing discussions about this gadget indicated that potential users, such as orchardists and biosecurity agencies, were less interested in buying one and would prefer to pay a service fee to have someone install it and report the results. Similarly, a project to develop an automated aerial drone to inspect infrastructure like bridges, mobile phone towers, and smoke stacks, has found the value proposition now lies in the automated navigation algorithms not in the hardware which is on the verge of being an off-the-shelf commodity even for high-end specialist equipment. The learning here is that talking to the potential market can reveal value propositions that may not be apparent from inside the project.
I’ve mentioned this idea of training the Researcher to become the commercial developer to several people now, and it often draws a reaction akin to biting into a sandwich with an unexpected layer of pickles (the “smacks of trade” reaction is another discussion…). The CSIRO presenter admitted that the program isn’t for everyone and it is optional although it is part of the cultural change being driven by CEO Larry Marshall (how CSIRO developed its strategy between executive and staff is a whole article for another day). An interesting consequence of the ON Accelerator program was how it had changed the career paradigm for the researchers involved. Whereas a previous career goal may have been to get among the top citations for the LeadingJournal© in their field, now it was getting their idea to market and making an impact on the real world.
What’s the real impact of our research? How far does it reach into the real world and impact on things beyond journal citations?
