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Australasian Biotechnology, Vol. 10 No. 2, 2000, pp. 3 FROM THE EDITORMartin Playne, Editor Biotechnology has certainly come of age in the last two years: its own stock
exchange index, a daily prominence in the business pages of all major newspapers,
frequent articles on GM foods in the first pages of most newspapers, a regular
topic in current affairs on television, and, importantly, a steady stream of
new and successful products in the marketplace. Australia, of course, can only
mirror these happenings in quite a small way. We are a nation of less than 20
million people, within a world population of some 6 billion. We are a nation
with educational and research facilities of world standing. We play our share
in quality scientific publications, and we have some excellent biotechnology
companies, but we are only a few per cent of the world’s activity in biotechnology. It is well recognised that less than 10 per cent of research concepts end up as successful products in the marketplace, with an even smaller percentage remaining as “Australian-owned” products. Policy-makers and government (are these the same?) tend to expect too much commercialisation success, continue to demand greater success, and try to identify bottlenecks to the commercialisation process. They repeatedly say that we are good at research, but not good at commercialisation of the products of research. These clichéd statements tend to wear a bit thin, especially when we are probably doing quite well in gaining value from our research in view of the 1 in 10 chance of success . Sure, there are weaknesses in and improvements that can be made to the tortuous paths to commercialisation, but governments would be far better first to provide institutions with real increases in research money to prevent the obvious decline in basic and strategic research which is occurring, and, secondly, to revert to the 150% tax concession for company R&D. The decline in company R&D which occurred as soon as the concession was dropped to 125 % is obvious for all to see. The recent National Innovation Summit, held in Melbourne in February, has provided a good basis for improvement for creative and innovative development of science-based industries in the future. But will the Government listen and respond to the recommendations of the summit’s working parties which are due out in September, and will we see an effective response to the promised “Innovation Action Agenda” due before the end of the year? More focused on the funding needs of the higher education sector, the recent report arising from the Australian Science Capability Review, issued by the Chief Scientist, Dr Robin Batterham, in February, illustrates very clearly the crisis in funding for all types of research in Australia. Comparisons are made for government-funded expenditure on R&D, for higher education expenditure on R&D, and for business expenditure on R&D in Australia, USA and the OECD average. We clearly hold our own in the first two categories, but are well below the OECD average and the USA in business expenditure on R&D (when expressed as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product). Our figure is 0.8%, the USA, 1.95%, and the OECD, 1.5% of GDP. In contrast, Finland, where I visited recently, is a country doing really well in the global competitiveness stakes. Finland, coincidentally, has strong policies for high expenditure on R&D by both private and public sectors. R&D expenditure from both private and public sectors has increased consistently from about 1.5% of GDP in 1985 to 3.01% in 1998. The Finnish Government has set itself a goal of achieving government expenditure on R&D of 3% or more, through focusing on developing effective links between government and industry. Not so different from Australia, you say - only that Australia’s 1.5% of GDP for government expenditure on R&D is expected to drop to 1.4% by 2004, according to the Batterham report. Australia has a total of only 1.6% of GDP in 1996 (source: OECD) for all three categories of funding (government, higher education, and business). The Australian Financial Review reported on 20 April a study, conducted by the Swiss-based International Institute for Management Development, entitled “Year 2000 World Competitiveness”. This study examined how well 47 countries were doing in providing firms within their borders with a climate that sustains domestic and global competitiveness. The leaders were: 1. USA, 2. Singapore, 3. Finland and 4. The Netherlands. Britain was 15th, while Australia had slipped one place to 13th. Interestingly, Finland had jumped 13 places since 1996. The article concentrated on how well the Dutch were performing, and pointed out the need to marry social cohesiveness, good social security and employment with technical innovation and infrastructure development, while encouraging deregulation and flexible work packages. It seems that Australia could do well to look at the approaches being taken by the Dutch and the Finns, rather than trying to ape the USA and Britain all the time. We have here two good models to follow and improve on who have similar population sizes (16 and 6 million) and similar societal views on social structure and equality.
More on the Chief Scientist’s report: www.isr.gov.au/science/review/ Discussion topics planned (given reader’ contributions) in coming issues this year will include: “R&D funding and innovation (continuing the debate outlined above)” “The real reasons behind the protests against GM foods: world trade globalisation, multinationals, government regulation, people power” Readers are invited to suggest and contribute to further topics. Please contact the editor directly (mplayne@netspace.net.au). Copyright 2000 - Australasian Biotechnology |
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