Bill Ferris talks about the need for Australia to bring its ideas and inventions to market, and the way to tackle a business culture that fears failure.
An emphasis on innovation is great, but we need genuine reforms to universities and tax incentives if we’re to promote collaboration between research and industry.
The answer to Australia’s ailing innovation system does not lie with universities, which should stick to teaching and research, and aim to do both well.
When academics come up with a viable innovation, they need to figure out the best way to protect their intellectual property if they’re going to bring it to market. Patents aren’t always the answer.
Countries will take emissions reduction pledges to international climate talks in Paris at the end of this year. Those pledges should also include funds for low-carbon R&D.
Commentators continue to call for new infrastructure to lift Australia’s flagging economic growth, yet there is a significant lack of awareness over what constitutes infrastructure. Infrastructure is not…
Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane let his discretion slip this week in a speech to the Queensland Media Club when foreshadowing an upcoming report on research funding and competition. Distancing himself…
After a few years of increased funding, Australian research has recently started to face cutbacks and job losses. This boom and bust cycle for science is nothing new but is it time to take a new approach…
What happens to CSIRO when the federal government decides to strip away A$111 million over four years from its A$733 million annual contribution to the organisation’s budget? We are beginning to find out…
The message from the federal government’s Commission of Audit is loud and clear: science, research and education are expenses to be trimmed rather than investments to be nurtured. Yes, there are few big…
It wouldn’t normally be cause for celebration when something related to cancer goes viral, but the recent #nomakeupselfie trend has been great news for charity-funded cancer research. The campaign has…
From the days of the gold rushes, to the banking and mining booms of the last 15 years, Australians have long worried that most of the world’s innovation was happening somewhere else. Did our good fortune…
Innovation policy in the UK has taken on a medieval cast. No sooner do we have Catapult Centres, than there is a call for Arrow Projects. This is the headline recommendation of a report to government by…
The UK is investing less on research and development across both the public and private sectors and remains behind Europe on the proportion of its GDP spent on research, prompting leading academics to…
In a referendum on 9 February, the Swiss population voted against mass immigration. That outcome will have far-reaching consequences on the position of Switzerland in European research cooperation. As…
Previous Vice President of the Academy of Science of South Africa and DSI-NRF SARChI chair in Fungal Genomics, Professor in Genetics, University of Pretoria, University of Pretoria