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If you ask our erstwhile business leaders (as BRW did recently) to rate the importance or not of innovation amongst their top 3 business imperatives, over half of them (64% to be precise) think that innovation is important enough to rank in their top 3. This is lunacy.

We are a nation of net importers of overseas developed, turnkey, off the shelf innovation and technology. Our companies and leaders seem happy, nay complacent, in this attitude to being consumers of innovation, not developers of it.

With the election looming, both sides of politics would do well to address this complacency or, if we are not careful, the rest of the world will continue to view Australia as either a pub, a holiday destination, a place to send their children to Uni, or a quarry

We are not viewed as a source of elaborately transformed, manufactured goods and services but merely as a small market (1-3% of worldwide revenue) for their products to be sold into.

OK, so where do we source this innovation and how can we get it to the world market?

The recent Productivity Report on the Public Support for Science and Innovation concluded (amongst other findings) that Government Expenditure on R&D (GERD) is roughly in the right ballpark – neither too much, nor too little. So, if we’re spending roughly the right amount on GERD, where’s the innovation payoff?

Academic researchers are currently judged on their publication record alone. The more prestigious the journal and the greater the paper’s citation impact the better it looks on the academic’s CV.

What we in the Science Industry would like to see as an equally valid entry on the selfsame CVs is a history of achievement in Proof Of Concept development.

A lot of research is done that does not necessarily lead to published outcomes but is in itself still valuable and capable of commercialisation alongside the published data sets.

Academics and their research groups get zero recognition and kudos for developing this non-published work and we at the Science Industry would like to see that changed and both sides of politics currently have an ideal opportunity to simply implement this Proof Of Concept recognition.

An outcome from the Science Industry Action Agenda is the development of a Proof Of Concept checklist and guidelines.

We are not arguing that academics should be coerced in any way to commercialise their innovation, or to place greater emphasis on developing commercially ready innovation.

What we are saying is that, if some innovation is developed to the Proof Of Concept stage, then let’s give the developers recognition for this achievement that carries as much weight and significance for their career as their publication record.

Proof Of Concept activities fill a role in commercially-oriented research which is analogous to 'papers' in academic research - with dollars earned, patents lodged etc being a measure of impact analogous to citations. The Proof Of Concept metric is an intermediate measure of the conversion rate of ideas into marketable products, processes and services.

This will have many positive outcomes. It will:

1. remove the disincentive to pursue non-published research undertakings
2. substantially remove a lot of the risk of commercialising the innovation from a manufacturing companies perspective
3. empower University commercialising arms, as they would administer the development of Proof Of Concept documentation (for example, commercialisation bodies could publish information on the number of 'proofs of concepts' undertaken in their university and in what field. This would be an important indicator for industry.)
4. ease and facilitate the transition of innovation from Publicly Funded Research Agencies (PFRAs) into the commercial sector
5. reduce the number of poor-quality commercial prospects put to industry, thus boosting industry’s confidence in the commercial aspirations of PFRAs
6. substantially boost the revenue stream back to these selfsame PFRAs from commercially established licensing, royalty arrangements for their IP
7. develop a culture whereby business can easily access and assess the commercial potential of PFRA generated innovation – facilitate ease of communication
8. substantially remove unrealistic expectations from both sides of the commercialisation equation

The experience of CSIRO and most major overseas research universities is that a Proof Of Concept checklist to guide researchers on commercial research works.

The government has an ideal opportunity to champion the Proof Of Concept ideal in its Research Quality Framework as does the opposition in its forthcoming higher education statement.

Adoption of Proof Of Concept as being equally as valid as an academics’ publication record will ensure that Australia is not starved of innovation through a lack of will to:

1. undertake the necessary research in the first instance, and
2. then commercialise the innovation once is has achieved Proof Of Concept status

This is not saying that every Proof Of Concept innovation statement can and will be commercialised – but rather that in developing the Proof Of Concept, the academic gets the recognition for the work undertaken and then the work stands a much better chance of commercialisation if the right partner and/or mechanism can be found.

I commend this idea to both sides of politics – and to the science community - as a way to ensure innovation that can be turned into the sort of elaborately-transformed, manufactured goods and services that the rest of the world would happily buy from Australia.