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Collaborative research centres are a visible way of creating structured support for research and innovation activities, but it is important to remember that they do not exist without drawbacks.

One of the biggest limits to centres of excellence is the very thing that makes them valuable. Their focus is usually on a limited range of research and innovation activities.

The problem is that loading research effort only into a number of targeted subject areas provides a research platform with very large gaps across the broader subject. Gaps in which good ideas and opportunities can fall through.

To get sufficient coverage to trap most opportunities there would need to be either a large number of overlapping centres of excellence, which would be highly resource-intensive; or centres would need to broaden their scope considerably resulting in dilution of their ability to excel. The answer may lie somewhere in between.

On the 29 May the Department of Water will host the WA Water Innovation 2008 conference. Part two of this event will showcase a nest of projects that have been supported through Round 1 of the Premier’s Water Foundation grants. Projects that have generated excellent results.

One of those is a small project conducted by vegetablesWA in partnership with the Department of Agriculture and Food. Here, best management practice for vegetable growing on sand, real time weather data and individual farm information is provided and combined in a way that yields a potential irrigation water saving of 10 to 15 per cent, or around 10 Gigalitres per year. That’s because growers are now able to take the guess work out of irrigating and apply only the water needed by that crop on that day at that stage of crop growth.

For an investment of $519,000 that saving is cheap water, and a terrific result for our Swan Coastal Plain groundwater systems and users. The principles of this work can be applied to virtually all irrigation users.

Yet with all that good feeling it is difficult to see how this project would have gained support through a structure consisting only of centres of excellence. This was not a project with a great research component, it was simply a reorganization of knowledge generated from a vast amount of previous research and a little technical development. Importantly it did not require a centre of excellence to advance, just funding support.

But can a simple funding scheme generate the collaborations required to push development in more difficult subject areas?

Yes. Take the Managed Aquifer Recharge project led by the CSIRO, which became the springboard for Western Australia’s drive to test and establish aquifer recharge as a significant recycling option.

CSIRO’s partners in this project are the Water Corporation, Curtin University of Technology, the Chemistry Centre (WA), the University of Western Australia and the Centre for Ground Water Studies. This strong cooperative research team is generating valuable data on chemicals of concern, and pathogen travel and decay in the groundwater system. It also delivering an understanding of the drivers of public perception related to aquifer recharge as a means for indirect potable water recycling.

Once again the collaborative group comes together only for this project, utilizing the resources of existing research and expertise structures. It is only the funding mechanism that is required to join up the project.

There is no doubt that centres of excellence can drive research in the areas targeted and we are fortunate in WA to see drive behind research through the emergence of new collaborative centres. But we must not forget to maintain broader secondary structures that bridge the gaps.

Jeff Major is Project Manager of the Premier’s Water Foundation.