Take Your Partners

Although government funding of research in Australia is sadly almost stationary, there are a plethora of opportunities available to researchers that are flexible enough to adjust to and take advantage of the ever changing research and development environment.

These include research consultancies with industry and government (Federal, State and Local) and identification of intellectual property of value and its subsequent technology transfer and commercialisation.

At a time when many industries and all levels of government are outsourcing research, the universities should be providing quality consultancies at market prices. There are a myriad of ways in which technology transfer can occur, often leading to considerable short or long-term financial benefits as well as long term collaborations for the researchers and the University. It is the responsibility of university management to be on their toes, continuously and proactively identifying new sources of funding, matching them to the appropriate research area, and assisting the researchers to interact with the outside world.

Ultimately, the most flexible universities, able to sense changes in the wind and respond, will be the winners in this competitive search for dollars.

This is particularly important in Australia, where universities have limited local access to large industry for collaboration when compared to their equivalents in the USA and Europe. Indeed many partnerships these days between industry and universities are with multinationals.

Universities are already moving away from the old era where research often involved a lone researcher gradually becoming a world expert in a fairly narrow field and building a set of publications. Quality and depth in research rather than a fast pace was the yardstick of success and it brought considerable personal satisfaction to the researcher.

No longer is this true! The new exciting world of research is pacy and it attempts to solve large complex problems with a team approach covering many disciplines.

Usually the best team for such work is not found in one institution. Therefore, to be successful, universities have to partner with each other and with the public and private sector in order to assemble the best team to answer the question in a holistic way.

It is clear that a small country like Australia cannot maintain its strong involvement in the international research scene if it does not draw its best researchers together into partnerships to compete on the international stage.

It is true to say that no Australian university has top international standing, but many Australian research teams are at the top internationally.

The emphasis is on a high quality team of first-rate researchers who are internationally recognised. When they join in a partnership they must gather together the top complementary teams in the world, and not look to partnering with their friends down the corridor _ even though it might be easier to manage.

The current successful management of such partnerships, often over large distances, is made relatively easy these days by evolving technology that enables cheap and immediate worldwide communication via the Internet. The funding for partnership research is usually extensive, but this is often shared between many partners who have to learn to work together over large distances. This is not usually a problem for the researchers who are frequently enthusiastic about collaboration but can be difficult for the relevant institutions who are more used to competing than partnering.

The Federal Government has also joined in the partnership approach to funding research. For example the Federal Government first joined in the act when the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) program was introduced in the early 1990s, where research institutions and industry were encouraged to work together. More recently, the Department for Education, Science and Technology signalled its support for team research with the Backing Australia's Ability (BAA) multiplicity of funding schemes forged out of the Innovations Australia in 2001. BAA allocated $2.9 billion over five years, and much of this funding favoured a holistic approach to problems. At the WA State level, the present Government reintroduced the very successful State Centre of Excellence scheme in September 2002 to promote partnership research between the public and private sector.

There is another side to the new government schemes that foster partnerships. They require industry and research partners to put cash up front to support their application, so it becomes a true partnership with government. Industry, government and the universities are leveraging off each other so the whole is considerably greater than the sum of the individual parts. This means research funding in universities and State governments must be set aside for such strategic partnership allocations in order to be in the game.

However, committing cash up front for the application is gambling on chances of success. Should universities commit funding for ten applications knowing the total cash commitment may be in excess of the budget in the unlikely event that all are successful? Or should they be conservative and only support what they can afford? Most universities are only just adjusting to this risk situation. This issue of Synergy is about such teamwork and partnerships at Murdoch.

Murdoch has 40 research centres¹ where teams of researchers focus on particular problem areas. Murdoch hosts two Cooperative Research Centres and is a partner in three others². It is involved in six State Centres of Excellence³.

Murdoch University is performing exceptionally well in this fast changing environment. It has a large group of committed and active researchers of quality. It has long had interactions with outside industry partners and other areas of the private and public sector, through shared grants and consultancies, long before the value of such partnerships was recognised. These partnerships have already led to Murdoch's long-term success with the Linkage scheme (and its previous form, the SPIRT scheme).

As a consequence Murdoch competes well in the research arena for its share of the operating grant for all 38 Universities. It is a small university, only ranking 29th in size out of 38 Universities nationally, but it rises to rank 19th overall when rated by its total research income, and rises again to rank 12th when the universities are all normalized for size.

In the last two years Murdoch has identified areas in which its research is strong and some of these are within the pages of the publication.

Established Areas of Research Strength

· Agricultural and Veterinary Biotechnology;

· Contemporary Asia;

· Mining and minerals processing _ extractive metallurgy;

· Social Change and Social Equity;

· Technologies and Policies for Sustainable Development;

· Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecosystems Management and Restoration.

Emerging Areas of Research Strength

· Bioinformatics and Biostatistics;

· Interactive Media

So the final message is universities must collaborate and facilitate the drawing together of appropriate research teams of high calibre and international standing if Australian universities are to remain players in the international scene.

¹ This includes Cooperative Research Centres, WA Government Centres of Excellence, Inter-institutional Centres and Divisional Research Centres and Institutes (http://www.murdoch.edu.au/cwisindex/dso.ndx)

³ WA State Agricultural Biotechnology Centre (Host), Centre for High Throughput Agricultural Genetic Analysis (Host), International Environmental Technology Centre (Host), Centre for Organic Waste Management (Host), Australian Centre for Renewable Energy Laboratory (Host), WA Biomedical Research Institute (Node).