Tech Transfer Talk

In this episode, we reflect on Science Meets Parliament 2024 – a bespoke training event run annually by Science and Technology Australia. This event brings together emerging scientists and Australian federal parliamentarians to strengthen connections between STEM professionals and decision-makers.

I chat with Sharath Sriram, President of Science Technology Australia, RMIT Professor and start up founder. We also hear from attendees Preeti Castle, Mark Hutchinson, Alfonso Chinnici, Warwick Bowen, and Parwinder Kaur, to get their impressions of #SMP2024.

We reflect on Sharath's National Press Club address and Australia's place in the world of innovation. Sharath describes Australian innovation ecosystem funding as three interconnected pieces – higher education, government and industry investment – and comments on how the three components need to be better connected. Low R&D investment from industry results in research being commercialised abroad rather than with local industry. We then discuss the industry settings in Australia that may sit behind the current malaise in private sector investment.

Our discussion then turns to the 'missing middle', a term coined by Minister Ed Husic at the National Innovation Policy Forum, and the need for national scale up infrastructure (as touched on with Katherine Woodthorpe in the January 2023 podcast). We also discuss the need for increases in domestic technology transfer capacity, which follows the calls made by Natalie Chapman on this podcast earlier this year. We close our discussion on how Australia might position itself in global innovation and how benefits might flow back to the Australian innovation ecosystem.

In this special episode, I had the privilege of talking with David Thodey AO, whose experiences and roles have included board and chair roles in organisations such as Xero, CSIRO, Ramsay Health Care, Telstra, and Chancellor Elect at the University of Sydney. David is also a figurehead and thought leader within AICD, particularly around innovation and the role that it can play in Australian business and society.

In our conversation, David shares some of his journey into innovation, having started at IBM, and he shares his passion and ongoing fascination with how science and technology can shape society and business for good. We reflect on the importance of communication in technology transfer, both in terms of inspiring the public and private sectors, but also in articulating the problems that it can address, and the opportunities that can arise through the embracing of innovation and well-managed risk.

We touch on some of the broad enablers for business, such as finance and process, however, culture becomes the dominant theme through our discussion, and the challenge of disrupting the status quo alongside the need for competitive energy, both within organisations and in the markets that they serve. We then touch on the recent Australian tour by Marianna Mazzucato, and the notion of grand challenges for Australia to set and rise to. through better deployment of innovation and technology into the local ecosystem. David notes the need for defining organisational aspirations, purpose and through that, setting the culture for an organisation.

Some time was spent reflecting on Australian business outlooks, including a recent PwC survey which suggests that 85% of Australian CEOs believe their business would still be economically viable a decade from now, if it remained on its current path without major changes. This catalyses some discussion around the current malaise in private sector investment in innovation, competition, and the arising risk appetite from corporate Australia. David notes that every board should be looking for means to prosperity, and that innovation reflects the desire to improve. We reflect on how there are great sectoral examples of innovation, where organisations compete on the global stage for talent, resources and commercial success.

We also explore some of the cultural conundrums inherent in innovation, related to people (who ultimately are driving innovation), and the corporate governance settings around reporting, control, trust, and accountability. There is an equilibrium between these and also between the board and management that needs to be thoughtfully calibrated. We also reflect on local attitudes to risk management and the challenges associated with recognising and managing well-intended but erroneous outcomes arising from the pursuit of innovation. Accountability and consequence need to be built into a system that results in (failing and) learning fast, not failing fast (and not learning).

In this episode, we get the chance to catch up with Anne-Marie Perret, an independent advisor and significant contributor to the Canberra innovation ecosystem through her roles as mentor and board member with several ventures. Anne-Marie is also an active member of the Griffin Accelerator (which works alongside the Canberra Innovation Network) as advisor, board member and angel investor.

I was particularly keen to explore the importance of advice and governance with Anne-Marie and discuss how this adjusts through different phases of a venture. We framed the discussion around 'small g' governance and 'big G' governance as needs change through scale and sophistication of investors, markets and stakeholders. We speculate that the inflection point for transition was where capital raising moves beyond friends and family and the importance of due diligence from all parties as new capital comes into a firm.

We also discuss the concept of being ready for a board, with the associated benefits of discipline, mentoring and networks and the countervailing loss of control that may be felt by the founding team. Anne-Marie reflects on engaging with mentors and advisors, the discipline of always asking the second question and being interested in the answer and not always being in 'pitch mode'.

With the recent AICD Australian Governance Summit and the increasing interest in innovation governance, management and strategy, I hope that this podcast presents a timely set of insights.

In this episode, I had the opportunity to talk with Megan Steele, from CGIAR Accelerate for Impact Platform. Perhaps more accurately, she spoke with me as I offered my thoughts on Scouting and Mobilising Intellectual Property.

We frame the conversation around a series of questions 'What problem are you solving?', 'How can you solve this problem and create value for stakeholders?' through to 'What does your solution / contribution look like?' I reflect on the phenomenon of technologies looking for problems to solve rather than starting with the problem in mind. A concept we often discuss with guests and indeed, with our partners at Spiegare, is the Value Pool and the importance of considering the breadth of partnerships needed to bring technologies into utilisation and the distribution of benefits among those Value Pool participants.

While the webinar involved some slides, I hope that the conversation and subsequent questions catalyse some thoughts around the early considerations in mobilising Intellectual Property. The webinar is also accessible as are the other related webinars from Maurice Moloney and Anne Roulin.

In this episode, we discuss the current challenges in tech transfer capacity, capabilities and resourcing within the Australian innovation system with Natalie Chapman. Natalie found her passion for tech transfer in her time at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) after a short stint in the finance sector. Missing the science, she found a way to combine her interests in science and commercial outcomes, bringing together technology and industry opportunities. In 2012, Natalie established gemaker, who provide tech transfer communications, consulting and advisory services to the Australian research and private sectors.

We explore the absence of the tech transfer community's voice in current discussions around innovation and research, and the pathways to and interfaces with industry and government policies. We discuss the challenges that are being presented as multiple, arguably uncoordinated innovation programs are initiated from various government departments and statutory corporate entities. These efforts, while arguably well intended, are straining the available Tech Transfer Office (TTO) resources, be it through work volume or through loss of capacity as programs compete for talent to drive innovation and tech transfer. The problem is exacerbated by a lack of pathway and training for entrants to the profession which is compounded by a lack of industrial experience amongst new hires.

Natalie outlines the case for TTO investment, framed around the returns on public monies invested in research and innovation. This is a contrast to a more typical cost-centre framing when looking at organisational and divisional budget allocations. We explore FOMO, a related Australian innovation culture challenge (also related to the reluctance to say "no"), and the importance of managing risk through active portfolio management and market intelligence gathering to underpin decision making.

In this episode, we discuss a different lens through which to look at entrepreneurship with John Bloomer. John has taken a journey from chemistry to agricultural seed technologies through advisory and board roles to his newly found vocation within the Church of England. John started his career at ICI and through a period of active mergers and acquisitions through the 1980s and 1990s, arrived at Syngenta, establishing the wheat and barley breeding business and migrating into an intrapreneur role with that organisation, before heading into independent consulting. His current business activities, alongside being a priest and chaplain, include advisory work with a range of agritech companies, Non-Executive Director with Elsoms Seeds, and co-founding TraitSeq as a spin-out from the Earlham Institute.

We explore his twin journeys through technology transfer and theology, and reflect on the Doctrine of Participation that John wrote about in Faith in Business Quarterly. We explore how his faith, science and technology commercialisation sit alongside each other and some unusual moments of transition (where John started pitching God alongside pitching business ideas!) and his reflections from his theological studies and training at Westcott House at Cambridge. John discusses how he sees strong compatibility between his theological and scientific training, framing these in terms of the why and how of the world around us.

The Doctrine of Participation connects to entrepreneurship and technology transfer through five features. We explore how the infinite of theology and the typically finite value that technology transfer activities merge to create new opportunities. These, and the overarching doctrine (which is a theological perspective or framework) reveal some interesting perspectives on how entrepreneurs and technology transfer activities are creative as part of the broader world, be it economic, social and / or theological. John highlights the need for relationships (over transactions, a concept the podcast explored with David Mitchell) and how relationships drive building the networks that underpin successful technology transfer, built on humility, selflessness, curiosity, perseverance and an unconventional mindset.

In this episode, we have the opportunity to reflect on the recent National Innovation Policy Forum in Canberra last month with my colleague, Dr Faisal Younus, who participated in the event. Thanks to Cooperative Research Australia, we also have been able to weave some excerpts from the panels into our discussions to try to offer some reflections and insights from the day's events.

We open with Faisal's key reflection from the Welcome to Country, followed by some of what Minister Ed Husic said in his keynote address.

We then look to the scale up challenge, which was initially identified at the same event 12 months ago and discussed on the podcast with Dr Katherine Woodthorpe AO in January 2023. With a brief reflection on the challenge of needing midsize firms to take up innovation yet noting their dwindling numbers in the Australian economy, we then reflect on comments made by Dr Cathy Foley AO and Professor Roy Green. We also touch upon the challenging policy landscape over the past 30 years, and the dispersion of investments and resources, likened to the spreading of Vegemite on toast.

We follow these government challenges with a few reflections on competition, or perhaps hyper competition, in the innovation system, before turning to the role of markets and the need to be solving a problem. This was highlighted in some of the remarks made by Dr Leanna Read, and Glenn Keys from Aspen Medical. We explore the notion of whether patenting could be the very beginning or the end of the beginning depending on the philosophies of market pull or tech push in various parts of the innovation ecosystem. Time, the one non-renewable resource, which we explored on the podcast with Allison Haitz and through soliloquy in 2022, where Glenn Keys and Phil Morle shared some perspectives from the podium.

We close by drawing some thoughts and themes from the panels around the innovation culture in Australia and the need for collaboration, which was encapsulated by Sally Ann Williams in her remarks, and the complexities and chaos of collaboration remarked upon by Catherine Livingstone AO.

While we couldn't draw together all the incredible content from the panels, our thanks go to the other panellists who provided the inspiration for this podcast. Professor Andrew Parfitt, Matthew Wilson, Sophia Hamblin Wang, Professor Elanor Huntington, Dr Kerstin Oberprieler, Julia Spicer OAM, Dr Michelle Simmons and Dr Cori Stewart.

In this episode, I have the great pleasure of having our first omnipresent guest, Jim Lane, who is everywhere within the biobased economy with his leading daily publication The Digest. In the midst of driving the Bold Goals Initiative, catalysed by the US Inflation Reduction Act, and running the Advanced Bioeconomy Leadership Conference (ABLC), we catch up with Jim on current perspectives on the bioeconomy and a little soothsaying on what the next few years might look like.

We take a broad tour across ethanol, bio and renewable diesel, biochemicals, biomaterials and hydrogen. We briefly examine the origins of the current North American bioeconomy from the mid-00's, reflecting on the drive for employment, energy security and emissions reduction and how the financial crash of 2008 and the discovery of shale gas affected early growth.

Through our discussions Jim introduces a concept of 'Skyfill', to describe carbon emissions (akin to Landfill for material waste) and reflects on the need for transparent mechanisms for dealing with carbon and the inevitable unaffordability of government subsidies currently seeking to drive industrial and consumer behavioural change. Jim refers to this situation as 'unsustainability in the name of sustainability'!

We touch on feedstocks and the lack of abundance of what we need, arguing we have too many sugars and too few oils from which to drive the industrial bioeconomy. Jim reflects on a little industrial history as we discuss the current energy and chemical market structures and how some thought should be given to not creating future strong oligopolies when it is hard to anticipate what the right mix of technology solutions might be. In discussing transport, while I suggested thermodynamic efficiency should be the key driver, Jim points to economics and consumer preferences that will drive consumer behaviour, particularly in transport (energy) markets.

We close by traversing the world of biopolymers, the challenges around no renewable chemicals standards (unlike fuels), how drop in molecular equivalent products are playing out against their functional equivalents (or new polymers) in the market and the respective challenges in delivering functional, cost-in-use competitive products. Jim concludes with some optimism, noting that we need to grow faster to meet the carbon targets being set by governments and the private sector.

I'm delighted to bring you a special podcast leading up to the 2023 National Innovation Policy Forum, presented by Cooperative Research Australia, to bring leaders from business, government, research – and boundary spanning organisations to focus on the future of the Australian innovation system.

I had the opportunity to have a pre-forum conversation with co-patrons Catherine Livingstone AO and David Thodey AO for their thoughts on the current innovation landscape, the role of policy, and the importance of a shared vision for Australia's future. In our discussions we touch on the notion that innovation is a fundamental part of what we do as individuals and as a society and discuss how that inherent tendency intersects with government policy and its role in the national innovations system. We touch on the challenge of individuals being caught in small pockets of the system and the need to view the broader innovation landscape, the previous diagnoses of the innovation system, most recently reflected on by Dr John Howard and the need to reach beyond the political cycle to establish stable policies that encourage longer term investment from research and corporate sectors.

We also set the scene for the Forum around the challenges of translation and scaling innovation into successful businesses. We reflect on research translation and the gap between innovation exiting the research and early stage (venture) sectors and moving through scale and into more commercial, customer orientated settings and explore aspects of market, research culture and the local tolerance of failure.

We hope you enjoy this special podcast that sets the stage for the National Innovation Policy Forum, where these critical discussions will unfold.

In this episode, I have the great pleasure of having our first guest, Maurice Moloney, make a return appearance to revisit what's been happening in protein over the past two years since our first discussion. Coming off the back of the International Rapeseed Congress (in September 2023), we explore the decline, or indeed collapse, of the alt-meat market and what the prospects are for it reaching its next growth phase. The role of plant sciences in supporting the alt-protein scale up, and particularly brassica species, is also explored.

We specifically reflect on the importance of ingredients in the alt-protein space and Maurice's interest in growth factors for cellular agriculture through Core Biogenesis. We discuss the importance of a diversity of addressable markets for emerging technologies and product offerings.

The importance of alternative casein for alt-dairy markets is discussed through the lens of Miruku, where Maurice is in a science advisory role and we also reflect on the utility of safflower as an oilseed, not only for Miruku but also the role it has played from its use in the Crop Biofactories Initiative (funded by GRDC and CSIRO) and currently being commercialised by Go Resources.

Maurice shares his reflections on the challenges that plant-science can address for alt-protein and the importance of processing technologies to improve texture and mouth feel in this product category. We close our discussions reflecting on the emerging opportunities and challenges for the alt-protein market.