In summary, Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) believes that there is an urgent need to strengthen Australia’s national innovation system. Some of the key actions required are listed below.
- Develop and adopt a ten-year strategic plan to increase innovation in Australia. This strategic plan should include investment milestones and performance indicators and its development should engage all key stakeholders.
- Develop a strategic national intelligence capability that explores critical emerging issues through horizon scanning, technology roadmaps and foresight; and provides findings that can be understood and acted on.
- Recognise the high costs and risks in later stages of technological innovation and provide assistance measures that will address this need.
- Establish a new mechanism to fund collaborative research for projects that are smaller (and involve shorter time frames) than a CRC, but are bigger than ARC Linkage grants.
- Increase the R&D tax concession to 200 per cent, raise the turnover limit for the R&D Tax Offset and adopt other improvements to fiscal incentives in order to increase business expenditure on R&D.
- Include an element in the new university block funding formula which rewards investment in proof-of-concept and innovation/ commercialisation activities.
- Assist firms (especially SMEs) to develop products that government agencies are interested in buying.
- Increase the numbers of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates from our universities by mechanisms such as reducing fees in these disciplines.
- Improve the teaching of STEM in our schools by making teaching more attractive to STEM graduates and providing better teaching resources.
- Establish an annual Prime Minister’s prize for innovation based on the application of Australian-developed scientific discoveries.
- Improve the commercialisation of public sector research results by supporting training and adoption of best practice in knowledge commercialisation.
- Promote greater cooperation between Commonwealth, State, Territory and local government in encouraging innovation.
