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.
Transcript
CB: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Tech Transfer Talk. My name is Cameron Begley, Managing Director of Spiegare, and we are quite privileged today to have join us from Gemaker, Natalie Chapman, who is, for all intents and purposes, one of our contemporaries in Australia; who has a passion for tech transfer and has been involved in the sector for some time. And it’s great to have a chance to talk with her about her perspectives on what she sees in Australia and, and indeed, trends around the world. Natalie, welcome.
NC: Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here.
CB: Terrific. Now, it’s great to have you and Natalie, the catalyst for reaching out to you was your fantastic little op-ed that you did late last year, off the back of the National Innovation Policy Forum. So, I’m really looking forward to talking about that with you today. But just to bring a few people into the picture, a little bit of your background and, tech transfer is not a normal place for people to end up. So, how on earth did you arrive here?
NC: Interesting story, since when I graduated as a chemist out of New South Wales Uni, tech transfer was not, I guess, a well-known career path. And so, it wasn’t like, you know, I came out of uni, thought, ‘Hey, I want to be a tech transfer professional.’ It was a case of moving myself around looking for jobs. There wasn’t a lot in chemistry. So, I then ended up in marketing, and as I picked up skills in marketing and really enjoyed it, I then still missed my science and really wanted to have more involvement in that. So, I really wanted to blend the two passions together. And so, I managed to do that in a role at ANSTO, which was half technical, half business development and marketing. And from there, it just blossomed. I went for ten years at ANSTO working out how to get their research out of the lab and into use across a whole heap of sectors. And then ended up in a role that was called a tech transfer professional role, and then started a company that specialises in that space.
CB: Yeah, that sounds an awfully familiar journey, I have to say. Natalie. And it’s interesting, at the time you came out, you sort of went to marketing first and then the call of the technical stuff drew you back towards the science.
NC: The funny thing is, I loved science as a kid. I went into a science degree because I loved science and I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I did a year in industry in the middle of my degree, and that was as a chemist in quality control. And I worked out from doing that, that I never wanted to do that type of role ever again, which, so, it, you know, it was good to be in the lab. It was good to learn things. It meant when I went into my last couple of years of university, I really knew how to do lab, and I really did enjoy lab. And then I did honors, and that taught me that I never wanted to be a researcher permanently, and I mean that in a most respectful way. Because those, those that find a passion for it, and are able to do it, and enjoy it, and a creating the next best things for us, is awesome. It just wasn’t me. I really liked talking with people and I liked solving problems, but not problems in the lab. Hence, yeah, this, this worked for me.
CB: Completely get it. It is not for everyone being at the bench,
NC: But I would never change that because I really loved doing the degree. I loved the science, and when I went into a finance role for marketing, I found that was just absolutely, absolutely not me at all. I really missed the the innovation.
CB: And of course, at the risk of dating both of us or certainly myself, there wasn’t a thing called technical marketing or tech transfer, as you alluded to earlier. That wasn’t a job. It turned out, I ended up in a job called technical sales and development, and that was the nearest thing to tech transfer, I think, that you could find back then, but it was all about products going to market, not research coming to market, but nonetheless really interesting. So you, so through ANSTO and then out into Gemaker. An interesting transition. And I’m curious, what was the moment that you decided to strike out by yourself. What was, what was that catalyst.
NC: Uh, right. Yes. The catalyst. So I was doing an MBA. I was doing a subject in innovation and entrepreneurship. And part of that, you needed to keep a diary of, you know, what you’d been learning and what you had been doing, and you needed to keep that after you’d done the subject as an assignment. And it was sort of all moving you down that pathway. There was an exercise that you had to do in it, which was a survey. And when you completed the survey, it told me that I was intrapreneureal, and I’d never heard the concept before, and I had no idea what it was. But it was lovely to have a label to myself when, so I worked at ANSTO. And being intrapreneurial is being entrepreneurial within an organisation, it’s being an entrepreneur setting up an organisation. And so, when I was coming up with ideas and networking and, and hooking different things up together at ANSTO, people would kind of look at me like I was a bit weird and I felt really, really odd in the organisation. And I’m like, ‘You could do this and you can put this together, and how about we grab that and we can have these external parties and we can get some funding here’, and I’m doing all of this, and people are just going, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, just hang on a second and just slow back down there.’ And I was like, ‘But what? But we could we could build this.’ And so, it wasn’t that I was weird, but that’s how I felt. And so…
CB: No, not weird at all. As far as I can tell, in this conversation, you’re sounding like a tech transfer person to me.
NC: So, so having that enlightened moment of, ‘Hey, okay, I’m intrapreneurial slash entrepreneurial. I’d never thought of myself that way before. Maybe I can build things and all the rest of it. Maybe I can build them outside of an organisation, not just in it. So if I’m any good at business development marketing, I should be able to build a business. And if not, maybe I should be back inside.’
CB: Yeah. So, and the moment came where you stepped out and tried to build the business, and here you are ten years later.
NC: Yes. Actually, we’re heading, I, our birthday is Halloween. And so, it was Halloween last year. We turned 12.
CB: 12. Oh, I apologise,
NC: I know, that’s okay. It’s more than ten.
CB: And it’s like, you know, 12. That’s fantastic. 12 years in this, in building small businesses is no mean feat. So, that’s terrific. And it’s really interesting, this notion of you identifying as an intrapreneur, at least this survey identifying you as that, and transitioning into entrepreneurship. We actually talked about that in last month’s podcast with John Bloomer, who, indeed came across this, introduced this intrapreneur concept from his experiences at Syngenta. So, it’s really quite interesting that you’ve had that same experience on the other side of the world in, I would dare say, an entirely unrelated set of circumstances. And so in Syngenta, being some distance apart in terms of markets and, and interests, so interesting that, that word started to get a bit of traction in sort of 12, 13 years ago. And here you are on the outside, indeed, as is John. So really interesting. And within Gemaker, you’re obviously, I’ll use the word ‘inspired’, but that might be a little bit over the top. But with your experiences through Gemaker and participating in the Innovation Policy Forum, and the other forums that we meet in with Science Technology Australia and things like that. You wrote this op-ed about the state of tech transfer offices, and I think you were predominantly focused on Australia, although you drew on some international experiences. And I’m curious, I’ve assumed that it all came about because of the Policy Forum and just bringing your experience together. But what catalysed the article and got you, sort of resolved, to table your quite reasonable concerns?
NC: Well, I think this has been an interesting thing for me for many, many years. And what initially did it, was there’s lots of forums on out there all the time, and they all talk about innovation, they talk about research, how great we are at research. And in fact, I went to one. I think it was like an AFR innovation two-day event. And I’ve got to say, at least 5 or 6 of the speakers starting on that day, all came out with the same thing at the beginning of their presentations, which is, ‘Australia is world class with its research, and we really suck at commercialising.’ It was basically, you know, they ranked, they put out the OECD ranking, as they were, they were all coming out with the same line. And I’m really sick of those two lines being used all the time. Because, you know, there is a lot of fantastic commercialisation going on in the country.
CB: I’m in a bit of a camp which might be considered hedging. I actually think we are pretty good at tech transfer, but we can be a lot better.
NC: Yes, yes.
CB: I do not subscribe to the negativity, but I’m not subscribing to the, ‘Yeah, it’s OK’ either. Lke so, I don’t put weight on the negativity. And I find it mildly disappointing, that that’s the narrative coming out of the event you mentioned earlier. And the challenge as you’ve described it then is, ‘How do we become part of the conversation to solve it?’, not just this silent bottleneck for want of a better turn of phrase.
NC: So, over the last 20 years, we’ve decreased the investment we’ve put into commercialisation, as in the professionals who are doing it, but we’ve put billions into venture capital. Who all wait, who are all waiting for this pipeline. We’ve increased the amount of money into research, so we’ve got world class research, which is awesome. But you’ve got this bottleneck, right, of the tech transfer professionals, where you’re not actually getting things out the door because they’re under-resourced severely.
CB: Yeah. I think you’re contending capacity bottleneck, in that there’s not enough bodies to deal with thisbountiful supply of research that is now coming about through this increased investment.
NC: What we’re doing at the moment is we are getting stuff out, right. But if we’re, if we’re not able…put it this way. I’ve worked in tech transfer before. And if I give you a, I guess, a picture of what that can look like. There might be one or two of you in an organisation that is looking after and, in some cases, particularly in the regional universities, you either don’t have a tech transfer capability and you’re lucky enough to have an accountant, or someone in the research office that’s looking after IP. And that is the equivalent of your tech transfer office, right. Some of the larger universities have much more established large offices, lots of staff. And they’ve also got larger number of researchers to be dealing with as well. So, you know, there’s size comparisons and things to be made. But if you’re in that role and there’s only one or two of you, then what you trying to do is catch what comes in proactively already and deal with it and get it out the door. And so, you’re talking about a whole heap of different sectors that you might be in. So different technical sectors, there’s different commercial things that you need to be doing. We also put together a competency framework of the competencies required for tech transfer to occur. Well, like what you need to get it out the door. And so there’s a whole heap of skills and expertise that’s required as well. So, the chances of the one or two people scenario, three or four, having expert knowledge in IP strategy, legal commercialisation, marketing, relationship building, all of those sort of core areas, as well as, I guess, the technical areas. So, you know, could be critical minerals, could be energy, could be medical, you know, your full spectrum. You just don’t understand everything. You don’t have networks in everything. You don’t have theexpertise in everything. And so, just not having access to all of that in the first place, disadvantages a tech transfer office trying to get research out. Not to mention, you’re trying to deal with hundreds or thousands of researchers. So, all you can do is quickly, the proactive ones that come in with something, you quickly try and do something for them. Right. You’re not even going to be able to do that in a time efficient manner for industry, because you are swamped with so much stuff. So, all you do is effectively move deckchairs on a Titanic.
CB: Yeah. Yeah.
NC: Or use technology until it dies. So, yeah, the successful ones with a really proactive researcher that perhaps has got a lot of industry experience themselves or has done something before, might get some things out. So, things are getting out but imagine the amount of stuff that is not getting out. Imagine all the researchers who haven’t been trained and understand how to engage with industry and the process. So, if you’re in a small situation like that, you don’t even try and educate the wider population or let them know that you even exist because you don’t have time to do anything with them.
CB: No, no. And so we’ve seen that phenomena you’ve described there, Natalie. And that’sjuggling, 76 things, constantly. And you’re so busy juggling the 76 things, you don’t actually have time to put one down because you’re so busy juggling 76 things. And so, you keep juggling 76 things, and hence you end up with the problem you just described. The issue…
NC: Sorry. There’s one other thing to put on top of that, and that is, that you’ve got a turnover of staff happening every couple of years as well.
CB: Mhm.
NC: Right. So, as soon as that happens then you’re back backwards another 3 to 6 months or more, as you fill in staff. And it’s getting harder and harder to do it now with the expertise that’s required, and the more, you know, trailblazers and incubators and accelerators and all of those things that crop up, they’re, you know, you’re basically training people to go out to that. You don’t actually get to keep them for a long time, doing and building that expertise and building that team up and knowledge and all the rest of it.
CB: So just to grab that point momentarily in a couple of ways. So, building competency in a tech transfer office and ,you gave a number of broad brush strokes of all the things that a tech transfer professional needs to be able to handle, if they’re half life in a role is notionally two or three years, are they genuinely prepared for the next accelerator, incubator, whatever it is, that’s drawing them out of the tech transfer world and into the next program, that’s got money… Are we actually building competencies because we don’t have enough time with these people to build the skill base and build the experiences you need?
NC: Yeah, you’re right on that one. Because even the ones coming into the tech transfer office, frequently come out of PhD programs where they finish the PhD and they go, ‘Yeah, no, I don’t want to be a postdoc. I want to go into….’ And so, a lot of them end up in the actual tech transfer office as an associate and then need trainin. In some cases, in the big offices, they’re able to access better or more resourced training than in the smaller ones. So, if you’re in a small office doing that, who’s going to teach you?
CB: Yeah. So, but I think, I think there’s a couple of aspects to this, this teaching thing. One, is indeed, like, what is coursework or what does structured programs of learning look like for tech transfer people, like that’s a whole interesting question, which I know a few people are thinking about. But for me, it’s the experience, it’s the learning experiences that, are possibly more important than the technical competencies. So, I think the technical competencies can be learned with time, but it’s being in the experience of negotiating, of engaging or building relationships, when sadly, but inevitably, things get derailed. And things get derailed largely because people are involved. So, you know, misunderstandings and changes and expectations like, so, those, experiences, they can’t get built. So, whilst there’s all these accelerators, incubators, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, out there that are drawing talent out of the tech transfer office environment in Australia, their lack of experience…I’m just going to sort of put this out here, does their lack of experience potentially compromise the effectiveness of the things they’re going to, because they may not yet have the breadth of experience to deal with things being derailed?
NC: Yes, you are right. There is a real need to have. Well, look, we were, when we put the competency framework together, we put it together on purpose so that we could see a pathway, and not just a pathway, but for development to skill up and train up talent, to go from a business associate junior level into more of a commercialisation, mid mid-range, into more senior positions. And so, the framework that we developed actually, has a pathway literally for all the, what is required. And so. we definitely need to see more skilling up in the country. And I can’t say that there’s enough of that happening. So, there is, there is some. But also the investment in tech transfer is quite minimal. It’s seen as a cost centre.
CB: Yes it is.
NC: And so, it’s not seen as an investment. If it was seen as an investment, there would be a lot more money spent on the training, the development. And when I’m talking about training, I’m talking about shadowing with senior members into negotiation situations and those sort of things. Because, sure, you can go to a whole heap of courses and workshops and all the rest of it. But effectively, if you’re actually working with a senior member, as you do this job and there is a high turnover, there’s, it’s difficult to find senior commercialisation people that have all the experience in terms of, the universities are all looking for them and all the rest of it, but having that deal-making experience and that sort of thing, it’s not something that you can read about. It’s something that you have to do.
CB: It is experiential. Absolutely. The notion of investment versus cost centre is a very interesting one. And, just to unpack that momentarily. So, the notion of an investment would be, in broad terms, an investment is something that you put money in with an expected return.
NC: Mhm.
CB: Yet when we look at tech transfer and we look at licensing, there are those unicorns, I’ll use that term, it’s, that’s common in venture capital. But there are those transactions which knock it out of the park. Right. The one…but they are rare. A little bit like unicorns. But, the hard truth of tech transfer offices is that, at least in my experience, Natalie, they rarely pay their way.
NC: Yep, and I have…Yeah. No, no, I agree with you completely.
CB: So, how do we move that? Right.
NC: How do we move that done?
CB: So, I’m, I mean, I’m in screaming agreement with you that it should be seen as an investment. Like, absolutely. Not only, not only in people, but in deploying the assets of the university in its broader, or the research, and there’s CSIRO and ANSTO and others as well. But it should be seen as an investment. But if I look at it as a financial person for a minute, I’m going, ‘Well, that’s actually not a good investment.’ How do we crack that nut because that’s the story we’ve got to create?
NC: So, what you have to look at is, and it took me a while to get this, I actually had a conversation with someone in this space a while back, who is, well, is Chief Scientist, really. And I was saying, ‘You know, I just don’t get it, why aren’t we investing more in tech transfer? Why is this being seen as a cost centre all the time? What’s going on?’ And he said to me, ‘Where do universities make their money?’ They make their money from research grants and research quality, and they make their money from the international students. So, that’s where the money comes in from the university, and as you rightly said, and that’s profitable money, right? So, when you have tech transfer, the money that you put in for tech transfer, and if we’re talking about commercialisation, licensing, those side of things, then you the money that you put in, you don’t necessarily get back, right? And so, as a university, and if you were looking at where are you going to put your money, so that you can have the most research outcomes, etcetera, for you, that’s where you’re going to put your emphasis, right? So, that’s totally reasonable as a business entity, right? Now, if we take a helicopter view and we move back off that, right, and we actually look at what the country is investing in, which is the $11.9 billion back in the day for research. Right. And then, what is the country getting back out of it? Right. What does the country want? The country wants jobs, industries, and a better future for Australians, a better, so, it’s not just about money as in money coming back, but there is a better quality of life, better medicines, better access, better environmental considerations, etcetera. Right? So, if we look at money coming in from government and investment money coming back out. Right? Then it’s an investment, right?
CB: So, trying to connect the public investment to public outcomes, rather than looking at it at the business level, which isa university entity or whatever, or could even be a school for that matter. But, looking at it through a business unit lens, which is, ‘Well, it’s an investment at a business unit level, I’m unlikely to see that money again. Easier to put it into another, extra postbox, publications and run that line.’ So, you’re contending to build that into a narrative, that tech transfer offices deliver returns on public investments through public outcomes.
NC: Yes.
CB: Okay. That, I think makes good sense to me, but, that what immediately spikes in my mind is, okay, the challenge of building that story over and over and over again, which is an interesting communications challenge. The challenge does seem to remain, though, around awareness. It just struck me as you were talking there, Natalie about, ‘Well, how do we build awareness in the institutions?’ And, I think, this is predominantly the university settings, which are a touch more diversified in their interests compared to, say, an ANSTO or a CSIRO where their remit, the remit of the researcher, I think is a lot clearer and the resources are broadly there to support that tech transfer effort. So how do we build the awareness? You know, training courses are great. There may not be a magic bullet to this, but it does strike me, awareness is the challenge within these institutions at the moment.
NC: Absolutely. And I guess we go back to what I mentioned earlier, which is, if you’re a small tech transfer office, how much do you actually want to put your head up to let people know that you exist when you don’t have time to help the people who’ve already found you? So, you have that as a number one thing, right? Then there is, having a system in place that allows you to, triage quickly. So, you know, we’ve been involved with various universities where they have no staff, and so they have to quickly assess how they’re going to be able to decide what they’re going to do with something, without taking a lot of time to do it. Right. So we’re putting those sort of systems in place, just as a, it’s like, literally, like a public hospital where you, you know, not dealing with everything in time, but this will work.
CB: One piece of the system that confounds me a little bit in Australia. I’d be really interested in your observations on this, Natalie, is, we’re not really good at saying ‘no’.
NC: But it’s practice. It’s practice. And my staff would probably still disagree with me. But, if you have a matrix of when you should say ‘no’, that’s helping me. So, that’s not natural…
CB: Okay, so it’s great that you’re good at saying ‘no’.
NC: No, no, not at all.
CB: That’s terrific. And, I’m, might noting, I’m pleased you said ‘yes’ to coming on the podcast. But, what I sense is, that within the research community and t the associated tech transfer, commercialisation, that we aren’t good at saying ‘no’, because there is this undercurrent of the fear of missing out. What if I say ‘no’ to the wrong one? So, I better not say ‘no’. I either won’t say anything or I’ll say ‘yes’, but then I won’t ever say ‘no’. And so, you get all these zombies. You know, as an aside, I think we’re going to have a whole lot of zombie start ups over the next few years that are underfunded, and,because no one said ‘no’. But coming back to this matter, I just want to review, if you’ve observe that phenomenon, that, ‘I won’t say ‘no’, in case I miss out? ‘
NC: Yes, yes, there is definitely the phenomenon of, ‘What if that’s the one that was going to make me lots of money? What if someone else takes it and makes money out of it?’ Right? And so, when you’re a small, even if you’re large, right, it doesn’t matter what sort of entity are, you can’t work on everything. You can’t do everything. And as an organisation, we’ve recognised that ourselves. And so, we’re trying to be more discerning about when to go for something, even when we’re invited to go for something, actually saying, assessing it internally and deciding, ‘No, that doesn’t look like it’s the right opportunity for us, so thank you very much but we won’t take it up at the moment.’ Right. So, in a research organisation, there is the fear. And I think, it’s also a fear in government too, about,’What if that’s the thing I miss?’ because it’s more that you’ll get hit on the head by someone later, right?
CB: Indeed.
NC: Yeah. So, you don’t want to be publicly humiliated for not doing something or even…
CB: Which is a thing. Well, this got this aired at the at the Policy Forum late in 2023. Did get aired. You, on the one hand, you’ll be chastised for missing and the FOMO, but then you’ll also be punished if you’re a tall poppy. So, there’s this really interesting challenge for anyone in the innovation system to be successful, but just not too successful.
NC: Yep. So…
CB: Really…
NC: Keep your head down.
CB: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just, you sort of, you almost have to keep the water just below your chin. You don’t want to pop up out of the water, and, of course, you don’t want to be stuck under. And that’s not a particularly healthy description, I suggest.
NC: No.
CB: I get the sense that’s what we’re both seeing.
NC: Yes, you do see it. And, it’s almost like gambling too, where you know, people will, bet on something and they don’t want to, they don’t want to lose, and so, they’ll keep betting on something.
CB: Mmm. Well, yeah, yeah. That’s another interesting phenomena, is you keep doubling down rather than saying ‘no’.
NC: Yeah. Or getting out at some point. Yes. So, we’ll keep putting money into something that you shouldn’t. So, when I was at ANSTO we had a portfolio that was quite large. Back in the day, a long time ago, research organisations saw status in patenting or putting in patent applications and having patents. Right. And, then the patent portfolio becomes national, everything becomes extremely expensive. And, you’ve got to work out, can I get it out to someone or otherwise you’ve got to drop it. And so, looking through all of the things that we’d invested in, I did a hard, look at it with, where are we up to? Is there any interest in it? If there’s no interest in it, then we get out of it and we would have an exit strategy. And the exit strategy was, offer it to the researcher. If the researcher is passionate about it and wants to invest in it, see if the market’s interested, y do different options before you come out of it altogether. And have a solid reason as to why you’re exiting. In this particular case, for one of them, there was a competitor that had come into the market with exactly the same thing, was a way bigger player and all the rest of it. And the person that we thought we were going to be signing a deal with wasn’t happening. So end of story, get rid of it. So, I think it’s important to have a justification for why. And it doesn’t have to be ten pages. Just a paragraph is fine. But that’s to, when people are coming back, and why did you do this or why did you do that, having a reason for it. But also, we we tend to put together matrixes, which we’ve done recently for one of the unis as part of a innovation framework, that triaging thing, which is, is it unencumbered IP? Do we have to go and get it signed off by 50 others? Right. If it’s in that situation, then, ‘No, we don’t want to progress with it.’ Right. Because we have a group of two. We want to go with things that is, unemcumbered, has a good market, has a good alignment, has a keen researcher, is innovative, right. It’s got to tick all of those things. Then we’ll spend the money and take it through. So, you need to have what what your risk profile looks like. And when you’re going to take that risk, and what you’re actually going to have as what you invest in. And that way you can go back to the researcher with an explanation as to why it’s not happening this way, but then, that you encourage them, if they if they want to continue with it, these are the incubators that you can set up. You could go to CSIRO online. You give options for it to happen. So, you’re still facilitating it, supporting it. But it’s not your resources, your time, it’s your university that it’s come out of. So, it’s still the good news story. And you haven’t just chopped it off at the knees and then that’s it. So, I think if you put those two things in place, with the justification as to why. And you also usually have a committee that has internal and external representatives on it.
CB: Yep, yep, yep.
NC: Then I think, I think if someone wants it to be unicorn some other way. That’s fantastic.
CB: Yeah.
NC: It came out of us. Isn’t that wonderful. This is how we intend to run things.
CB: I think the issue of risk is a really interesting one. And risk appetite, and I think that’s bubbling around as almost a cultural undercurrent in all of this, because we talk about FOMO, and FOMO is a type of risk or risk appetite. And the processes that you’ve described, that you’ve developed and implement in the research community, are ways of managing risk. But I’m not sure, generally speaking, we’ve got our head around innovation risk and managing that risk really effectively. But that almost, is a conversation in and of itself, the management of risk and innovation. I did want to circle back to a notion that keeps popping up from you, Natalie, around, knowing markets and market intelligence. You mentioned it much earlier as we were chatting. And this idea that I’ll paraphrase you, if I can, that what we can’t, not every tech transfer office employee will know everything about every market. So how, I’m not sure we actively do this, but how do we address this market intel issue? Because from my vantage point at least, better market intelligence allows us to make better decisions around saying ‘no’, around partner selection, around even research direction. Because as technically competent commercial people, you can go and have those conversations. I’m interested, what your thoughts might be around, well, how do we solve that market intel problem?
NC: I agree with you on that. And so, the reason I started Gemaker was because I was in that situation of, how do I get across all markets, all times? How do I have all of the skills, expertise that I need to access? Because you can’t just employ a team of 20 people everywhere, and even 20 people may or may not, have all of that niche expertise. So, you need to be able to tap into niche expertise in different sectors and in different commercialisation areas. And that was the genesis of Gemaker, really, was to be able to provide a much broader capability network, easily straight into tech transfer offices.
CB: I think the market intel piece is really important, but I do believe that if we could degum those pipelines a little bit with some good market intel, it might even with the constrained resources we have, we might actually free up the system a little bit because we’ll be able to say the advice says ‘no’. And that’s that little paragraph you referred to. The advice says ‘no’, boom, we move on. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, Natalie. And I suspect there’s many more conversations ahead of us. I’d be really interested in, just sort of your takeaways. And where do you think all this is heading? Say, over the next 6 to 36 months? With an election coming up, with a lot of geopolitical challenges in the mix for Australia, how do you see things playing for the role of tech transfer over the next 6 to 36 months?
NC: Now, that is a good and deep question because I’m looking at what’s happening politically at the moment and it’s obviously different, with the the different leadership that we have. And it’s, the NRF has been set up, and the Industry Growth Fund has been set up, and Australian Economic Accelerator has been set up. And so, at the moment, I see that they’re the sort of levers and drivers pushing people in particular directions, particularly since particular sectors have been prioritised, I guess, in those areas. So, yeah, I know industry engagement is going to be a massive thing. And I think, the more investment that the universities put in industry engagements’ staff, if they have those teams working more with the tech transfer office, that would be a good thing. Tat’s something that I’m hoping will happen rather than, there’s this industry engagement office over here and there’s this tech transfer office over there. I think if those two are not managed together as a team because, I would hope to see that there is more investment, third stream investment in the ideas that I’m suggesting. I am speaking to various department people with Knowledge Commercialisation Australasia, and the Cooperative Research (Centres) Association to get everyone, including ministers, advisors, etcetera, on the same page with how important this is for tech transfer. So, I know that you’re suggesting it may take a very long time. I’m hoping it takes less time and perhaps we can actually have a pilot project that puts an investment into this area, particularly in the regional universities. Because can you imagine putting extra effort into the tech transfer function in regional unis and unlocking some of that researcher potential out there and creating more regional jobs? So, that’s what I would like to see happen out of the paper that I’ve written and the interest that it’s garnered across the Web.
CB: Great.
NC: So, yeah, that’s where my head’s headed. I don’t know if that’s what will happen, but that’s where I’m driving.
CB: No, I quite like that ambition. And I think that the way you’ve come at that’s really good, ‘cause those programs domestically are going to strongly influence what happens over that time period. And, I think that your aspiration about trying to drive more innovation and tech transfer outcomes out of the regional universities, I think, is entirely laudable and makes sense, but particularly to build those regional economies out. You know, our major cities, I’m not sure getting bigger is necessarily better anymore. So, getting more economic activity out in the regions, I think is is an important thing domestically for Australia. So, I think that’s a great ambition to have with that. Natalie, thank you very much for joining us today. It has been terrific talking with you, and I am looking forward to talking more with you, not only know as the year unfolds and hopefully finding points where our interests intersect with the podcast and the ideas we talk about and, and the things that you’re trying to achieve here in Canberra, but equally right across the innovation sector in Australia. So, thanks for coming along today.
NC: Thanks for having me. I’ve really, really enjoyed this. So, thank you.