In this episode, I had the great pleasure of having a wide-ranging discussion with Professor Mark Hutchinson. He is currently a member of Australia’s National Science and Technology Council, Advisory Board Member to Australian Economic Accelerator Program, recent past president of Science and Technology Australia, and has been a successful research leader and tech transfer advocate for over 15 years at The University of Adelaide, largely centred on the ARC Centre for Nanoscale BioPhotonics and Neuro-immunopharmacology Laboratory.
We quickly uncover one of Mark’s modus operandi which is to seek forgiveness and not permission. This approach allowed him to get on with addressing roadblocks and challenges in developing and delivering solutions to willing and engaged partners. Given Mark’s early experiences in academia in Australia and at University of Colorado at Boulder, we touch on Australian cultural challenges of researchers moving between private, government and research sectors, and differences in partner scale between his USA and Australian activities.
Mark reflects on his 2024 experiences at BIO in San Diego and notes the open engagement culture, the lack of non-disclosure agreements, and the focus on relationships. We contrast this with our observations around Australian tech transfer and Mark raises the notion that we could be suffering from a culture of locked in scarcity where the glass is always half empty. We then discuss some of the arising challenges of tech transfer with a scarcity mentality.
We then explore Mark’s successful tech transfer experiences and reflect on the experience of a doctoral student, the cadence of engagement, and the need to change direction to reflect changing circumstances. We also touch on the need to get comfortable with uncertainty and contrast organisational and experimental (or bench) uncertainty. The domestic employment arrangements and consequences are also explored, touching on the Vice Chancellor’s Challenge that David Mitchell discussed in Episode 11.
We discuss AUKUS and the innovation and tech transfer opportunities, touching on co-creation as a driver of economic growth through dual use technologies and the opportunities for SMEs. Mark reflectsd on the need to ‘get sticky; with our deals and partnerships (which is a variation on the concept discussed with Angeline Achariya in Episode 38) and look to a ‘hook and loop’ component to government transactions, somewhat inspired by the thinking of Marianna Mazzucato. We discuss the cultural challenge of risk aversion to sharing ideas in this brave new world, and the need to make change through talent heading abroad for experiences and have them returning into a welcoming and engaged innovation system and share stories of success.
Mark shares his paper transportation challenge’, noting that not all innovation comes through PhDs! We reflect on the importance of Minimum Viable Products and the importance of engineering alongside research to get products to market. This introduces the notion of scale, which we started discussing on the podcast; firstly with Katherine Woodthorpe) at the start of 2023 and highlighted further at the National Innovation Policy Forum in November 2023. We also touch on this getting discussed by Michael Liebreich with Rosie Barnes in an episode of Cleaning Up. Mark notes that there is a perception that fundamental science is worth more than the translation bridge, however they need to exist in a dynamic equilibrium.
We wrap up our discussion with an impassioned close from Mark around believing in your product, solutions arising from teams, and being prepared to listen to the market and adapt while pressing forward.
Transcript
CB: Hello everyone, and welcome to Tech Transfer Talk. My name is Cameron Begley, Managing Director of Spiegare. And joining me today is an extraordinary character in the Australian innovation system, Dr Mark Hutchinson—in fact, Professor Mark Hutchinson, I guess it should be, more formally. Mark has taken many and varied roles whilst based in Adelaide, but most notably has been the President of Science and Technology Australia, on the ARC Advisory Board and, most recently, has ascended to the great heights as a member of the National Science and Technology Council and a board member of Australia’s Economic Accelerator Advisory. Mark. Hello.
MH: Hello, Cameron. Great to be here. Thank you.
CB: It’s terrific to have you. Thanks for coming on the show with us. And Mark, I’ve got to start almost at the beginning. You’re in Adelaide. What is the main anchor for you in Adelaide? And what got you into this tech transfer and innovation commercialisation gig?
MH: Well, here on Kuarna country, it’s awesome. That’s number one. Two, family are all here. And three, I have employment here, Cameron, at The University of Adelaide, soon to be, Adelaide University. I have sufficient flexibility to seek forgiveness more often than permission. And that lets us do things at pace and scale. So really, it’s been fun to be able to see the world and work around the world. But Adelaide’s home and being able to do what we do here and love what we do here, family first and foremost.
CB: Have you found that seeking forgiveness rather than permission has made it easier doing tech transfer and commercialisation?
MH: Absolutely. So, when I started working in my version of tech transfer, when I was still as an undergraduate using and installing IT systems, there was the expectation that you had to have qualifications for that kind of thing, and actually waiting until you had qualifications, you were already out of date. So, I was seeking forgiveness for installing things that apparently, I wasn’t qualified to install when there were no qualifications really to do that. So, from the beginning, I’ve always been ahead of that game. But then even within the university, early 2000s to early of last decade, there really was a hesitancy to make decisions at pace and that slowed the deal flow. So, we did deals and got things rolling. And then from there, I have to say, in the last three years, things have profoundly changed to allow us to actually operate within systems that do seem to start to work at scale. So, I’ve had to seek less forgiveness of recent times. Not because I’m getting soft, but just simply because the systems have now bended to what we actually wanted to do in the first place.
CB: Right. The less seeking of forgiveness is a function of systems improvement or cultural improvement, or just everyone adapting to the worldview of Mark?
MH: No, no one’s adapted to the worldview of Mark, I can guarantee you that. But what I absolutely can say is that the people that we are working with now, and the systems that we are working within, have profoundly changed. And there’s been a series of significant shifts that have occurred. So, within The University of Adelaide, for example, around simply acknowledging within our enterprise bargaining agreement that commercialisation and work in industry is not a detriment to your academic career path. And that is now acknowledged as a step forward, as much as awarding of a grant or a paper. And these things were heretical a decade ago, but now are part of that. And so, I think that the reason I see that of Adelaide is because of key initiatives like the trailblazer scheme and the defence trailblazer, specifically at Adelaide, that has mandated that these changes occur.
CB: It’s a fascinating comment there, Mark, because one of the things we’ve talked about from time-to-time on the podcast, is this almost cultural issue Australian research and the research community has around moving between academia, industry and government. And it seems to be a one-way valve. If you exit into industry or exit into government, there’s no way back to a research career. And we’ve kicked this around a little bit. It sounds like this is a thing that at least The University of Adelaide and the environment you’re working in, is acknowledging is trying to correct for.
MH: It is. I guess I’m fortunate because right from the beginning of my studies, I was in drug development. And so, we weren’t doing something relevant if there wasn’t a drug company knocking on the door or there wasn’t a clinical trial that was there. And so therefore I didn’t realise I was doing something differently and that was engaging with industry. And it wasn’t until I was postdocing in Colorado, when all of the brilliant academics I was working with, had no idea how to talk to industry. And this was in the US, right. So, this is at the Front Range in Colorado at CU Boulder. And the reason they didn’t know how to talk the industry, I think looking back on it, is that they were so used to talking to startup founders, and they weren’t used to the big pharma side of the fence. And so, where I guess, I’m seeing the delta in Australia is, we don’t, we haven’t had the key industries with the decision makers at scale in the country. Where those people are located is not within the industry parks that are adjacent to or across the road from universities. So, there haven’t been the coffee shop or the water cooler or insert here your beverage of choice interaction, face-to-face opportunities, to actually have a conversation. And at the end of the day, these things have to be curated and cultivated over, I think, a human interaction. And if those human interactions don’t exist, then you don’t develop those skills. Now why we then have had such of a one-way valve in Australia? And I was privileged to be able to do the, share the report for the Office of the Chief Scientist on the Stem Career Pathways review last year, and that was quite clear that we do have something as a set point slightly wrong in Australia. And some of that has to do with what is rewarding within universities. Some of that has to do with the skill sets that we allow our students to acquire as part of their training. And then, on the other side, industry being willing to engage and talk and have these early conversations. And so, whilst, you know, I’m coming from the academic world and don’t want to beat up my academic peers too much, I think we’ve got to look at where we need to shift the dial on both sides of that divide so that we don’t have a divide, and we stop talking about a divide. And perhaps, you know, in a few years’ time, it won’t be a divide.
CB: Absolutely. That industry has to have an appetite, in order to take on these research skills and want them for their business growth, etc. But I do take from your remarks there, Mark, that the observations that others have made through the podcast, over the many episodes we’ve touched on, it has some validity from your perspective and sort of came up in the report to the Chief Scientist. So cultural settings and the system needs to adjust to that, but it’s not something that is being misread. It’s real and we actually have to do something about it.
MH: It is. And you know, if I think about where some of those massive differences that I have seen just in culture, just in the last two months. So, I had the opportunity to go to Bio this year in San Diego and you know, there are 22,000 people there all engaged in business conversations, and not a single NDA or CDA flown around at all in those early discussions. Do you realise how many heart attacks the IP lawyers within the universities in Australia would have, if they realised that this was actually normal business practice in the big grown-up world; that you can have an intelligible, meaningful conversation with someone in a completely unprotected way? And that is because the ideas that are talked about in that first stage are not worth protecting/are already out there, and you’re curating a relationship and understanding who else is out there. And then you work out if you need to have a CDA or NDA—if you need one. And I think that’s where we need to stop this lack of trust in each other and trying to wrap it in a bubble wrap of an NDA/CDA, which, honestly, I’m not too sure how many people actually prosecute, even if we did have a CA problem.
CB: Yeah, it’s a rare thing to be prosecuted for breach of confidentiality. But I think, the observation you make in San Diego, and I reflected on this some years ago around the Californian ecosystem. And the way I describe it, or the mental model I have, is that if you’re in the Californian environment, perhaps even more broadly, but California is where I hang out more often than not, you’ll be in a conversation and it’s almost like you’re in that conversation, ‘So, do you like that idea? Just take it. They’ll there’ll be another idea along shortly. I’m okay.’ It’s like, ‘There’ll be another bus. I’ll get on the next bus and maybe we get on the next bus together or you catch a different bus, that’s okay?’ We’re all on buses and we’ll catch different buses. In Australia, I’ve posited that everyone thought because there’s only one bus, and there’s no way you’re getting on my bus because that’s my bus. And as a consequence, we protect too much because we think this is the idea. And if we share this idea, it’s not one plus one equals two. It’s one plus one equals about 0.6.
MH: Yeah. So yeah, it’s fascinating you say that. So, the people I did my post-doc with, Linda Watkins and Steve Meyer. So, Linda Watkins is the godmother of neuroimmune biology and the consequences for health and disease and specifically, in pain. And her partner, Steve is Steve Meyer of Meyerand Seligman. Meyer and Seligman established the hypothesis of learned helplessness. That is the modern understanding of the origins of depression. When we start thinking about the neurobiology that you’re describing. If we are so locked into a scarcity mentality, we are immediately entering a learned helplessness cycle. That learned helplessness cycle is one where the glass is always half empty. We are protective. We are in immediately in that that ‘fight and flight’ domain. And we are not, we are not looking out for our neighbour. And so, I’ve used this phrase before. We’re circling a drain. We’re not looking for an upward spiral.
CB: Yep, yep. You describe that as circling a drain of learned helplessness, I believe, when we chat.
MH: Yeah, yeah. And so, if, we, if we are approaching all of our deals with that glass half empty, or that our glass is half empty and these are the only ideas we’re ever going to have, then that’s immediately, of course, the default position is ‘my precious’, you know, and so we end up with that Golem attitude. So, I think the Americans do have a ‘go getter’ approach. That also then fits also with the failure, the acceptance of failure, and the expectation of acceptance of failure to be part of the journey. I don’t think we have to be so ‘gung-ho’ that we’re all walking around with microphones strapped to our heads and, you know, being, trying to be superstars. But I do think there is an opportunity here to start asking the question of why are we doing this? Or attempting to do this translation piece with a scarcity mentality as our immediate default. And then by doing it that way, what are we actually missing out on? And I think it’s quite clear that we’re missing out on far too much.
CB: Yeah, it’s interesting in that scarcity mentality, as you describe, that’s a really interesting set of connections you’ve made there, Mark, around what’s happening psychologically. I guess in a more simplistic world, I have viewed this as a zero appetite for risk amongst the research institutions in Australia. And that coupled with, and this will bring us back to the ecosystem watercooler conversation, it’s coupled with a lack of receptivity from industry domestically. So, you’ve got actually a very small market of buyers coupled with a risk-averse seller. And then you sit back, and you go, ‘Gee, I wonder why this is so hard to do?’ Whereas in the United States, and I think there are others—not just the US, but there are other ecosystems that go off like this that say, ‘We’ve got an appetite for risk; we’ve got a receptive industry; let’s go do it’. And failure happens, but they seem to learn reasonably well through that process. And they don’t cop the cultural cringe of failure, which we seem to have here, compared to some other jurisdictions.
MH: I completely have seen that in practice. I have seen that in negotiation approaches as well from US deals, I’ve been part of, compared to things negotiated here from Australia. I don’t have the answers as root causes, but one of the things that I have seen that the Australian ecosystem of university-based researchers’ approach is ‘I must apply for an ARC grant and an NHMRC grant for my ideas’. Full stop. The end. There’s no apparent other way to get something off the ground. And I know that’s not the case in the US. And I know that when people have an idea and if it’s good enough that they really, truly want to prosecute it, there is always a way for it. Now, I’ve mentored a lot of brilliant academics, far smarter youngsters than me, but they are locked into this view. ’I have a grant idea. I must get an NHMRC grant’. Full stop. That’s it. Rather than ‘I have an idea. I know a company that I could go to globally. I could apply for an EU grant. I could apply for an NIH grant. I could collaborate with others to achieve this outcome’. And so, I do wonder, I don’t have the origin of where that started…
CB: No, but that’s the observation…
MH: Right, but if we can identify that’s the problem, and that’s one of the cycles that’s reinforcing learned helplessness, then if we can implement some optimism into that equation, then, ‘Oh, we can apply for an NIH grant. Oh, fantastic. Let’s do that. There are industry opportunities who could pick this up’. And then, you know, these are the things that I’m pretty passionate about, people starting to think about. Because if the idea is that good and it is going to impact the health of someone, the productivity of someone, or is so profound in its fundamental basic discovery, someone will fund it and it doesn’t have to be decided by an academic peer.
CB: This brings me back to this ecosystem notion. You referred to what you saw in Colorado, and I suspect a little bit of it is starting to emerge in Adelaide around defence, where you’re getting ecosystems and those watercooler conversations happening. It’s the human dynamic that catalyses the technology transfer journey; they’re relationships, not transactions. A theme that we bang on about quite often. We talk about the relationships that carry these things along; the transactions you build on top of them. I’m interested in where you’ve seen the success in tech transfer, and how that perhaps touches back on the established ecosystems you’ve been involved in. I mean, we could talk about what’s wrong and we have, how have we seen it go right from a tech transfer ecosystem perspective.
MH: Yeah. So, we were fortunate in South Australia to have some early-stage seed funding both into the Institute of Photonics and Advanced Sensing. And these were small pockets of money, that were leveraged with an industry partner to literally just test the waters of a project idea. And then within the Centre for Nanoscale BioPhotonics, there was again, another scheme that we were able to explore with the state government. Again, looking at these very early days, explorations of an idea, just to see if it had an opportunity to go out the door. Now, what was interesting about those, were that those were ideas that were co-created by the academic in the industry. So, it wasn’t a solution trying to find a problem. It was, let’s start a conversation, build a relationship, and co-create some of these early projects. Now, it wasn’t much money. It was 50K, 75K, but crucially, they weren’t a three-year PhD project. They were a three-week to three-month sprint, less than 100 days. And I think the 100-day piece is a crucial piece. If anything goes longer than 100 days on a meeting, you might as well start the relationship again. We have to sort of fit this expectation of a tempo of engagement that is sub 100 days. Whereas what we classically do in academia, is we have historically in Australia said, ‘Have a meeting on day one of the PhD and see you later’ for a thousand days. And then we’ll deliver a report that happens to be in the form of PhD thesis, which is useless to industry, right. Seeing that success is short, fast tempo, rapid decision times, focused projects, and kill it if it doesn’t work, and that’s okay. And that meant that we then freed up resources to have a new idea, have a new relationship, create new time. So those projects led to so many, so much potential deal flow. But who knew? It wasn’t the first deal we thought we were going to do. It was the second, third and fourth ones that then kicked on from that, because we had a relationship. Oh, my goodness. What an absolutely, extraordinary idea to actually know someone that you’re working with.
CB: What a fascinating point you’ve touched on there, Mark. And the tempo of engagements is really interesting. One we’ve talked about time and timing and clock speeds many times. And what you’ve done there is actually reframe that, quite interestingly, around that 100-day exploratory piece, which is a means of building momentum, building a relationship with potential partners, but having the courage, for want of a better word, to actually terminate something if it doesn’t look like it’s going well, because another, better idea has come along, and I’m not sure we’re super good of that in managing our IP assets in this country.
MH: No. And so, what’s funny, when I talk to my academic peers about this, they say, ‘Well, I could never put a PhD student onto that’. I’m like, ‘Well, hang on, let’s just think about this’. You’re starting a PhD student on a journey where they’re going to explore unknown things, right, There has to be an uncertainty element to what they are pursuing. If it is to be called research, there must be uncertainty into it. So, are you saying to me that you’re going to give a PhD student a thousand days of zero uncertainty, and they’re just going to go? Well, no, of course you’re not. You’re going to have regular meetings with your student, and you’re going to then do an assessment and say, ‘Well, that method didn’t work. Let’s try this next one’. Now, I’m not saying that the whole PhD project dissolves. What we’re saying is, this approach didn’t work. This was the first sprint. Let’s try that. And maybe the first engagement was with the defined use case for a defined requirement for a defined industry partner. But the broader program of work can go on, and there may be a secondary industry partner. Or there’s another question that that partner might have that needs to be asked. And so, I think those are those are things that we need to get very, we have to get much more comfortable with the uncertainty of research to be able to balance that risk, because unless we have that comfort with uncertainty, we’re not doing research.
CB: That almost sounds like a tautology, to become comfortable with the uncertainty of research, because research is inherently uncertain. Where I think you’re heading here, Mark, give me a little bit of rope here, where I think you’re heading is that the systems don’t deal with the uncertainty. The researcher at the bench, and my experience at CSIRO over 12 years, is that the researchers I dealt with, limited falling away in a special organisation, but their appetite for uncertainty at the bench knew absolutely no bounds. Like, they loved the uncertainty. All of a sudden, you put them in the uncertainty of the organisational content on a construct, and they really didn’t like that. They wanted certainty around them and take the uncertainty on the bench. And I think, is that the distinction we’re talking about here?
MH: Yeah. So, it’s interesting to use the example of CSIRO, where there is potentially greater certainty around them and the enablement of uncertainty at the bench, because I think this our human capacity to entertain untapped amounts of uncertainty would be a learned helplessness nightmare. And immediately, I’m imagining in myself the anxiety levels rising, right. There has to be a balance.
CB: Yeah. Of course.
MH: I think where we where we are struggling in this country specifically, is we have uncertainty in employment of our key star researchers. Who are then balancing the inability to maintain that same cup runneth over of uncertainty for their research. And so perhaps we aren’t taking those big leaps forward. So, how do we then ask of the nation’s talent to enable large scale, big, challenging questions when we’re giving them a runway of a thousand days of funding.
CB: Mark, that is really interesting that you’ve tied, for want of a better word, you’re thinking back to the employment issue, and we had David Mitchell on the program two years ago, and he spoke of the Vice Chancellor’s Challenge, which is to actually employ the researchers. And he observed through his time at the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics just how damaging this phenomena was. I think this is a fascinating conversation around this tempo and this sitting with all the uncertainties that lay in the system. I want to touch on co-creation as we head into the world of Adelaide and defence and AUKUS, which is a big thing in Australia at the moment. A lot of talk about the innovation opportunities.
MH: The part that’s fascinating then when I think about the AUKUS Pillar 2 piece and co-creation, is that if we only go, if we think Pillar 2 and we think submarines, we will only go and talk to defence. And yet, what’s fascinating about the conversations that are happening now around Pillar 2 specifically, it’s actually about economic growth across the three nations and that economic growth across multiple industries. So, we’re identifying dual use capabilities. So suddenly co-creation needs to be co-co-creation because you need to co-create it with one industry, then identify unique opportunity for a co-creation on the other. And you co-co-create and suddenly you have the single platform capability selling to two domains— one Defence, one other, and each supporting the other, in both good times and bad in terms of revenue. So, we’ve now got examples of tech that we’re looking at for med tech and flipping that straight into defence tech and likewise, defence tech flat straight back into ag tech. And these are nice for us. That’s a really nice cross correlate because these are platform capabilities, we’re able to ruggedise them for an ag tech solution. And if a semi-skilled producer can use it in dusty, rugged, Australia, then it’s definitely going to work on a battlefield. But it will absolutely work for a highly cognitively impaired, tired surgeon who needs to use this same technology very quickly. So I think that’s where these AUKUS opportunities, we need to get out of the grey, green and blue, idea of this being just defence and thinking about these dual purpose capabilities across multiple domains, and getting comfortable with the fact that there are companies who are actually doing fantastic work outside of the big defence and little defence and civilian defence capabilities, who could be working with collaborations across the defence sector.
CB: So, Mark, that’s really interesting, the notion of co-co-creation. And I’m sure there are lots of jokes we could make off the use of the word co-co but might just be over a hot chocolate. And there’s the one for today. But I’m interested in something that happened that Australian SMEs now have a form of market access to the United States that has come about because of AUKUS. Now, how do we get technology transfer then to work better? How do we get these relationships to work better with this door that’s open that I suspect is not widely known, that it’s open?
MH: So, it’s interesting to see the heterogeneity of knowledge across this domain. So, if you’re looking at the fear mongers are around the, well, let me say the fear mongering and some genuine concern around the Defence Trade Controls Act and information transfer that was raised there, there were some things that were discussed that could have been counterproductive for simple laboratory discussions in Australia, where ideas were shared across teams. Those have been fixed. Those issues were nipped in the bud. Some great consultation was done and that’s out of the way. But where we’re heading now is this brand-new world where there are domestic opportunities in the US for Australian companies to now access. And I saw Minister Husic announce today here in Adelaide about a trade, a transfer agreement in the space sector where there’s $1 billion worth of opportunity, has opened up because of a single agreement for our Australian suppliers to now access the US market. Now, I think we’ve only exercised truly the Australia to US side of this. We have not yet exercised the UK side, and I think that will be a domain we can grow on. But these kinds of heavily regulated spaces that were in place for control of information flow and intellectual property, now are being loosened, slash aligned, and perhaps red tape cut, to allow for this greater transfer. But we have to be careful here. And I think the carefulness is, we can’t then just have all of the brilliant ideas from Australia leave at greater pace to be then commercialised in the US. We have to get sticky with our deals. Yeah. So, I think we really need, everybody talks about getting sticky, and I think we need probably to do a both a hook and loop component to the deal, right. We’ve got a hook to get them in and we’ve got a loop to keep them here. And this is something that you know, what I’ve seen and appreciate from some of the work that Mariana Mazzucato has done in articulation of ‘Mission Economy’; go big but go with these sticky deals that allows for long term returns back to the investment that was made, often by government. And I think those are things. Those are well-trod paths that other nations have incorporated into deals that we need to probably intentionally complicate some of our deals so that they actually do have benefit here in the country, but then also take advantage of the new market access that we have.
CB: Yeah. There’s an interesting thought that, I think it’s an interesting thought, that strikes me as you described that scenario, and that is we touched on earlier, that we have a reticence to talk without a non-disclosure agreement. We are inherently risk averse. We don’t like sharing our ideas. So, if I take all those as a sort of a starting norm…
MH: Yes.
CB: What are we going to do to unlock the cultural aspects of the opportunity? Our cultural limiters in Australia, for those listening abroad, ours is Australia in this conversation.
MH: Yeah. So, I think there’s a component of willingness to allow our talent to go and work overseas. It is completely okay to allow our graduates to go and work overseas, because they will come back. And if they come back, they come back with an international experience. And that international experience is one that is truly richer and not that glass half empty scenario. Now, I think that we have to do that. There’s an element also then of creating an attraction to come back on skills. And so, we, we do need some defined talent attraction funding to allow for people to make that movement. But crucially, then if I, if we go back to one of the points we made before, industry transfer and going between academia and industry, can you imagine how hard it would be to go from academia in Australia to industry overseas, and then to come back to academia in Australia? I mean, it’s hard enough to do academia to industry in the same city, here. So, we need to really start identifying defined schemes in defined areas where we can actually enable that to occur at scale. But then when those people come back, don’t put them into a box and don’t give them nothing to do. Actually, harness those people who have the global experience and enable others to cluster around them, to learn from them, and cultivate that new culture throughout these organisations. And I think that’s then where we have this opportunity to start exploring the culture-modifying funding schemes. We can actually start to see these things changing their culture. There’s no magic one thing, we really do need to water this garden with multiple fertilisers and expect a period of transition and learning. And then when we identify excellence, let’s tell that story and share it freely and cultivate what it is about the success that drove that. Because, the funniest thing was being in Colorado, University of Colorado at Boulder is the only organisation in the world that has placed an object onto every body in our solar system. NASA hasn’t done it. Because University of Colorado worked with the Europeans, work with the Japanese, worked with the, with JPL. They did it all. But do you know who it was that took them to actually realise that? It was their new DPCR coming in and talking to them. They didn’t even realise it. And this person is like, ‘Do you realise how cool you are?’ So, we don’t curate and narrate our own histories well enough. Now, if we could learn one thing, like if we could take one thing and learn from and be led by our indigenous brothers and sisters, it’s narration and storytelling. 65,000 years of continual presence here, enabled by story, tale, lessons learnt.
CB: And the communication piece is a critical part of tech transfer and innovation, and what you’ve just touched on there, Mark, not notwithstanding that 65,000-year history of storytelling and communication and handing innovation down through generations and building on…
MH: Building on. Yes.
CB: So indigenous storytelling has been an extraordinary example of resilience and communication. Yet, I sense that resilience may not yet be pervasive in the local tech transfer culture.
MH: So how do we create resilience within our own presentation and storytelling, so that we are comfortable with telling it 40 times and for only one of those transactions to actually hit home?
CB: That’s a very interesting flip, Mark. So, what I’m hearing there is that we’re not good at hearing ‘no’.
MH: Yeah, absolutely. We’re not good at saying ‘no’. And we’re definitely not good at hearing ‘no’.
CB: Right. So, we’ve actually got a problem on both sides. Not only have we not been saying it, but we’re not good at hearing it. And we have talked about the issue of this research isn’t going to get there, but ‘Oh, but it’s beautiful and it’s my child and it’s wonderful’. And so, it would appear we may have stumbled upon the fact that we’ve got at least two problems: we’re not good at saying ‘no’, and we’re not good at hearing ‘no’.
MH: Yeah. And so, then if I think about some of the innovations that are coming through now with industry PhDs and the industry fellowship scheme, those people are going to be out in industry where it is entirely appropriate to say ‘No, we can’t do this project. There’s not the funding, we don’t have the time. And so, we’re going to do this’. And so those skills about, not only having the reception of an idea as a ‘no’. Great. Okay. So, let’s either reframe or tell it better the next time and keep pitching it to different people, but also to then realise, ‘I’ve done this 55 times. Maybe I should evolve my telling from the first time to the 55th’. And I don’t think we spend enough of our time in our training courses to actually introduce this idea. We are, one of the favorite exercises that I do with third-year sciences students, is I have a paper transportation challenge, and that’s all I tell them. Give them a piece of paper and ‘You are to transport this paper from this line over to here’. 99 out of 100 of them will make the perfect plane, and one of them will screw it up and just throw the screwed-up piece of paper. And the screwed-up piece of paper is the minimum-viable product, always wins. It’s not elegant. It looks terrible. But it wins every time.
CB: Yeah, absolutely.
MH: We love the elegance of the plane. We love the flight of the plane. But sometimes you’ve just got to go MVP. And so, this is where we really need to, I think industry will always go MVP. And MVP is a piece. There is science and research and excellence in being able to make the best MVP. It’s not, it’s not half baked. It’s not, it’s not a sellout. There is true engineering brilliance in an MVP. And sometimes we overengineer. And again, that’s that ‘No’. The ‘no’ needs to be ‘no we shouldn’t add another laser. We shouldn’t add another decimal point to the sensitivity and specificity. This is okay. Let’s go’.
CB: But let’s go with it. And as we segue into engineering, a couple of points that strike me there, Mark. Firstly, is no one thought of standing up out of their seat and walking the piece of paper across…
MH: I did set that as one of the expectations…
CB: Oh, okay.
MH: But please, if you wish to write the paper to demonstrate to me that that shouldn’t be the way, then change the policy.
CB: No, no, that’s okay. But the other thing, and I think you’re on pretty safe ground here, Mark, I’m not suspecting a lot of your third-year students are listening to this podcast, so the experiment will continue to work for some time to come.
MH: But wouldn’t it be nice if next year’s lot, they did? And so, the whole thing was broken, and I would say, ‘My job here is done. Let’s move on’.
CB: Absolutely, absolutely. But raise a really interesting piece of the puzzle there, Mark, which is the engineering piece and something that we’ve touched on with Katherine Woodthorpe around engineering and scale up. And in fact, it only came up in a podcast that I listened to called ‘Cleaning Up’ with Michael Liebreich. I don’t know if you know that name. He interviewed one of our colleagues in Canberra here, Rosie Barnes, around engineering and engineering scale up. And you mentioned, you know, the engineering is part of the MVP. I’d be interested just in your thoughts on the challenges of engineering, because we do, we like talking about the science piece and that’s great. But the engineering piece, it struck me perhaps doesn’t get the airtime that it needs. And if you want to scale something, it needs engineering. And why do tech transfer if you’re not going to look to scale it?
MH: So, we had some really fascinating discussions within the Centre for Nanoscale BioPhotonics about the difference between ‘forward iterative projected planning’ versus ‘identify the target and plan backwards’. And by doing the identifying the target of the MVP and planning backwards, it literally cut 90% of the options that we had available to us for a sensing modality, for a manufacturing modality here and now, to be able to achieve something that was usable, scalable and economically viable at the end of the day for the customer that could have been out there.
CB: You started with the end in mind?
MH: Absolutely. So, classic point for me at the moment in the pain field, is there’s a lot of interest in quantifying pain using fMRI systems, functional magnetic resonance imaging. You are looking at the oxygen consumption in the brain for brain activity. That is a useless form of expectation to translate to a global population, of which pain is the number one health burden of all global population. It’s a lovely research tool, but do not claim at all that this has any relevance to pain diagnosis. Because it does not, and it should not because it will never scale to a population. What we need to do, if we want to look at pain diagnosis, in my view, if we have the end in mind, we need a test that costs less than $0.10 per test, that takes less than ten minutes to resolve. And if you don’t start with that in mind, you are going to be inventing something that’s far too expensive, far too labour intensive, far too many consumables, far too many meetings of PhDs out in the field. And therefore, it’s never going to translate. Now, if we then start having the engineering and manufacturing questions structured in there, then there’s some really interesting questions of machine learning that get built in, some advanced robotics and manufacturing that get built in, where we can then start asking some really cool integration research questions about microfluidics, about micro scaling, some photonic chip work. And each of these has uncertainty and excitement and translation, translatability. But it’s on a path from ‘does it work?’ through to ‘can we make it?’; all worthy questions and we shouldn’t discount that ‘Does it work? And can we make it?’—Neither of those are actually better than the other. They are actually part of the journey, and I think sometimes there’s this perception that the fundamental basic science is somehow worth more than the translation brings. Both contain uncertainty. Both contain uncertainty. Both require creativity. All of them need to be done in a structured fashion. All of them are novel. All of them have to be done in a transferable and reproducible fashion. Unless we actually start acknowledging that, then we’re going to continue with this unnecessary internal fight about ‘my research is better than your research. And so therefore my research should be funded more than your research’.
CB: Yes.
MH: We need these two things to exist within the ecosystem. And that’s not to say that we should always spend more money on translation. Now, I think there’s this, there’s a dynamic equilibrium we need to establish where the work that is done in brilliant, fundamental basic research is enabled in a free-form space. But that free-form space is indelibly connected to the brilliance of the translation gurus who can identify, ‘Oh, that’s a great idea. I’ll use that over there. Boom! Go’. You know, NDA gunning collaboration, fast scale, fast pace. That’s an ecosystem that I’m seeing slowly develop. But I think will be thrust upon us very quickly when we hit our next pandemic; when we hit some thresholds of global warming; when we hit some biosecurity threats; we’re going to need to have exercised that muscle faster.
CB: Mark, this has been a terrific conversation. We have traversed a lot of territory in the short time we’ve spent together. I’d be fascinated, just in your closing thoughts and observations around the tech transfer journeys and innovation journeys that are opening up for Australian researchers and industry, and the opportunity to seize the things that sit before us.
MH: That’s the thing that I’m really keen for us Australian scientists and researchers to really identify. We believe in this thing that we’re working on. Believe in your product, believe in your solution, work with teams, identify some solutions out there and keep iterating forward whilst then still being willing to hear, ‘No, this is not a good idea’, but being okay and adapt and pivot or whatever western dance move you need to do to keep it going forward.
CB: Mark, that is a great note on which to finish, to have a bit of belief and to keep heading forward. It’s been terrific speaking with you today, Mark. Thanks so much for joining us.
MH: Cameron, thank you so much and all the best. Look forward to chatting further in the future.