In this episode, I had the opportunity to chat with Greg Harper, a longstanding colleague and friend, who has been on the tech transfer and commercialisation journey for many years. In this conversation Greg shares some of his experience and perspectives following his time at CSIRO, as a board member at Meat and Livestock Australia, senior leadership roles within the Agriculture Victoria and, most recently, at University of Melbourne.
Greg shared some of his early journey into technology transfer from his post doc at the National Institute of Health, Uppsala University and CSIRO, where he became involved in market orientated science, and the development and delivery of products to market, in a broad collaboration led by Professor John Hopwood, that created enzyme-replacement therapies for children suffering from mucopolysaccharidosis.
We quickly turned our discussion to more contemporary issues in the Australian innovation system, reflecting on the recent economic roundtable and calls for improved productivity (which we have discussed on some of our other recent podcasts). We discussed the notion that there is an over representation of research but relative under representation on translation in the local innovation and productivity discourse. This line of thinking connects back to the discussion with Catherine Livingstone in Episode 50 and the National Innovation Policy Forum Prequel podcast with Catherine and David Thodey in Episode 53. We explored how tech transfer has “fallen through the gaps” in Australia, with the Productivity Commission setting it aside for SERD to address, and the rise of a startup ecosystem that may be a proxy for externalising tech transfer from research institutions. Greg, with some insight from his daughter, then introduced the broader notion of innovation as central to sustainability—not just productivity. This invited some reflections on what sustainability means as a central tenent of innovation.
I started reflecting on Victor Pantano’s recent observations that there is international demand for Australian innovation and asked Greg why that demand isn’t appearing locally. Greg thinks this is a networking and relationship challenge more than an alignment problem and that research and industry are not communicating in similar languages. We spent some time, given our shared interest and experience in the bioeconomy and agrifood, reflecting on the communication and alignment challenges around bringing digital and biophysical innovations to market. Patience was discussed as a missing ingredient in the domestic private sector (or innovation demand side), and contrasted this with the longer term, patient funding that can be found in other jurisdictions. We touched on venture in Ag, noting this was an in-depth discussion with Roger Wyse earlier this year.
Greg and I then reflected on role of the board and strategy following the article that we published through the Acton Institute last month, exploring the important role that the board should play in setting the culture and risk appetite. While we had discussed this with Anne-Marie Perret for new ventures, we focussed this discussion on the role of established companies and their boards, and two lenses for boards to use—the growth and opportunity lens and its link to the governance, regulation and compliance lens. We explored the question of how a board gets a contemporaneous measure on risk appetite and profile.
Greg then reflected on his experiences at MLA and the commercialisation of VIAscan, an automated carcase digitisation and assessment technology developed through MLA investments, and the board processes associated with taking risk for long-term industry benefit. We explored this as an example of the importance of complementary technology, disruptors, timing and patience in bringing a technology to market.
I asked Greg about the role of boards and management teams in building absorptive capacity and how this ties back to the risk culture. Greg suggested that we are demographically challenged in that the younger we are, then higher risk appetite we might have. Greg brought this to life through an ag-production lens and the importance of regions and community in setting a culture of innovation and risk taking.
We closed out our discussion around Greg’s sabbatical with Professor Soren Salomo at the Technical University Berlin, and reflecting on NorVic Foods— the team led by Lisa Birrell, and how ecosystems form and are assessed.
Transcript
CB: Hello everyone, and welcome to Tech Transfer Talk. My name is Cameron Begley, Managing Director of Spiegare, and joining me on the podcast today is a long-standing colleague of mine, who I’ve been dying to get onto the podcast, and now he is free of his obligations from the University of Melbourne. It’s great to have you here, Greg Harper, welcome to the show.
GH: Thanks so much, Cameron. Great to talk to you, and thanks for the opportunity to be on this podcast.
CB: A pleasure. And the great thing now is that you’re a free man, so to speak. We can have you unimpeded by the political niceties that may have constrained your ability to talk broadly in the past.
GH: Absolutely. Notwithstanding any confidentiality obligations I might have. And I think it’s good to talk about, you know, the ebbs and flows of this tech transfer business.
CB: I think it is. And no, we won’t be breaching any confidentiality or any propriety. We’ll be talking robustly, though. How on earth did you get into this, Greg? What got you here?
GH: It’s a long story, mate. You go back, you know, in those mentoring conversations you have with young people who are thinking about doing science, you know, people are often talking about impact. They’re talking about what they want to do to make a change in the world. And, you know, while I really appreciated doing a PhD at Monash in really quite fundamental science, it was then I started to think about applications important. And that led me in my postdocs with the National Institutes of Health and then Uppsala University and Uppsala had a fantastic model. You know, everybody you talked to independently of how much fundamental science they were doing. They were also doing their application and commercialisation. That sort of stuff really influenced me. Then um, then did go to CSIRO ‘cause I felt as though I needed a real job. After working for a while at the National Health and Medical Research Council as a postdoc. Thank you. You know, look, I needed a real job. And that introduced me, as you said, the CRC and the research and development corporations and those sorts of applied organisations. And gradually one thing and another led me getting closer and closer to application. But there was this brilliant day when I was in CSIRO, I got a call from the group in Adelaide that were commercialising a technology in the muco-polysaccharidoses, so we don’t need to go into what they are…
CB: No. we’ll take that as read for everyone listening…
GH: Take that as read. People can look at that. But under the leadership of a great Australian, John Hopwood, a big team of people took this series of enzyme replacement therapies to market. And it actually was after I’d left that, you know, the people had done a nice job looking back at who had contributed to that technology, called me up and recognised me as one of the developers; not an inventor, but a developer. And hence, you know, I was in line for some, uh, royalties. And I thought to myself, ‘It’s time for a change,’ so I retrained. I got a graduate diploma in technology management. And then, you know, my AICD graduate, basically a program in governance. And one thing and another, ended up there.
CB: I’m very interested in this developer award that you got, Greg, just to dive into that momentarily. So, we do spend a lot of time and with good reason, lauding scientists. You know, we have in Australia at least, we have Eureka Prizes and CSIRO Medals from our former employer and the like. But it’s interesting that we probably don’t recognise the developers, the translators, the scale up, perhaps in the same way.
GH: Absolutely.
CB: And it’s interesting that in that moment, at the risk of carbon dating you, I’m figuring that’s early to mid 90s…
GH: Yep.
CB: And there you got recognised for the role you played in translation or in developing it. I find that interesting.
GH: I give a lot of credit to John Hopwood for setting the tone for this, and I think what he did, and I wasn’t around, like I’d moved back to Queensland by that time. I was in the wonderful world of CSIRO, and what he did was he ran some sort of a process. An external process to University of Adelaide as it turned at the time and run, I think, by people at Flinders University with patent attorneys. And they did this consultation where they basically said, ‘Well, what do you think you did to develop those technologies, and what did you think this person did and what did you think that person did?’ And I think they ran that consultation in a, some sort of a circle strategy. And so others must have said, ‘Well, you know, Greg certainly didn’t invent this,’ but the work I did, showing that the, you know, the enzymes could be taken up in cells and they absolutely did the correction that was proposed and would have contributed from a development point of view. I guess that nowadays, you and I would say it pushed it along the TRL scale.
CB: Interesting that your role in the development and translation was recognised, which probably not something we do enough of at the moment, but it is in fact…
GH: Absolutely. I think that I think that’s absolutely right. And we see now a few trends that, as you say, in terms of awards, but I think we’ve got to go further.
CB: I think the translation piece and development piece is a theme that has emerged regularly through the podcast. And indeed, you know, we spoke with Catherine Livingstone recently. We’ve spoken with Katherine Woodthorpe before that, all around the scale up and translation piece. And yet we found ourselves not having that conversation. when the Economic RoundTable happened a few weeks ago. And I guess the thesis that’s been rolling around amongst some that I talked to is that if government wants productivity improvement and productivity needs change, and change typically requires innovation, how is it that as a group of tech transfer professionals or indeed the research community, how have they, shall we say, missed is probably too strong a word, but maybe not maximised their voice in terms of inserting innovation into that conversation. I think the Productivity Commission took it off the table before we got in the room. Danielle Wood, who’s the Productivity Commissioner, the Chair, she said, ‘Oh, that’s all for the research community to sort out. We don’t want that in the room.’ How have we missed this opportunity?
GH: Yeah, yeah, what a great question that is. And you and I would never equate research with innovation. These are two…
CB: No—related but not identical.
GH: They’re not. You know, one might precede the other, but they’re not the same thing.
CB: No.
GH: Right. And for for various reasons, our innovation ecosystem has, I think, overemphasised the role of research alone, right, discovery research; under emphasised that, uh, next couple of steps and I thought the Catherine Livingstone podcast was great around that. And she talked about the ‘missing middle’. And you and I and other conversations have really brought that along. And I think that means this, uh, TRL 2 through to TRL, I know, 6 or 7 or something where, you know, you’re testing the idea and taking it forward. I think that that is significantly undervalued and that undervaluing occurs right across our system. It’s not only one group that is missing that point. So, while university administrators might be missing that, I think companies are also missing that, firms are missing that. And probably, you know, the startup community is being asked in a way to go right across that and fill that gap. And, you know, the startups, I think, that’s a different conversation. And and that’s where, you know, the startups will have their own drivers, of course, but they, they’re heavily driven on making profits and getting products out to market. They’re not going to fill this whole translation gap that we need.
CB: That’s a very interesting take on it, Greg, that maybe all of these startups that have emerged, really it’s been a thing in the last decade. It’s really, I think, gathered a head of steam. It’s an interesting notion there that we’re looking to them to fill this translation gap. And you cited that the universities and the research institutions don’t perhaps appreciate it. Industry perhaps doesn’t appreciate it. And that’s the domestic demand side challenge we have for innovation. And framing it in terms of government and the Productivity and Economic Roundtable, they don’t seem to appreciate it because they thought that innovation and productivity, ‘Oh, well, that’s the strategic examination of R&D that will take care of that,’ without actually recognising that it’s intrinsic to a productivity uplift of any description. So, it’s very interesting…
GH: Let me just broaden that conversation a little bit.
CB: Yeah, sure.
GH: Because one of the great things I can say about living here in Berlin for the moment is I’m getting to see my daughter, Elise Harper, much more. And she’s in this same business, as it turns out. And her challenge back to me was, ‘Don’t just talk about innovation in relation to productivity. Talk about it in relation to sustainability.’ And I think that that’s a good challenge for you. And I think because this then is about these ideas, they will naturally have their own lifespan. You know, you and I have seen technologies develop, come to market, become irrelevant and leave the marketplace, whereas the issue around sustainability is going to keep being with us. And it’s about how we build product, the product idea to idea technology, and environment to environment. So, I’m happy on her behalf to bring that into this conversation.
CB: Oh, no. I think that’s a really interesting addition to the conversation. And I think, at the risk of very generalised remarks here, the Europeans, of course, have sustainability pretty much at the core of their government policy and innovation system. Not sure Australia could hand-on-heart do that, however.
GH: Now you might say that, but I couldn’t possibly agree.
CB: No, no, you couldn’t possibly comment, I suspect, Greg; that would be imprudent for you to agree.
GH: Agreed.
CB: But nonetheless, the thought of sustainability is an interesting one, because an interesting definition that I came across, in fact, when when we were at CSIRO, there was a company that came to present to CSIRO at Ian Wark down in Clayton, to those that know the geography of Melbourne and this person, I won’t mention who it was or the company they were with, but they stood in front of a rather packed theatre. They were a representative of a pretty important partner of CSIRO at the time, and the opening gambit of the meeting was—paraphrasing—’Sustainability in its first definition is defined as our financial sustainability, because if we can’t make money, we can’t do anything else.’ And the room was in uproar.
GH: I can imagine.
CB: I was laughing in the back.
GH: You’re hearing this. In effectively the mid-90s or when was it?
CB: No, no, this was 2009.
GH: Well, it’s an amazing thing to say.
CB: Yeah, it was pretty controversial, albeit screamingly obvious. And, but it’s interesting you’ve raised sustainability in this conversation when it comes to this productivity piece, Greg, because, or productivity and innovation, I think it’s fair to say that sustainable profitability is a necessary precondition to get these other things right, in the absence of government cutting really massive checks. Businesses need to be profitable.
GH: They need to be profitable. And particularly when, because yeah, your comment is correct. If you look here in Europe and the regulatory piece has been so much further developed, you know, than the, the forward-looking piece—innovation will give us a pipeline, if you like, of future products. Each of them becoming closer to sustainable in their own right, and our business as a result, will be more sustainable because we’ve got a different perspective on resource use, recycling, circular economy, that sort of stuff. I don’t want to dilute the comments around the need for innovation, for productivity. That’s absolutely right, right. And given everything else we’ve got to do, we just perhaps need to drive that ahead first and then go, ‘Alright, what is our view in the long term? How are we going to be talking decades in advance?’
CB: I don’t think adding sustainability dilutes…
GH: No, no. I just think it’s a different reflection on the assignment.
CB: Absolutely. A different lens through which to look at it. And now, we’ve touched on this through the conversation already, industry’s appetite in Australia and private sector embracing of innovation. It’s a bit of a challenge, it’s fair to say, for domestic demand for innovation coming out of, you know, the publicly funded research community. And I think it’s, I’m going to sort of put a bit of a hypothesis up to for you to back down and from your vantage point at UMelb more than anything else, is it that we’re not doing the research that industry is demanding of us? And I’m talking about local industry because Victor Pantano, who’s been on the show, would argue we’ve got international demand for our research. We have multinationals coming in and out all the time looking to secure partnerships with us. It’s the local industry that is struggling. Are we doing the wrong research or do they not have the risk appetite and culture? Clearly the answer is going to be a bit of both here. But where do we land on a spectrum of completely the wrong research, all the way out to now completely risk averse and got the wrong culture?
GH: I think I look at that matter as a bit of a network problem rather than a line. And noting for your listeners, I have kept myself after leaving medical research in ‘92. I’ve stayed really in the agrifood sector. I’m really comfortable there. And one of the things that I recognise is that you can meet some people in Australia who are running outstanding agri food businesses.
CB: Absolutely.
GH: And those folks access the knowledge and technology and intellectual property that they need from anywhere on earth. So, they will be working through the the literature. They know that such and such a person at MIT as the world leader, they will just make an arrangement from their own corporation’s point of view. That’s the first thing. I think that we have a communication problem between our academics and our businesses. I think we need to really break down those barriers, because the barrier word isn’t even appropriate, that we’re just in different worlds. We’re different bubbles, right?
CB: Yeah.
GH: Each of these people in this economic and innovation ecosystem, they’re living in different worlds, right? And they’re not speaking the same language. So, we need to, through networks and just socialisation, allow people to hear one another’s perspective. And particularly the young, teach them how to have that conversation. How to listen and how to do your research in the background as to what these companies might be interested in. I definitely don’t want to get on that bandwagon of saying we do too much basic research. I don’t think that’s the issue..
CB: No, I’m not sure that’s true.
GH: Yeah, I think we do brilliant. And there’s so many examples. And the example I gave you of, of the mucopolysaccharidoses, the MPS, um, treatments-that would not have happened…
CB: Oh good, we’ve got an acronym. That’s important. Thank you.
GH: MPS, right. If, you know, that never would have happened if it wasn’t for some spectacular fundamental research done by that research group, right.
CB: Yep.
GH: It’s never got there. So, that is an important part of what we do. But it must be ‘and’. ‘And’ we talk with the, in the medical research case, the patient support groups. ‘And’ in the agriculture case, we talk to the people that are applying these technologies and what it is they need, right. If you were successful in your research, how would you need to get that to them? Would it be through an intermediary? Do you need engineering? Is it that you’ve got a partner with, you know, a big manufacturing company to get equipment that delivers your technology? You know, just thinking further down the line as to how these things work. Now, that is a credit for the way that the startups are being prepared, particularly the agri food sector, in that they’re talking about ‘Exactly how is this going to work?’ You know, think about it, talk, do your customer discovery, but also what translational modifications do you need to make to get this out there?
CB: So, I’m just going to throw a bit of a challenge to you around that assertion with ag and food, because I think that, there’s possibly two universes in ag and food and one may be working that way, and I sense one is not. So, I’m just going to go to the one that I sense is not. And that’s the ones and zeros crowd, the ag tech guys and girls, who I don’t sense have actually been thinking about the distribution and cooperative models that are needed to bring a product to market. And I do think this is changing. And I read a number of authors on this and I’m sensing changes in the air. But I believe from my vantage point at least, I’ve seen a lot of ag tech companies strike out by themselves, determined that they will by themselves have that one app, and every farm is going to use their app, and I don’t need a distribution partner and…
GH: I definitely saw that over the last, you know. So, I was with the University of Melbourne for eight years and I saw a number of those. I was approached by a number of entrepreneurs who were saying, ‘I’ve got this algorithm’ or ‘We’ve got this widget’, just as you say, you know, and just. And I’d go, ‘Well, let’s go and actually talk to some of these folks at different points in the market here, what they’ve got to say.’ And you know, so while I value the garage model, you know, it’s Silicon Valley…
CB: The Silicon Valley approach to…
GH: Right. You know, this is what happened in Silicon Valley. People were in the garages and tweaking. I actually don’t think that works super well in Australian agri food, because I think you’ve got to get out there closer to it. And you obviously chose the most challenging of those, which are systems that can be just reduced to ones and zeros, fully digitised and a Big Data approaches or those types of things, yeah. And and for me, it comes back to that more general case of how are you going to get your algorithm delivered? What’s it going to actually appear as, right. And the app example was a simple one in the past. But it’s not going to be that in the future because it’s going to be embedded in somebody else’s kit. You know you’re not selling to the farmer, right? You’re selling at some other point.
CB: I just wanted to challenge that because I do think, though, Greg, when you talk about agri food, which is the world we tend to inhabit, that the biophysical innovations and the more reductionist physical products that are out there, they are thinking about those challenges because to scale up needs concrete and steel and manufacturing, and it doesn’t have the benefits of Moore’s Law. It doesn’t. You still have, if you need to pour concrete to build a fermentation vessel or an oil crusher or whatever, nothing’s really changed in terms of scaling like the ICT space has.
GH: Yeah. No, I agree with that. And I think another component of this that you and I haven’t discussed yet is the patience of the investor community. Why is it that we have the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund? You know, what is it about the Canadian investors that’s prepared to be long term and more patient than our own superannuation funds as it relates to food? And the only thing I can put forward is that the Canadians have been used to an agrarian model, and they’ve grown with it over centuries thinking, ‘This is an important part of our economy. It’s never going to go away’, and so, people, ‘and we don’t want it to go away. It’s an important part of our whole system.’ And hence, you know, they’re making some of the very long-term investments, there’s just not Australian capital to do. Other commentators in the same field you and I are in, they’re talking about, you know what, maybe the Silicon Valley model has not worked in agri and food tech. You know, we’ve got to rethink it. I think there’s some of the terms that we’re talking about. It’s the closeness of investors to these sorts of problems and what are going to be, going to be, the significance of scalability of the solutions.
CB: I would have assumed that the reason that Canadians have stayed patient is because they sit out long winters, but that’s just an assumption on my part. That would teach you patience, if nothing else.
GH: Let’s see who responds to this podcast, Cameron.
CB: We’ll find out soon enough. But in terms of that other point that you made there around types of money and patience and the like. Yes, I do think that Ag is a little unique. And yes, Australia probably hasn’t got that mentality for that patience. And there’s been a conversation, there’s been a conversation around whether the venture and its suitability for ag and food. This is something we picked up with Roger Wyse, and I think it’s a bubbling discussion around the world at the moment. I think the other thing that fits into this conversation though, is the ecosystem side of things that John Howard has been speaking about regularly and came on a few months ago now to talk about. And that idea that the Silicon Valley model is a ‘rinse and repeat’, is clearly not right. Like, it’s worked really well in the Bay Area and, no denying, it’s worked really well.
GH: Yeah.
CB: But it does not necessarily translate to other parts of the world. And I think part of that is what verticals you’re playing in or industries you’re playing in. I do think it starts with culture though. One of the things that we’ve been talking about amongst ourselves has been the role of the board in trying to get this going. Given that we have some constraints culturally or currently, maybe is a better way to frame it, around domestic appetite for innovation, we’ve been speculating as to what might be happening at the board, and we, we on the podcast at least have had a couple of goes at talking about this. We had Anne-Marie Perrett on talking about governance in startups—‘big G and little G’ governance, she called it. But startups aren’t really the topic of conversation in a way today in the sense that, or at least for this podcast, because they’ve got their own little microcosm. They are inherently innovative, looking to move quickly to find their beachheads. And with that in mind, I’m thinking more about established organisations who are already out there. How’s the board influencing the appetite for innovation at the moment?
GH: So, yeah, I got to say, I find that whole series of questions just fascinating. That’s why, at the moment, I’m on the AIFST board – training Institute, Food Science and Technology board. I’ve been on the Meat and Livestock Australia board and other, um, you know, not for profits in other sectors. I just love that challenge that’s applied to a group of interested folks with very different backgrounds and then saying, ‘Well,’ you know, ‘let’s start with a growth and opportunity lens. Let’s link our strategies there. But then at the same time come back to a governance and regulation and compliance lens.’ And you know, what sort of dynamic are we going to create between those? And, you know, I personally flip back and forth between, you know, I’ve chaired audit and risk committees, and I sit there and think, ‘Well, with that lens on,’ you know, ‘with that risk lens, there’s how could I possibly say to the organisation, you’ve got to be taking risks. There is a risk that we’re not going to meet our numbers because those ideas didn’t work.’ And that’s a fascinating thing. I think that, you know, in your and my lifetime, we’ve seen the results of different boards making the decision to take some risk. And, um, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. So, I think, I think there is a, firstly a cultural setting that from the board level you’ve got to try and articulate, which is ‘It’s okay to be taking risk. We are going to deal with it if that risk doesn’t pay off,’ right. We obviously have government regulations around trading insolvent and transparency and those sort of things that are quite reasonably in place. But you’ve got to try and develop this culture that ‘Yeah, we want some, we want you to be taking risk and to celebrate the risk taking. And we’ll deal with the fact every now and again it doesn’t go right.’ And, and the, you know, the, um. I’ve read in the literature myself around these sorts of things, and I’m not sure anybody gets this right. You know, there are boards that have done it brilliantly in hindsight., right. But, but you know, it, as you and I have talked about around the, the thinking of Porter, for example, you know. It, it is trying to, as a group of interested humans, pulled together that insight into the business that we’re working for and within foresight of where we think this is going to go, and turning yourself to oversight as the processes running, having the right measures and then finally hindsight, you know. ‘Look, that didn’t work. Oh, thank God that did. How incredibly good was that.’ And that I think is a fascinating thing. And I’m very much a supporter of this more diversity on boards is good. You know, it’s an intrinsic good that, um, different minds will say, ‘No, Greg, look, you’re seeing that from the such and such a lens, but put a different lens on. Now, what do you think you see? How are we going to make a decision around that? I mean, is that the way you’re thinking about these things?’
CB: I think that’s a really good set of insights, and I’m particularly interested in that idea that you put up there around the ‘It’s hard to get right in the moment. But you can reflect on it in hindsight and you can actually figure out how that’s gone or not gone well.’ And I think there’s an interesting challenge there about how you get a contemporaneous measure on how your risk appetite and risk profile is going, and that doesn’t mean second-to-second, but board meeting-to- board meeting, how do you actually get a contemporaneous view on this? Because things in innovation tend to take longer than you think and then happen in an awful hurry when you least expect it. That’s at least my, uh, view.
GH: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And I think the, again, why I think it’s a fascinating area, but it’s this point about making putting a lot of effort as a board into setting some measures of organisational, uh, change and organisational innovation and being comfortable to say ‘We’ve set the measures now get out of the way and let management get on and do that.’ And every now and again it’s going to go bang, right?
CB: Yeah.
GH: Some of these things, a classic one I think about is that MLA did a lot of work around early digitised image analysis of carcasses. So, at the start, and that, they own that technology. And they tried a couple of times to get it commercialised. And it went out as a license to licensee. And they weren’t successful. So, the licenses came back and MLA kept trying and doing that. Now, that was an example where there was failure but on behalf of the whole industry, MLA had to, if you like, accept its responsibility to get that productive technology forward. You know, I applaud the board at the time, and that wasn’t one I was actually involved in. But I saw how they did that. And I thought, you know, that, that was obviously the result of a technology transfer and innovation mindset, right. Cultural setting that, you know, ‘We are going to take some of these risks and we’re, we’re going to try and do it in a sensible way, but we have to do it with a long-term benefit.’ That’s where this whole thing around risk appetite comes. And I think it is the board’s obligation, right, to have the robust conversations internally and say ‘Our appetite setting for…’, let’s say,’ technological implementation,’ right, ‘our risk is set at this level. And we’re going to accept the fact that some aspects are not going to work well.’ And you and I have seen any number of major technological implementation failures in big organisations around the country. You know, it’s happened on a number of times, but ultimately greater service comes out of that. A lot of pain on the way, but it’s service overall. So, it’s I think, setting risk appetite and being as measurable and specific and then doing your best to step back. Have I ever erred in on the wrong side of being too, um, you know, interfering? Absolutely. And I work against it in myself.
CB: Yeah. I think we all get a bit attached to the things that we’re working on from time to time, and that, that in its nice way, can be construed as interfering. Sometimes it can be a bit worse.
GH: Because I’ve always got great colleagues around me that go, you know, ‘Turn the dial a little bit more this way or a little bit back that way,’ and sort of setting your behavior accordingly.
CB: Yeah, I think the MLA example is a very interesting one. And there are a couple of pieces that caught my imagination as you were sharing it there, Greg. So, one of them was the obligation they had to the industry, I think is what is how you described it, that they had to keep persisting because there was, there was a clear intrinsic value but the path to market hadn’t yet revealed itself. So, you just kept hitting it and hitting it again…
GH: They just kept persisting…
CB: …it that way.
CB: Yeah.
GH: Yeah. And now you know it’s a key thing and I guess, I guess what you’re doing is you’re waiting till some other part of the economy or the technological landscape brings in something that solves your problem. So, at the time, you know that they had relatively poor video technologies—not up to it. And you look at the image analysis now, right. And it’s integration into other decision- making systems. You know, it’s like leaps and bounds. Now the meat industry did not generate that technology.
CB: No.
GH: But it was able to access it internationally, get it as fast as possible.
CB: Yeah. That’s a very interesting part of tech transfer and commercialisation around the co- technologies that are required for enablement. So, it wasn’t the digital camera that probably finished classical photography off, it was the phone, it was the digital phone. The minute that camera got put in that phone it was away. And that was the end. And so, it needed that other co-device to come along to really make it fly. That’s an interesting example.
GH: Can you imagine you’re sitting on a board and you’re saying ‘What risk am I going to take. When is this other technology going to come?’ You know, now I imagine that the people that were developing Cochlear, you know, with that was the circumstance where so much that technology was in-house, they were so far ahead of everybody else that, that’s as I understand it.
CB: We’ll have to get Catherine back on for the second episode.
GH: Get her back. Because…
CB: …if we want to talk Cochlear…
GH: I think that’s where they were. Whereas, you know, in the case of the DB, sorry, digital image analysis, they had to wait for it to come from somewhere else. And, and the, the strategy I always used to say on that board I can share is that, you know, sometimes, sometimes you’re better to approach somebody who is the real disruptor and have them in your innovation ecosystem for five minutes, than to expect that all the people that you’re currently funding are going to come up with that idea. They’re not right. They’re going to be doing quite respectable, incremental additions to existing knowledge. But you’ve got it in some way bring in this disruptor that goes, ‘Let’s look at it this way.’
CB: Yeah. There’s no doubt that incrementalism is an important part of productivity and innovation. And just ticking little 1% improvement. A 1% improvement every year, if you raise it to the power of ten, actually becomes useful. That sort of argument. I think the other thing, though, that’s interesting about MLA, because this is quite an interesting case, Greg, particularly when you think about the role of the MLA board, of which you were on, I suspect at the time.
GH: Yeah. Five years.
CB: You’re sitting there and you’re having to sit with the discomfort of, ‘We know there’s something here, but we’ve got to keep holding on and prosecuting the commercialisation.’ So, there’s not only a risk component to this, but there’s a patience component. You know timing. Timing is a big deal in tech transfer. I think Greg, we’ve both in our time at CSIRO seen things that have been far too early and what do you do with that technology? And occasionally one that’s just a little too late because the patent surface is halfway through the research program. So, there’s always a timing, so, sitting with that tension around, you know. The governance of it is one thing in the risk appetite, but the culture in the room has to be okay. ‘We can deal with this and we can keep everyone moving with us, knowing that there’s something bigger at play.’
GH: I think that’s right. And I think this is a reality of our position as Australians. You know, we reckon we contribute something like 4% of global knowledge and new patents, you know, something in that order. But, you know, we don’t control the other 96%. But we need to be getting access to it absolutely as fast as it comes. And that can be by, in licensing or collaboration or engagement with, you know, these big international networks or hiring people, you know, bringing in people that bring that technology and there’s just that whole sense of dynamism. We have to be, I think, going, ‘Oh, well, every now and again, we’re not going to get it right. But by doing this and being dynamic, we’re going to get some that are big payoffs.’ We do have to kiss a few frogs, I reckon.
CB: Well, well that is that is actually, I think, part of the tech transfer conundrum that there are frogs that get kissed and don’t turn into princes or princesses.
GH: Yep.
CB: Which is frustrating. And because it’s hard to know until you’ve kissed them.
GH: Yeah. That’s right. Until you’ve done it, nobody’s going to know, right. But no, we’ve got to keep that.
CB: I just want to go back to the 4% question momentarily. Maybe the segue back to our earlier conversation about the research community. My sense is that there’s a tendency in Australia, we talked about this with Mark Hutchinson, actually. There’s this tendency in Australia that the researchers, when they’ve got their idea, hang on to that idea because that’s their idea. And if I share that idea with anyone, it dilutes my ability to get money, funding, partnerships. And the last thing I really am interested in is finding out that idea has already been done by someone else, because now I’ve got to go off and find another idea. Is that a bit harsh?
GH: I can probably speak on this because I’ve been a researcher myself and…,
CB: Well you have. You’ve managed them, you’ve been one. I’ve simply tapped on the glass and looked in from the other side, mate. But you…
GH: So, I can be self-critical and not criticise any of my colleagues? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that everything that is around you encourages you. You think like that. Your senior professors, I’m going to assert, you know, that they came through a system that almost doesn’t exist now, right. So, it’s not as though they left a burning platform behind them, but the little spot fires were there. So, the promotion systems in universities or the systems by which we secure grants, lots of those things encourage individualism and individuals.
CB: Yeah.
GH: And as you said earlier on, many of our rewards are still focused on individuals now, not on the broader…
CB: Yeah.
GH: Every now and again, you hear somebody get up, uh, in their speech and say, ‘This wouldn’t have happened without the whole team.’ And that’s really great. I think that is the nature of, that’s something to applaud. But yeah, we’re just human at the end of the day, as researchers and you look at, you know, what is being encouraged. How’s my next grant going to come through? What’s it going to mean for my family being fed?, you know, all those things. And you’ve got this series of incentives which are all heavily weighted towards doing things as an individual.
CB: Yeah, there was another concept I just wanted to kick around between us while I have the chance, Greg.
GH: Yes, mate.
CB: It’s a bit of a board issue in some respects, but I think it’s a management issue more generally tied back into culture, which is a, is the idea of absorptive capacity and the ability of the private sector, whether it’s here or abroad, it really doesn’t matter. And I might even broaden it a little bit further to say government and NGOs or not-for-profits and their ability to take up innovation and actually make change to become more productive is an interesting conversation piece, because it sort of pops a little bit in articles I read over the last 3 or 4 months, particularly locally. You know, Victor Pantano has raised it recently. John Howard‘s raised it from time to time. What’s your take on the absorptive capacity conversation in Australia right now? It’s not the ability to do the research. It’s the ability to absorb it. Maybe it comes back to that communications piece you mentioned earlier, but I’m curious to know what you think about this challenge.
GH: Yeah. And again, I’ll just, I’ll bring it back to the personal. Because that way, I’m not really criticising colleagues.
CB: You can criticise them to your heart’s content. I know very few of them, right.
GH: You know, obviously, as you get older, your willingness to take big risk changes, right? And, you know, I reflect back on when I left Australia in 1984 to go to the United States with really, you know, no means of support. You know, it was a pretty big risk that this was going to pay off, and away we go. So, effectively running our own enterprise. So, as you get older, that’s the issue now. I think, if you look at the demographics of our agriculture, uh, community in Australia, there’s a clear age predominance, the older folks. And one way then I think that’s really valuable is a number of the state government jurisdictions have been emphasising young farmers, you know, and women farmers and farmers from other groups. And I think that what that does is just continue to drive that diversity component. So, I think we do have a problem now with absorption, with absorptive capacity. And I think it’s almost going to be a generational change that we’ll see it accelerate. And again, all of these things, um, you know, they’re additive. That’s the ecosystem perspective. If you’re seeing somebody in a closely aligned, perhaps a supply organisation to you making innovations as well as somebody who procures from you making innovations, then you’re in a community that is all jointly taking risk to see accelerated advantage. And I think that that creates a community culture. That is this ecosystem perspective or a cluster perspective that everybody’s in this together. We all recognise that we’re all feeling uncomfortable. But there’s something that can be said of shared discomfort. You know, listen to your individual, but we’re all in this. I reflect back to my own early postdoc years. Everybody around me, they were all in the same position. Not sure where they’re going to go next and how was this going to go, how many papers they’re going to generate? It wasn’t, but it was an incredibly creative time, when you look back at what was delivered, I think that’s what we’ve got to do. And so, that’s about, you know, we see it in a range of things. We see the mentoring programs, you know, like under ATSE (Australian Academy of Technological Sciences & Engineering) and through AIFST, the way we’re celebrating young tall poppies. I think that’s all good. I think that’s the way that at least from the, that’s more the demand, sorry, the push end, the supply, I recognise that. And, but I recognise there’s also those activities in the demand side as we celebrate businesses that do adapt and innovate fast. That’s us as a community going, you know, ‘Look, we really appreciate that. We’re all feeling it. But you did really well in that complex environment.’
CB: And I think that demand side absorptive capacity is the bit that I’m particularly interested in solving and resolving. Just to touch on that generational change. So, I get the sense there, Greg, as much as it’s generational, because the farming communities around most developed economies are aging, you know, that average age is creeping higher and higher. But I’m going to slightly reinterpret generational change to a broader demographic change. So, it’s not just moving from the 60-year-olds to 20- to 40-year-olds as it passes down through the family. But it’s more women, it’s a more diverse… background and those things that you are pointing to.
GH: I agree with you…but, you know, there’s whole activities in the farming community talking about how you do succession planning and how you, how we get around the fact that these assets are incredibly expensive and it’s difficult for people to buy in. So, there’s a range of models. And I think that that’s a particularly interesting form of change, you know, bringing just energetic minds that have been given another historical training to look at these problems in a completely different way. And that will drive, you know, because lots of folks will have been influenced by the perspectives of sustainability and different ways of land use and this sort of thing.
CB: Yeah, yeah. So, Greg, in wrapping up when we started introducing you at the top of the show, I noted that you were in Berlin. Tell us what Berlin’s about as we wrap up today. Why are you there and what’s next for the next few months for you?
GH: So…Yeah. Thanks, mate. So, what happened was, you know that we are some colleagues and I during Covid, wrote the case for a thing called NorVicFoods, which was at the time we framed it as development of an agri food cluster type idea up around Shepparton, the Hume region of Victoria. This really captured my interest. I knew from my time in state government that this would work. And, you know, the best thing we did was hire Lisa Birrell and she got on and did a great job, uh, really driving that forward. So, we’ve, um, evaluated the performance of NorVicFoods with a couple of external thinkers like yourself. We’ve done a hard-nosed evaluation of it, but I’m wanting to think about it now in the context of ecosystems. What did we do and what didn’t we do? So, being a bit critical, right. What didn’t we do that we could have done? The Europeans and particularly the Germans have a very active system of of clusters and ecosystems. And they have formal ways of evaluating performance of these things, one versus the other. So, I want to learn a bit about that. Position myself…
CB: Yeah, excellent.
GH: A colleague here called, uh, Søren. So, Professor Søren Salamo, he leads a group in technology and innovation management at the Technical University here in Berlin. These folks are very embedded in this sort of ecosystem thinking. And so, I’m looking to learn. I’ll write it up and make it available to colleagues, you know, hopefully later on this year. So, that’s what I’m up to.
CB: Oh, that’s fantastic
GH: And, of course we’re seeing our daughter.
CB: Yes, yes.
GH: Who lives here.
CB: She offered us a pearl of wisdom as we chatted.
GH: She did. I’ll thank her.
CB: No, please do thank her. So, Greg, that’ sounds a terrific reason to go to Berlin. And I’m sure you will see other things beyond the inside of the university that you’re visiting. So, enjoy your time over there, Greg. It has been great getting you on to the show. I’m very pleased because I’ve been talking about this for a long time, and now that you’re free of the University of Melbourne, we’re able to get some time together and just talk quite freely about our experiences.
GH: And thank you for the opportunity. And thanks to all of those organisations that, you know, helped me along on the ride, including University of Melbourne. But, you know, thanks for recognising, I’m kind of sitting in a unique position to look at these different organisations and hopefully share that knowledge.
CB: No, Greg, indeed you are and hence I was very keen to have you. So, thank you for coming on the podcast and enjoy the rest of your time in Berlin. Auf wiedersehen.
GH: Auf wiedersehen und danke.