Commercialisation still coming into focus

A new survey of commercialisation activity in Australia's universities, medical research institutes and national research agencies shows they are lagging well behind their Canadian and US counterparts.

The latest health check on commercialisation activity detected an erratic pulse, but the second National Survey of Research Commercialisation, released in late October by the federal education minister, Dr Brendan Nelson, confirms the patient is not thriving, despite increasing injections of taxpayer funds.

A press release from Nelson's office announcing the results of the survey struggled to put a positive slant on its findings. The minister welcomed the increased response - 113 research agencies completed the survey, up 50 on the first survey in 2000. But he observed that a relatively small number of organisations accounted for the bulk of commercialisation activity, "suggesting there are some high performers in the system, from whom others could learn".

Among other findings, the survey reported that seven of Australia's 38 universities employ no commercialisation staff; six others employed only one commercialisation officer at the time of the survey. Fourteen universities, including Victoria's Monash, Deakin and La Trobe universities, recorded zero income from licensing, patenting and spin-off companies.

One of Australia's smaller universities, the University of New England, topped the university table with a 13 per cent return from licensing, on research expenditure of US$32.9 million [the report converted Australian and Canadian dollar figures to US dollars, to facilitate comparisons].

In a commentary in last week's issue, Prof Michael Vitale of the Australian Graduate School of Management awarded only a "conceded pass" to Australia's universities for their commercialisation performance. Vitale said the survey showed Australian universities consistently underperformed their US and Canadian peers in research commercialisation, and on many measures, their performance has fallen since the first survey in 2000.

The national research agency, CSIRO, also fared poorly on the reported figures. While it ranked second, behind the University of Queensland, in gross income from licensing in 2002, its revenues of US$7.5 million equated to a return only a 1.3 per cent return on its research expenditure of US$593.75 million in 2002.

Among medical research institutes, Melbourne's Austin Research Institute was a runaway winner, with licensing revenues equivalent to 50.4 per cent on the US$4.62 million it spent on research in 2002.

But Nigel Poole, head of CSIRO's commercial group in Sydney, cautioned against attaching too much weight to the survey's findings, because the survey's methodology was complex and probably unfamiliar to many research agencies, and would take a number of years before it settled down sufficiently to allow reliable comparisons.

"The attempt to measure commercial activity is great, but it provides only an aggregate measure, and we must be careful about drawing conclusions," he said.

"It's also old data -- CSIRO's revenues from commercial activity have grown by 60 per cent, to AUD$22 million, since 2000, but those figures won't be taken into account until next year."

Poole said Stanford University, which came near the top of the US university survey, had probably used a denominator chosen to yield the most favourable percentage of revenues earned from dollars invested in research and development.

He said CSIRO performed a large amount of 'public good' research in areas like the environment, climatology and oceanography, which offered few prospects to earn commercial revenues, or to spin off companies.

Moreover, it was involved in a large amount of syndicated research for traditional industries like mining and minerals, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, wine and cotton, funded via industry organisations like the Australian Mining Industry Research Association, and agricultural research and development funds.

"There is a lot of sharing of research results, and the R&D benefits are very large, but there is little opportunity royalty or licensing flows," Poole said. "You could say we should be evolving away from these syndicated or collaborative research arrangements, but there is considerable inertia in the system. We can't change overnight from a diffusion model to a transaction model."

The University of New England in Armidale is earning its millions from booming sales of its animal breeding software to the livestock industries in Australia and overseas.

The software, which has names like BreedPlan and PigBlup, distils decades of animal genetics research, according to the university's manager of consulting and industry liaison, Anneke van Mosseveld.

The university tops the list with 38 staff involved in commercialisation work - around 20 of them are located in the Agricultural Business Research Institute, a 100 per cent-owned UNE subsidiary.

"We followed the survey guidelines in including the ABRI staff and its commercial revenues in our figures, but only two of our commercialisation staff actually work in the university, so we would otherwise rank somewhere near the bottom," van Mosseveld said.

Jonathon Sanders, chief operating officer for MonCom, Monash University's commercialisation arm, said at the time of the survey in 2002, the university had lacked the capability to aggregate multiple data sets from across its faculties, so had recorded its commercial revenues as zero, rather than give an unreliable figure.

Sanders said Monash was probably earning around half a million dollars a year through licensing and spin-offs, but accorded a lower priority to commercialising its research than it did to its core activities of teaching and research.

Sanders said that while the federal government exhorted universities to commercialise their discoveries, it was expensive to do so, and the government provided little financial incentive to encourage such activity.