CSIRO lifting its game: Garrett

CSIRO was well on its way to addressing the raft of serious problems outlined in a confidential internal report, the organisation's chief has claimed.

Last week a Senate Estimates Committee heard excerpts from the top-secret report describing the science agency as aloof, arrogant, hierarchical, internally focused and unsustainable.

The document, completed last May, also said CSIRO's commercialisation record was patchy and that it was "overly focused on short-term revenue targets".

Speaking today from a CSIRO Top Management Review Workshop, chief executive officer Dr Geoff Garrett told Australian Biotechnology News that the organisation was "lifting our game and attacking projects in three major domains".

Garrett said this included improving CSIRO's responsiveness to the needs of state governments and the private sector, growing its international business and leveraging its intellectual treasure chest through more licensing agreements and spin-offs.

He said the steps were part of a strategic plan to increase turnover by 50 per cent to $1.3 billion by 2006.

"Despite the negatives, the report showed that CSIRO is doing great work but asked, from that high base how do we improve it further?" Garrett said.

"We're obviously addressing through our key areas the need to focus efforts more on building a critical mass and working more collaboratively across boundaries as well as accepting that we must partner or perish."

Excerpts of the report, which charts the agency's future plans, were read onto the public record as opposition science spokesman Senator Kim Carr questioned Dr Garrett on the strategy.

Criticisms contained in the candid report included that:

• The organisation could be characterised as having a defensive, vertical structure.
• Competition over external and internal funding has actively worked against free and open dissemination of knowledge and best practice.
• Ongoing waves of top-down organisational restructuring have damaged trust ... making it a difficult environment to promote openness and the sharing of information.
• In many areas ... CSIRO is no longer perceived to be competitive in either the international or national labour markets.
• CSIRO was commonly seen as aloof, arrogant and unresponsive.
• Its current mode of operation is not sustainable and inhibiting growth.

Responding to Senator Carr's questions on how the agency planned to address the problems, Garrett said CSIRO was a "remarkable" institution that Australia was fortunate to have.

"However, we are in a process of continual change in our nation, in the region and in the world, and we need to respond to those changes," he said.

"We need to become more responsive to our external marketplace, and we need to become less bureaucratic and hierarchical.

"We need to manage risk and not be risk adverse."

Senator Carr today said that while he sympathised with many of Garrett's concerns, particularly over the external earnings target that forces CSIRO to raise 30 per cent of its income from outside sources, the agency needed to be more transparent to the public.

"There are profound problems facing CSIRO and as one of Australia's national research icons it has to be defended as a public sector institution," Carr said.

He said the external earnings target had caused CSIRO's research to be geared towards unstable and erratic funding sources leaving insufficient opportunity for strategic thinking.

A review of the target by chief scientist Dr Robin Batterham was due for release in January but has been postponed. Dr Batterham could not be contacted today.

More information: Hansard, Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education Legislation Committee, February 21