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Media releases: Index - Training challenge
- National Innovation System
- CHASS - the next step
- Toss Gascoigne steps down
- Innovation
- Rigor and relevance
- Federal Budget 2008
- PhD scholarship
- Excellence in Research
- Review of innovation systems
- Australian Research Council
- Three key Ministers
- Education revolution?
- ALP Research initiatives
- ALP Arts policy
- Chief Scientist and PMSEIC
- Pity about cluster funding
- RQF Chairs announcement
- RQF 'new opportunities for HASS'
- Job for boundary-spanners
- New President for CHASS
- Post-smokestack industry era
- Measures of quality and impact
- National research priorities
- PMSEIC appointment
Review of innovation systems 'long overdue'
22 January 2008
CHASS today (Tuesday) welcomed the announcement of a review of Australia's national innovation system.
Professor Stuart Cunningham, President of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, said that CHASS sees this as an important step to enable Australia to move beyond an old 1960's smokestack view of innovation.
"Modern innovation depends on bringing people together to work on a problem, making the best use of the available talent," he said.
"Many of our national policies are set as though the natural sciences – physics, chemistry, biology and so on – are the only sources of innovation.
"The R&D tax concession only applies to the natural sciences. It excludes any research that industry may conduct in the humanities, arts and social sciences."
Professor Cunningham said that this flew in the face of the fact that Australia is primarily a services economy, and all disciplines had a part to play in creating employment and generating wealth.
"The Productivity Commission accepted the role of our sector in its report on Science and Innovation last year, and we saw that as the beginnings of a change in the national approach to innovation," he said.
But current systems offer little encouragement for research in cross-disciplinary areas, despite the fact that this is where solutions to the most enduring problems and the most exciting new industries are found.
"It is difficult for an engineer to work with a social scientist on better and fairer ways to allocate Australia's scarce water supplies, for instance," he said.
"This is exactly the sort of collaboration we should be encouraging, yet our funding systems and university structures make it difficult."
"Australia has strong elements of a national innovation system, but the linkages between the elements need improvement."
Professor Cunningham congratulated the Minister on the quality of the people he had attracted to the Review Committee, under the chairmanship of Dr Terry Cutler.
He said that CHASS is preparing a series of research papers focusing on the innovation system, and will make a strong submission to the review.
See also: Media release from Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research,
- For interview: Professor Stuart Cunningham 0407 195 304
- For information: Toss Gascoigne 0408 704 442
- Executive Director
- Council of the Humanties, Arts and Social Sciences
- Phone: +61 2 6249 1995
- director@chass.org.au
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