Cruxes Innovation’s Response to the Ambitious Australia Report

The Ambitious Australia report is a welcome step toward a more connected, impact-oriented RD&I system. At Cruxes Innovation, we strongly support the report’s call for a more ambitious national approach that recognises research and innovation as drivers of productivity, resilience, sustainability, and new industry creation.

We share the view that Australia has tremendous, untapped potential to direct world-leading research towards creating innovations that address complex challenges.  We agree that unlocking this potential requires stronger research-industry collaboration, greater support for research translation and entrepreneurship, more and smarter capital, and a system designed to drive discoveries towards translation and adoption.

But, if we agree that maintaining Australia’s standard of living requires research-driven innovation to create entirely new industries, we believe there are several areas that deserve even more attention.

First, we need to fuel a system in which our applied research is designed from the start to address challenges defined not by researchers alone but in close collaboration with the people who experience these challenges.  Research-informed solutions aimed at addressing these challenges often disrupt existing approaches and catalyse whole new industries.  These solutions must be designed in collaboration with the target end-users to give them quantifiable adoption benefits – as we are doing successfully in creating Australia’s quantum industry. 

Next, system reform alone is not enough. We also need to build the human capability that makes research translation happen.  We must nurture researchers’ and technical specialists’ skills and confidence to engage beyond the lab, work across sectors, and co-create research with societal impact and adoption from the beginning.

Thirdly, culture and incentives inside institutions matter. If universities want more engagement, translation, and entrepreneurship, then researchers must see workload models, career pathways, promotion criteria, and leadership action changing accordingly.

Fourth, research translation and commercialisation are not only a funding challenge. Especially in Australia, where the innovation absorption capacity of much of our industry is limited, they are also a venture creation challenge.  Our emerging quantum industry shows that, with the right support, new industry sectors can be created largely by research-driven startups.  To amplify and replicate this, market validation and venture-building need far more attention.

And finally, the biggest gains from our R&D ecosystem are right before our eyes.  Research shows that today, more than 90% of research translation projects fail, with huge financial and emotional cost.  The emerging field of innovation science, largely based on Australian research, uses objective evidence to identify the factors that cause success and failure in research translation, and gives us the keys to guide translation projects and dramatically increase innovation success rates.  This will give us more economic and social impact from current R&D investments – Minister Ayres’ goal, outlined in his National Press Club address. The other initiatives described here will only amplify this.

The national blueprint matters. But so do the people working at the coalface of discovery, innovation, and collaboration. 

At Cruxes Innovation, we believe researchers and innovators themselves are often best placed to lead the creation of impact based on their ideas, when the right structures and support are in place.

We’re encouraged by the direction of the Ambitious Australia report.  Now the opportunity is to ensure that national reform is matched by the practical, evidence-based, human enablers that help research-driven innovation shape a more just, sustainable, and flourishing economy.