Opinion Piece;
Written in response to Ambitious Australia, the Strategic Examination of Research and Development released March 17 2026.
In the comedy classic Hot Fuzz, the Neighbourhood Watch Alliance are respected, capable, well-intentioned pillars of the community. They’re deeply committed to their version of the village, and they will go to considerable lengths to protect it. Whenever anyone questions a decision, no matter how valid the challenge, the answer is always the same: the greater good.
This feels like the right frame for reading Ambitious Australia, the Strategic Examination of Research and Development released last week. The secretariat was jointly established by the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, the same Department that administers every program being consolidated into the new architecture. This is not a criticism of the individuals, but an observation about what any village council naturally protects, for the greater good, presumably.
A panel built for research governance
The panel are unquestionably capable professionals in their fields. A Tesla board chair with a career in deep governance experience. A former Chief Scientist and Vice-Chancellor with encyclopaedic knowledge of Australia’s research architecture. A distinguished surgeon who genuinely commercialised a medical breakthrough. The CEO of LaunchVic, the agency asking “how do we create more startups.”
What the panel didn’t include was anyone with the experience of establishing and operating a company in Australia, not one commercial translation practitioner. And while “the invitation was open”, the reality for most Australian companies is they are flat out competing to survive, not sitting around looking for opportunities to share opinions with committees.
Where the diagnosis is sound
We should be clear about the many problem statements this report gets right.
- The economic complexity diagnosis is confronting and accurate: 105th of 145 economies, with 43 per cent of export revenue from iron ore, gas and coal.
- The fragmentation problem is real: 150 programs across 13 portfolios, $14 billion in annual expenditure, and outcomes that don’t match the investment.
- Recommendation 15, the “if not, why not” procurement principle, is arguably the strongest idea in the document in terms of impact; government procurement that genuinely prioritises Australian capability would reshape incentives across the entire economy.
- The production tax credit instinct, the cultural change narrative, the call for outcome metrics rather than input measures all reflect honest diagnosis of persistent structural problems.
The report’s central metaphor is a flywheel: research creates knowledge, translation builds products and economic activity, economic success funds more research. It’s a sound framework with translation correctly identified as the critical stage. The flywheel only works if translation does but herein lies the problem; nowhere in the report’s architecture is the translation actor named.
The institutional gap
The National Strategic Initiatives are once again coordination bodies. They are not-for-profit, member-based entities that manage research programs and support startup creation. Startups are too early-stage to carry complex industrial innovations to global markets. Universities are and should be the research input, not the output pathway. Large multinationals are incentivised through the corporate citizen framework, but foreign corporations translating Australian research into their global supply chains is not the same as building Australian commercial capability.
What about established Australian companies, ones that already have customers, distribution networks, manufacturing capability, and a decade or more of market relationships? They don’t appear anywhere in the architecture. The flywheel has a stage with no actor.
Not everything deserves the same fate
Ambitious Australia calls for the consolidation of 38 entities into 18 NSIs, described as simplification. But not everything being consolidated deserves the same fate, and that distinction matters.
On the one hand, the CRC program has survived thirty years through multiple different governments. The program sustained relationships between researchers and industry, long enough for commercial outcomes to have a fighting chance, in timeframes that allowed the program to evolve. It works precisely because it does only one thing and keeps doing it, with the longevity to adapt and respond.
The Industry Growth Program on the other hand, was the mechanism explicitly designed to support established Australian companies. Administered under tight control by the Department, it has been unable to operationalise commercial company support. Rather than evaluate the approach and performance, the response is consolidation into the new institutional architecture and move on.
The governance blind spot
Throwing both into the same solution suggests the village council sees these as the same problem; they cannot tell the baby from the bathwater. With nobody in the room to point out the difference, these programs inadvertently head for the same fate in the name of the greater good.
Where the report comes closest is in Recommendation 6, a collaboration voucher enabling existing businesses to access research capability from universities and publicly funded agencies. The instinct is right, but the direction matters enormously. Is the ambition for businesses to go to universities to conduct research projects? This is a theoretical economic “supply-push” model designed to produce research outcomes, but ignores commercial reality for Australian business. The models that successfully generate commercial outcomes from research excellence go the other way: research flows to commercially mature companies to create competitive advantage. One simple design change produces vastly different outcomes.
What systematic support actually looks like
In the Growth Centre, we tested this distinction at scale. Sixteen million dollars invested through existing Australian technology vendors, companies with customers and market access, generated over $900 million in annual revenue growth and more than 1,000 new jobs. These companies didn’t need a research voucher to visit a university. They needed systematic connection to innovation to build competitive advantage, to strengthen products that solved market challenges with customers they already understood.
Australia does not need more institutional coordination or startup programs. It needs systematic support for established Australian companies to translate local research into competitive advantage. Companies with market access and operational capability to deploy innovation globally. Without them, nothing changes: international acquisition, offshore transfer, Australia losing the very translation mechanism it has been unable to name.
Australia has produced a genuinely comprehensive examination of its R&D system, and the diagnosis is largely sound. The implementation architecture, however, has been designed by research governance and institutional coordination, and it shows. A flywheel built by the village, for the village, optimised for what the village wants. So when it comes to the hard stuff, the most fundamental flaw in our innovation ecosystem, sadly the ambition pivots to protect the status quo, justified by the greater good…, of course.
Adrian Beer is Managing Director of Australian Innovation Exchange and former CEO of METS Ignited, the Industry Growth Centre for Mining Equipment, Technology and Services.