IN GENIUS
sitting at about half the OECD average. It’s all too easy to deem R&D a luxury rather than a necessity. Thus we had farmers last year vote to cut the levy that supported wool research, with a consequent loss of scientific skills, knowledge and potential future development. Government cutbacks have been just as debilitating, whether dropping post-doctoral scholarships which once helped support our brightest talent or requiring our Crown Research Institutes to trim, trim and trim again to make commercial gains. Science is particularly vulnerable to the loss of expertise. It can take years to develop the knowledge, experience and collaborative networks that underpin discovery, and in this country that can all be swept away with the loss of even one or two strategic people. Each time the cuts come round, it seems to be the physicists and taxonomists, the molecular biologists and the invertebrate experts that go, not the management layers. Sadly, the public research experiment of the Crown Research Institutes appears to have boosted the job prospects for business management, administrative staff and funding proposal consultants, rather than boosting our capabilities in research. Even worse, the contestable funding approach has created significant rifts between the CRIs and the universities, the joint Centres for Research Excellence notwithstanding. Last year, the 2025 Taskforce recommended that there should be no further increases in the amount of public funding allocated to research and development. Instead we should be encouraging firms to innovate. Now we have a new Ministry of Science and Innovation. And once more a call to shift focus – and funding – from blue skies research to the applied stuff
that is predicted to provide commercial outcomes. As a long-term observer of such things, it has felt a bit like “Groundhog Day” at times. Every couple of years there’s been another white paper or policy analysis regarding the importance of scientific literacy in the population; the need to boost R&D and commercialise scientific innovation; the value of having scientific expertise at board level. And there’s the seemingly ever-changing parade of institutional amalgamations, logo redevelopment and rebranding, and enthusiastic press releases about how this time the new ministry/institute/policy initiative will bring a focus on innovation and commercialisation to boost New Zealand’s economy with our new-found knowledge. But there’s a vicious circle at work. If you want the applied innovation, you need the brains and experience to identify those lucrative opportunities or, as often happens, to recognise when some oddball result in an apparently unrelated blue skies research programme has the potential to become a major industry. To get those brains, you need the universities, research institutions and CRIs alike to attract the best staff they can and keep them. And those senior researchers need to be in place to be able to mentor, inspire and enthuse the up-and-coming generation that will power the research, development and, yes, commercialisation of the future. Will the graduates of 2014 have better prospects than those of 1994? You’ll forgive me if I don´t make any rash predictions. Vicki Hyde is a long-time science commentator, having been editor and publisher of the New Zealand Science Monthly and managing editor of SciTechDaily Review.
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