Comment #3 – “How should specialist advice be delivered?”

The provision of information should be delivered like a sales funnel.

The vast majority should be directed to the Internet for information. This will allow some people to self-select, delivering a smaller number to Workshops. This, again, will encourage a smaller number to self-select to attend Formal training and then Individual coaching.

Toolkits are a waste of tax payer money. By the time they move through the various bureaucratic channels, they will be out of date.

Treating the entire process like a sales channel creates the infrastructure to install clear KPIs.

The managing body should be required to attract, for example, 1,000 ‘unique browsers’ (i.e. prospective start-ups/researchers) to an educational website per month. The success of the site could be measured by the percentage that register for Workshops, graduate to formal training sessions etc, culminating in a real business (defined at the point when revenue is made).

Like any commercial business, the managing body should be required to track ‘conversions’ through the system, delivering genuine, well-educated, appropriately structured companies that actually graduate at the point when real customers are acquired and revenue generated.

I’m personally sick of abstract measurements to determine the success of most ‘innovation’ related initiatives.

Give me real numbers.

It would be very exciting to track the number of organisations that ‘enter the funnel’ against the number that ‘graduate’.

Organisations without clear KPIs and conversion ratios are rarely commercial and invariably fail (without access to government support). If the government wants the Institute to be be commercial sustainable, it must abide by commercial rules.

[Reply]

James,

Again I think you have got the fundamental thrust right. The devil is in the detail of course but the sales funnel approach that steps prospective innovations through a process that weeds out the pretenders and supports the real contenders is the way things have to do. Just how that is executed efficiently and accurately will be an interesting challenge.

We already have a very successful sporting analogy for the CCI and the wider process, the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS). We could pretty much take the AIS model lock stock and barrel and apply it to the commercialisation of R&D and you would not be far wrong.

The AIS:
* Identifies talent through open competitive processes (sporting competition)
* Supports and develops that talent (coaching, funding, training, facilities)
* Conducts applied research into how to best develop that talent
* Provides a focus and centre of excellence
* Supports sattelite centres of excellence
* Helps provide and enduring critical mass of relevant talent
* Supports the dissemination of knowledge and development and transfer of skills
* Provides high achieving examples for others to aspire to
* And much much more.

It has a clear focus to produce results at the top level and does a brilliant job of doing that. The process for the successful commercialisation of Australian R&D is not that different to identifying and developing Australia’s best sporting talent.

In this model where sporting clubs and associations are the grass roots, existing channels in the innovation and commercialisation space (such as the CSIRO, Universities [and their commercialisation arms], Innovic, AIC, VC’s, ANZATech, Incubators, AIIA, AAAI, MEGA, Austrade, AusIndustry, MMV etc etc) should also be used and leveraged in co-ordinated well-organised way.

[Reply]