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Good morning everyone.
I’d also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands here on Turrbul and Jagera country and thank Songwoman Maroochy for her generous welcome to country this morning.
I’m very mindful of how much we have to learn from Australia’s first scientists, not just from their many thousands of years as custodians of this land, but today as they apply culture and knowledge to modern challenges with resilience, tenacity and courage. It’s a great privilege at CSIRO to continually learn from our Indigenous colleagues.
I’d also like to thank Minister Ed Husic for his opening remarks.
One of the things that resonates for me about a Future Made in Australia is the opportunity to harness the experience, talent and creativity in this room to diversify and transform our industrial structure to meet the challenges of the energy transition, and create a more self-sufficient nations.
And of course, thank you to Cooperative Research Australia and Jane O’Dwyer for the invitation to be here among so many respected colleagues today.
I bring apologies from CSIRO’s Chief Executive, Doug Hilton, who unfortunately can’t join us, but sends his best wishes for a productive conference.
I want to acknowledge the many partners and collaborators in the room today and call out the evolution of CRA to focus on collaborative research in many forms and vehicles, which has been great to see.
Certainly, CRA is about more than CRCs, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge the incredible impact that CRCs have on our research system.
CSIRO has worked with more than 150 CRCs since their inception, but I’ll just call out a few partnerships that are particularly well-aligned with the themes of our conference this week:
- As we continue the vital national work of reconciliation, First Nations Innovation is a critical part of our research, for example the collaboration between CSIRO and the SmartSAT CRC on AquaWatch Australia.
- And as Australia moves towards its net zero future, exciting work is being done with the HILT, Future Fuels and the Zero Net Emissions from Agriculture CRCs working with several CSIRO missions.
- There is also cutting-edge research in the Cyber Security CRC, which is sharing its work in cyber assurance for energy systems.
Looking around this room, none of us are strangers to research that goes to the heart of national challenges, and we all know the ups and downs of working closely with industry to achieve those goals.
Solving big national and global challenges through research and industry has become almost the default framing today, following the lead set by people like European economist and so-called ‘mother of missions’ Mariana Mazzucato, and recently positioned for the Australian context by Treasurer Jim Chalmers.
At CSIRO, this has taken the shape of our purpose-led or challenge-led research, coined the Missions program, launched in 2020 at the height of a pandemic – at a time of unprecedented cooperation and collaboration in Australian and, indeed, global research.
This was a golden moment in time – at least for research and industry collaboration.
Four-plus years later, we have the opportunity to continue to build on those gains if we are rigorous in understanding lessons from this time.
In parallel, Collaborative Research Australia has also been evolving.
Many of you will know the CRA's history — it recognised the need and value of collaboration in different programs like RDCs, Growth Centres, CSIRO, and CRCs.
In my time this morning, I’d like to share a few lessons from undertaking mission-orientated innovation. And hopefully we’ll have a few minutes at the end for Q&A.
I think we also need to recognise that, as we look around this room, there are inevitably voices we don’t have at the table, or don’t have enough of, or give space to – which goes to my first lesson from our missions, aligned with the First Nations Innovation theme of our conference this week.
R&D outcomes are better when we engage, listen and collaborate with First Nations.
You don’t get to be the oldest – and I would argue the richest – continuous culture in the world without innovating.
You don’t thrive for millennia without being able to adapt, create, and innovate in an environment that can be extraordinarily harsh, unpredictable, and constantly changing.
There is much to learn from the original stewards of this land, which is why it is essential they have a seat at the table when it comes to working on our big collaborations.
We have a long way to go, and no doubt we have missed opportunities, but CSIRO is committed to achieving better science outcomes through our engagement with local Indigenous communities and by committing to recognise and value Indigenous knowledge systems.
Through establishing AquaWatch Australia, we’ve been learning the meaning of engagement.
AquaWatch is focused on monitoring water quality to help safeguard freshwater and coastal resources in Australia.
When it began in 2022, researchers started on a pilot test site on the Great Barrier Reef where the first sensors were installed. But a key element had been missed - engagement with the Darumbal People, whose Country it is.
That was nearly two years ago, and there have been significant changes since then, like early engagement and factoring this into planning, exploring opportunities for data sharing, and working towards Indigenous Ranger support for operating and maintaining the site. We have also invested in an uplift in cultural capability training.
The team is now also looking at co-designed and Indigenous-led pilot sites.
It’s too early to talk significant science outcomes for AquaWatch as a consequence of this deeper engagement, but it’s looking very positive – and we are starting to see the green shoots of collaboration at a smaller scale elsewhere.
Secret Harvest and its brand Native Secrets are owned by Bidjara and Kara Kara man Phil Thompson and Wailwan woman Cherie Thompson.
They began working with CSIRO in 2022 to explore the potential of a plant Indigenous to the area around their farm on Wurundjeri Country outside Dubbo, and in other parts of Australia.
We helped them develop an extraction process for native plants which evolved into a successful skincare company using ingredients Western science wouldn’t have dreamt of, like Finger Lime, Kakadu Plum and Buddha Wood.
This collaborative spirit has supported the success of other companies too, such as Indigenous biotech startup Rainstick who I know we’ll be hearing from soon.
CSIRO was privileged to work with Rainstick through our ON and Kickstart programs.
The company harnesses electricity to increase crop yield, reduce pesticide use, and strengthen food systems.
In doing so, it combines traditional knowledge with modern science to create an innovation in sustainable agriculture.
This leads me to the second lesson, which is aligned with the Net Zero theme of our conference this week.
To shift systems, we need to collaborate with those that shape the major sectors of our economy.
As I’m sure everyone here is aware, when it comes to collaborations with industry there’s a different set of rules and considerations at play.
For Towards Net Zero, we always knew collaboration with industry would be a fundamental part of the program given Australia’s hard-to-abate sectors produce 20 per cent of our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions every year.
Did we know from the outset how to engage and how to develop a shared sense of the problem? Not exactly.
As is the theme of this speech, it has been an iterative process with steps forwards and backwards as we have learnt about ourselves, our partners and the environment around us has changed.
When it came to the mission objective, we started with: ‘developing Australia’s first net zero emission resource production region.’
We started with this hypothesis, and through engaging robustly with industry – learned it wasn’t expansive or ambitious enough. Our partners wanted a response proportionate to the scale of the challenge.
So we refined and re-scaled.
That’s how we landed on the next iteration of the objective, which focused on three hard-to-abate sectors: aviation, steel and agriculture.
This took into account the big levers of change and then aligned them to the needs of the people in our regions.
It was through this mission that we brought multiple partners together to work on Sustainable Aviation Fuel – or SAF as it’s known.
Aviation is one of the most challenging industries to decarbonise, contributing two and a half per cent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
Failure to adopt sustainable aviation fuels could leave Australia lagging in global aviation standards, risking economic penalties and reducing global competitiveness.
France and Austria have banned short-haul flights under two and a half hours, and regions marry aviation decarbonisation targets with various policy mandates and incentives.
With our love for travel and our strength in agriculture and producing feedstocks, Australia is in a prime position to benefit from a strong SAF industry.
In 2023 we worked with Boeing to develop the SAF Roadmap, consulting with over 40 organisations across the value chain to introduce industry to the enormous commercial opportunities of SAF.
Being able to socialise the roadmap has led to projects with domestic airlines and refiners looking at building a supply chain based on known bio feedstocks and working to ensure building our new fuels meets the most stringent international standards.
We have also seen the establishment of the Jet Zero Council and significant investment into the commercialisation of low-carbon liquid fuels in the most recent budget.
Now to my final lesson learned.
The way we collaborate needs to evolve as the environment around us changes.
CSIRO has been around for a century, harnessing science and innovation to solve our nation’s challenges.
But the system has changed since we began, and so has the science, and the challenges we are trying to solve.
That means the way we collaborate also needs to evolve. This might seem obvious, but the most successful collaborations are those that plan to adapt.
Take Towards Net Zero, for example, since that mission launched in 2022 there have been many changes in the operating environment that have affected our model for collaboration.
The government has changed, new departments like the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water have been established, community expectations have shifted, and industry is leaning in more than ever.
This has impacted not only CSIRO’s role in the mission but arguably every partner’s role and stake.
The Catalysing Australia’s Biosecurity mission utilises a model we are especially proud of – it being our first fully co-designed and co-led mission from inception and planned with adaptability at its core.
Launched in March this year, it began with the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry recognising the complex and interconnected challenge facing Australia’s biosecurity.
More frequent pandemics, incursions of invasive species and other threats to our health and environment required a multi-faceted, urgent approach.
Together with DAFF, we launched the mission, bringing together partners across the system like Plant Health Australia, the Centre for Invasive Species Solutions and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who are often on the frontline when it comes to identifying invasive species on Country.
So what’s the so what?
I wanted to finish my remarks today by posing a few simple questions from these lessons.
As innovators and researchers and entrepreneurs and leaders – what should we be thinking about when we think about enhancing Australia capabilities as an innovation nation?
Because succeeding here will be about asking ourselves tough questions:
Questions like: When we establish coalitions and build partnerships around a challenge, we’re in a hurry to create change – but do we build in enough time and flexibility to accommodate change, and to genuinely engage and listen to stakeholders and partners?
Because change is a constant and we need to plan for it, and plan well.
Questions like: When we stand up teams around a challenge, do we back-in co-design and co-leadership as ways to provide resilience in the framework and team structure?
Because resilience is absolutely key. Traditional single-point command-and-control structures aren’t adaptable in world where we need to be considering the entire pathway from discovery, through to prototyping and testing, to delivering benefit at scale for the community.
Questions like: Are we all clear-eyed about the problems want to solve together, and speaking the same language about how we collaborate to solve them?
What I mean by that is that researchers in universities and government sometimes don’t really understand the problems that industry is trying to solve, and we end up shopping our solutions around, like answers looking for questions.
On the flipside, industry often struggles to frame their problems so that researchers can answer them, and we end up in the land of incremental innovation rather than doing ground-breaking R&D.
In many ways our experiment with Missions has been about addressing those challenges, and we’ve had a few setbacks – but also been part of some major successes.
Missions have catalysed new ways of thinking about the problems we're trying to solve, the impact we're trying to have, and how to collaborate more effectively as part of a national innovation system that is so much more than CSIRO, and indeed all of us in this room.
We'll continue to evolve our approach with Missions in collaboration with the system to ensure that together, we’re continuing to deliver the transformational, long-term change demanded by the challenges that face our nation.
Our goal is for mission ambitions to not be a 'CSIRO thing,' but to be collectively owned by coalitions, within and beyond this room.
So that’s our vision for CSIRO’s next chapter as part of the research-industry collaboration we need to solve Australia’s greatest challenges.
And, in the spirit of collaboration, I’d like to use our remaining time to hear your thoughts.
Over to you.
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