SMELLIE SNIFFS THE BREEZE: Down in the Lab

SMELLIE SNIFFS THE BREEZE: Down in the Lab

By Pattrick Smellie

March 5 (BusinessWire) - As a bouncy young Minister in 1992, Simon Upton dismembered the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and created the Crown Research Institutes, to various shrieks of heresy and with perhaps too much the idea they should act like private companies.

In 2010, today's somewhat backroom-y Science Minister, Wayne Mapp, has presided over the first major review of the CRIs since then, and concluded they're fit for purpose, apart from the top-heavy way they're governed.

First, says the taskforce headed by venture capitalist Neville Jordan, it advises allowing these potential engines of big answers and wealth to do their jobs themselves, with a good board of directors, overseen by only one set of regulatory, let alone political masters. Unlike today.

How can any organisation, let alone one charged with discovering knowledge, pursue a strategy when MoRST, FoRST, the Treasury, and probably MAF, MED and MfE, are all breathing down your neck with quasi-governance roles? Just keeping track of the acronyms would be hard enough, let alone the conflicting signals that exist for CRIs at present.

It's amazing no one's acted on it earlier.

Other proposals will also be music to the ears of a generation of scientists run ragged by competing like lab rats for contestable funds. Instead of a quarter of all funding being contestable, scientific inquiry needs longer term certainty, the taskforce says, echoing the findings of an OECD officials review in 2007.

It suggests only around 10% of all funding should be fought over - that would be a big change. It would keep some skin in the game for competitive tension, but remove an over-emphasis on short term value creation, to the potential detriment of breakthroughs and much greater wealth and benefits if projects are nurtured for longer. Science is a product of autism as well as fast talking, and too much loquacity has won out just lately.

As to the profitability spur, the taskforce says: let government-funded science prove financial viability and long term national value rather than annual profits.

“This emphasis encourages CRIs to deliver $1 million to their bottom lines rather than $100 million to New Zealand as a national benefit," says the taskforce in a moment of rare and unscientific hyperbole.

Working out exactly what long term measures should look like is a challenge. You could end up having to keep the faith for a long time while fearing you'd backed the wrong horse. On the other hand, if boards have responsibility and international reviews remain part of the puzzle, the likelihood of big disasters is small.

And if science is innovation, then failure must be tolerated, even if the cost is hard to measure in advance.

Since Upton's reforms nearly 20 years ago, scientists have experienced a period of shock, change both good and bad, an increase in form-filling, maddeningly unrealistic demands about capital returns and an unspectacular but credible rate of patentable discoveries.

In other words, in the face of adversity and also some chances, they've kept on doing a good job.

If they hadn't, there would have been no Prime Ministerial launch this week of the centre for agricultural greenhouse gas emissions research involving Massey University - still tops in animal and plant science nationally - AgResearch and various other elements of the sometimes confusing landscape of local scientific institutions.

Equally, there would be no New Zealand-led global effort to create a global research coalition to focus on our most problematic greenhouse gases - methane and nitrous oxide from pastoral farming - which just happen to be a big issue in the Third World. Without that credibility, International Climate Change Negotiations Minister Tim Groser would not be hosting a two-day international conference in Wellington, in May to set that coalition off and running. This is a New Zealand contribution to global climate change action, far more meaningful than bandying percentage reductions across a negotiating table in Copenhagen.

Nor are the CRIs the only game in town. New Zealand science also happens in universities, which were untouched by the CRI taskforce that reported this week, along with occasional outposts of independently rigorous science, such as Nelson's Cawthron Institute for fisheries research.

Even in the private sector, to a woefully limited extent, science happens in New Zealand.

So what the CRI report says about science and innovation policy is only part of the story.

Elsewhere, the Prime Minister's Chief Science Adviser, Peter Gluckman, is corralling opinion and, no doubt, exerting his own uniquely persuasive influence in his support for most of what the taskforce has said, plus a few things.

He has a deep view on New Zealand's natural advantages - like the nimbleness of a small population of clever people when put to the test.

The CRI taskforce report may have landed with barely a background thud for the mainstream media this week, but its implications - and those of the policies in science and innovation being shaped ahead of the Budget - are potentially profound.

(BusinessWire)