Tag Archives: innovation

Shark detection

July 6, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

Sharks have an incredible sense of smell, but it is their sense of hearing that could be one of the keys to protecting people at beaches, says a team of researchers led by Dr Christine Erbe from Curtin University’s Centre for Marine Science and Technology.

“We had this idea of trying to figure out what acoustic signatures humans make, whether the sharks can hear them, and, if appropriate, whether we can somehow interrupt that,” says Erbe. These interruptions could then potentially be used to ‘hide’ or ‘mask’ the noises people make in the water from the sharks.

Western Australia is a pertinent place to work on this project, given the debate over baited drum lines to cull sharks, and the project has been funded by Western Australia’s Department of Commerce.

Initial recordings have been made of people in a pool swimming and snorkelling past a hydrophone – a microphone designed to record or listen to underwater sound. Erbe’s team records people swimming and surfing at beaches to see how far their noises travel. These sounds can then be played to sharks in enclosures at Ocean Park Aquarium in Shark Bay to check for any responses.

“If we see responses from the sharks, the next step is to figure out if we can mask the sounds of people in the water using artificial signals,” says Erbe. These artificial signals are band-limited white noise, created digitally. “We can see which frequencies, or part of the human sound signature, could be detected by the sharks and calculate the range limits at which that might occur. We can then design masking signals that fill in around them so those frequencies can’t be detected,” she says. The team will test these masking signals by playing them back to the sharks at Ocean Park Aquarium.

The outline of a shark shows clearly on a scanner used by the Curtin team.

This masking technique is different to other approaches where loud sounds are played at beaches to scare sharks away. The problem with the loud sound approach, says Erbe, is that it potentially interferes with an entire underwater ecosystem. The masking approach, on the other hand, is targeted at frequencies and levels that only sharks can hear in the surf zone. “We’re not looking at scaring the sharks away, we’re just limiting them from detecting humans,” she says.

According to Erbe, a multidisciplinary approach is crucial to solving problems such as shark mitigation, and her team ranges from physicists to acousticians, engineers and marine biologists.

Team member Dr Miles Parsons is leading another project on the sonar detection of sharks with the aim of building an early warning system. “The solution will have to be a combination of detecting sharks and preventing them detecting us,” says Erbe.

– Ruth Beran

cmst.curtin.edu.au

Health, News, Society

Multi-million-dollar deal brings UQ pain drug closer to reality

June 30, 2015 Karen Taylor-Brown Leave a comment

A chronic pain treatment discovered at The University of Queensland is a step closer to clinical use, with a global pharmaceutical giant acquiring the Australian-founded company developing the drug.

Spinifex Pharmaceuticals has been acquired by Novartis International AG for an upfront cash payment of $US200 million (about $A260 million), plus undisclosed clinical development and regulatory milestone payments.

Spinifex is a biopharmaceutical company founded by UQ commercialisation arm UniQuest.

UQ Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Peter Høj welcomed the acquisition and congratulated those involved.

“This is one of the largest Australian biotech deals in history, and is a stunning outcome for the company, the researchers and the investors,” Professor Høj said.

“Spinifex builds on the unprecedented commercial translation achievements of UQ, which includes the world’s first cancer vaccine, Gardasil.

“It is a shining example of UQ’s determination to take research from excellence to what I call ‘excellence plus’, developing a product that has potential to improve the lives of people around the world.”

Spinifex is developing the drug candidate EMA401, an oral treatment for chronic pain, particularly neuropathic pain (a type of nerve pain), without central nervous system side effects.

The technology is based on a discovery by UQ’s Professor Maree Smith.

Professor Smith said the acquisition brought EMA401 a step closer to the people who needed it most.

“Chronic pain can be a debilitating condition, most commonly associated with cancer chemotherapy, post-herpetic neuralgia (a painful condition that can follow shingles), diabetes, peripheral nerve injury and osteoarthritis.

“It’s wonderful to see this deal eventuate, bringing a much-needed treatment option a little closer to reality for the millions of pain sufferers around the world,” Professor Smith said.

UQ pain researcher Professor Maree Smith

UniQuest CEO Dr Dean Moss said Dr Smith’s work was at the cutting edge of pain research.

“Her achievements and expertise have contributed to the formation of the recently-launched Queensland Emory Drug Discovery Initiative (QEDDI),” Dr Moss said.

QEDDI, a collaboration between UQ and Emory University in the US, will see the development of drugs to combat health issues including cancer, diabetes, inflammatory disorders and infectious diseases.

EMA401 is a novel angiotensin II type 2 (AT₂) receptor antagonist being developed as a potential first-in-class oral treatment.

Professor Smith and UQ’s Dr Bruce Wyse’s research identified AT₂ receptor antagonists as inhibitors of neuropathic and inflammatory pain in preclinical models.

Spinifex is supported by a syndicate of investors, including UniQuest, NovoVentures (Novo A/S), Canaan Partners, GBS Venture Partners, Brandon Capital Partners and UniSeed (a venture fund operating at the Universities of Melbourne, Queensland and New South Wales).

Innovation, News, Technology

Dragonfly eyes inspire machine vision

June 29, 2015 Karen Taylor-Brown Leave a comment

Mechanical Engineering PhD Student Zahra Bagheri at the University of Adelaide in South Australia says that despite having low visual acuity and brains no bigger than a grain of rice, dragonflies are remarkably good at tracking prey.

“They’re not like mammals which have developed very good brains, and they have very low resolution eyes compared to other animals, but they can catch their prey more than 97 per cent of the time while they’re moving at very high speeds in very cluttered environments,” Bagheri says.

“That means they have adopted very efficient methods for target tracking.”

Bagheri is part of a team of engineers and neuroscientists that have used those methods to develop a machine vision algorithm that can be applied in a virtual reality simulation, allowing an artificial intelligence system to ‘pursue’ an object.

Her project is a combination of neuroscience, mechanical engineering and computer science, building on years of research in to insect vision already undertaken at the University of Adelaide.

Zahra Bagheri and Benjamin Cazzolato with the robot that will use the newly developed machine vision algorithm.

“Detecting and tracking small objects against complex backgrounds is a highly challenging task. Consider a cricket or baseball player trying to take a match-winning catch in the outfield,” Bagheri explains.

“They have seconds or less to spot the ball, track it and predict its path as it comes down against the brightly coloured backdrop of excited fans in the crowd – all while running or even diving towards the point where they predict it will fall!”

This is known as selective attention. Dr Steve Wiederman is leading the dragonfly project, and conducted the original research recording the responses of neurons in the dragonfly brain.

“Selective attention is fundamental to humans’ ability to select and respond to one sensory stimulus in the presence of distractions,” Dr Wiederman says.

“Precisely how this works in biological brains remains poorly understood, and this has been a hot topic in neuroscience in recent years,” he says.

“The dragonfly hunts for other insects, and these might be part of a swarm – they’re all tiny moving objects. Once the dragonfly has selected a target, its neuron activity filters out all other potential prey.”

“It has diverse applications. It can be used in surveillance, wildlife monitoring, smart cars and even bionic vision.”

The team has emulated that ability with their algorithm. Rather than trying to perfectly centre the target in its field of view, Bagheri says the system locks on to the background and lets the target move against it.

“This reduces distractions from the background and gives time for underlying brain-like motion processing to work. It then makes small movements of its gaze and rotates towards the target to keep the target roughly frontal,” Bagheri says.

Because the algorithm is based on a dragonfly’s small brain and limited vision, it can rival insects’ abilities as well as those of more elaborate machine vision systems – all with relatively low complexity.

“It’s shown that we can do it with very low resolution cameras and very limited computational resources. It doesn’t need high-performance computers or anything like that.”

This bio-inspired “active vision” system has been tested in virtual reality worlds composed of various natural scenes. The Adelaide team has found that it performs just as robustly as the state-of-the-art engineering target tracking algorithms, while running up to 20 times faster.

“We are hoping to test it on a robot – we’re working on that right now. It has diverse applications. It can be used in surveillance, wildlife monitoring, smart cars and even bionic vision.”

Bagheri is lead author of the paper, titled Properties of Neuronal Facilitation that Improve Target Tracking in Natural Pursuit Simulations, which was published this week in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface.

This article was published on The Lead on the 11th June 2015. Read the original article.

Environment, Innovation, News

Australia’s energy future

June 29, 2015 Karen Taylor-Brown Leave a comment

Australia’s renewable resources include wind, solar, wave and geothermal energy, and there’s significant research happening to improve generation and storage technologies to overcome the inherent disadvantage of intermittent flow.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has completed 32 projects and is managing more than 200 others, including several large-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) plants and wind farms, which are considered the most advanced technologies in terms of making a short-term impact on our renewable electricity generation.

Australia’s CRC for Renewable Energy (ACRE), which operated 1996–2004, developed a state-of-the-art facility for testing grid-connected renewable energy systems, as well as small-capacity wind turbines for remote generation.

Australian scientists at the CRC for Polymers (CRC-P) have made big strides in the development of flexible, lightweight solar cells, which CEO Dr Ian Dagley describes as the “antithesis” of rigid rooftop solar cells. These lightweight cells offer intriguing possibilities: their flexibility means they can be placed on a variety of surfaces, from walls to windows, and they can operate indoors to help charge electrical devices.

They’re also attractive because they’re considerably cheaper to manufacture than silicon solar cells. Dagley says his CRC-P team has been working on refining the manufacturing technique, which uses low-cost components and reel-to-reel printers. One of the goals is to increase the lifespan of the cells, which is about five years, whereas rigid cells last roughly 30 years.

Meanwhile, the CRC for Low Carbon Living (CRCLCL) is looking at ways to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions by developing smarter, more energy efficient buildings and cities. CEO Dr Deo Prasad says lower carbon buildings can be realised by optimising design to ensure maximum energy efficiency, through integration of next-generation technologies, such as solar PV cladding and heat and electricity capture systems for on-site energy offsets, and by using more sustainable building materials that need less energy to extract, process and manufacture. At the suburb and city scale, Prasad says decentralised renewable energy generation, reliable storage and smart grids, linked with information and communications technology-based intelligence, will lower carbon impacts.

“We recognise there is not going to be a silver bullet solution to carbon reductions,” says Prasad. “The approach needs to be holistic and driven by industry and governments.”

There are challenges associated with increased renewable energy levels, but Australia’s National Electricity Market seems to be handling integration well so far, says Dr Iain MacGill, joint director of the UNSW Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets. Studies by the Australian Energy Market Operator show it’s possible to operate the national grid with 100% renewables. “It won’t be cheap – just a lot cheaper than unchecked climate change,” MacGill says.

Russell Marsh, director of policy for the Clean Energy Council, emphasises the importance of commitment. “Investors need long-term certainty to ensure a rate of return,” says Marsh. “The Federal Government needs to lock in a firm, long-term target.”

MacGill agrees that the right policies can incentivise investment, but adds that it requires leadership and social consensus. “Australia is contradictory on clean energy. We have an early history and remarkable success in renewable energy deployment, and fantastic renewable resources. But we are also among the world’s largest coal and gas exporters,” he says.

“Will we take a leadership role, or do all we can to keep our international coal and gas customers buying from us?”

Remodelling energy

While coal and gas continue to be our dominant energy sources, the once-burgeoning renewables industry has been hindered by the Federal Government’s recent review of the Renewable Energy Target (RET). The review recommended scrapping the 20% target for renewable electricity generation by 2020, resulting in political deadlock and investor uncertainty across the renewable energy sector.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s Australian head, Kobad Bhavnagri, says the review was especially damaging because it came “very close to making retroactive changes to a policy”.

“Whenever retroactive changes are made to policy it becomes, essentially, Ebola for investors,” he says. “When governments act unpredictably and destroy the value of existing assets, it scares people – for a long time.”

Australia generates more carbon emissions per person than any other OECD country. One-third are generated by the electricity sector, in which coal and natural gas account for roughly 85% of generating capacity. Renewables, mostly from hydropower, account for about 15%.

Reaching the 20% target during the next five years will not be cheap. At the time of the review it was estimated that another $18 billion of investment would be required to reach the target.

But the costs associated with increased generating capacity are yet to be weighed against the costs of potentially catastrophic climate change. Scientists have warned a 2°C increase in overall average temperatures from pre-industrial levels is the limit our planet can withstand before the effects of climate change become irreversible.

In December 2014, following the release by the International Energy Agency (IEA) of its report World Energy Outlook 2015, the agency’s chief economist and director of global energy economics, Dr Fatih Birol, told Bloomberg’s Business Week that global investment in renewable energy needs to quadruple to a yearly average of $1.6 trillion until at least 2040, to stay below that warming threshold.

Some of the world’s biggest economies have taken note. Estimates by the Climate Interactive indicate the US-China emissions deal, if implemented in full, could keep some 580 billion tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere between now and 2030 – more than all global fossil fuel emissions from 1990 to 2013.

In 2014 – while China spent US$64 billion on large-scale clean energy projects, increasing its 2013 total by about US$10 billion – the USA spent nearly US$13 billion on utility-scale renewables and continued to expand production of its almost carbon-neutral shale gas reserves (see here for Australia’s progress).

Research by Bloomberg New Energy Finance found Australian investment in large-scale renewable energy in 2014 was US$223 million – the lowest in more than a decade. 2014 saw Australia nose-dive from 11th largest investor in commercial clean energy projects to 39th, behind developing nations such as Honduras and Myanmar.

The 2040 outlook

If Australia is serious about boosting its capacity for renewable energy, 2040 is a good deadline, says Iain MacGill, joint director (engineering) for the Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets at UNSW Australia – by then we’ll need “a major infrastructure transition”.

Russell Marsh is Director of Policy for the Clean Energy Council, the peak body representing Australia’s clean energy sector. “With the right level of support we could see the deployment of renewable energy at least double between 2020–2040,” he says. “But if the target is not extended beyond 2020, it is unlikely that we will see further growth.”

This view is backed by the Australian government’s Bureau of Resources and Energy Economics (BREE). In a November 2014 report looking towards mid-century electricity production, it reported “In the absence of potential new policy initiatives, the relative shares of fossil fuels and renewables in electricity generation are not likely to change significantly”.

In fact, BREE’s projections show renewable generating capacity remaining stable, meeting 20% of Australia’s total demand from 2020–2050. In this scenario, coal-fired power would still account for 65% of electricity by mid-century.

There are concerns that the current policy uncertainty is reaching a tipping point, which could see companies exiting Australia or going into distress.

Policy uncertainty is taking a toll on the business end of renewable energy.

In July 2014, RenewEconomy reported that Recurrent Energy, a US solar power plant developer being acquired by Canadian Solar, was planning to cease its Australian operations, citing concerns over policy uncertainty. Several other large international renewable energy companies, including Spain’s Acciona and US-based First Solar, have warned of possible exits, should the Renewable Energy Target be amended.

MacGill says exits are inevitable. “Why would an internationally focused renewable energy company stay if there is no prospect for their projects to go forward?

“They can, should and will depart at some point,” he says. “And with their departure, we will lose institutional capacity – such as people, money and industrial knowhow – which will inevitably
slow our ability to deploy clean energy, and increase its costs.”

Marsh agrees the risk to the industry is significant. “Every day, week and month that goes by with a cloud hanging over support for the renewable energy industry are days, weeks and months when our international competitors are racing ahead of us – and reaping billions of dollars in investment in this global growth market.”

Dr Deo Prasad, CEO of the CRC for Low Carbon Living, says that while the effects aren’t as dramatic, policy uncertainty also impacts the research community, especially “end-user driven projects where collaboration is essential”.

“Many a research direction and focus has had to change over the years, for the worse, due to policy uncertainty,” he adds.

– Myles Gough

CRC for Low Carbon Living

CRC for Polymers (CRC-P)

Careers, Highlight, News

Transforming innovation in Australia

June 26, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

When it comes to fostering innovation and the commercialisation of world class research, there is something the United States has that we lack. We ought to learn from the successes of the US in this area, and emulate one program they have pioneered to give our own innovative industries a much needed kickstart.

For dozens of Australian researchers returning to the country after working in the US, the lack of an equivalent to the US’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) scheme here reflects a major hole in our innovation ecosystem.

Charles Wessner, Professor at Georgetown University and Director of the Global Innovation Policy unit, says the SBIR scheme triggered a fundamental shift in attitudes in American universities when it was introduced in 1982.

According to Wessner, before SBIR, the Dean of a faculty would ask young academics how many publications were going to come out of their latest piece of research.

Thirty years on, the Dean is now asking whether the research can be converted into a product or service, and whether they should spin it out of the university to access SBIR funding. It has been a profound change of mindset, says Wessner.

Simple but effective

The SBIR scheme is a fairly simple design that hasn’t changed much since its introduction. US government agencies, which undertake more than US$100 million worth of R&D outside the agency, are required to allocate 2.8% of their R&D budget to these programs. Currently, eleven federal agencies participate in the program.

Each agency takes an active role in calling for R&D – “solicitations” is the term used in the US, and with a completely straight face – for areas of concern to them. For example, the US Department of Agriculture this year is calling for projects in 10 areas. They are unsurprising fields, like “aquaculture” and “biofuels and biobased products”, but with a bit more specificity under them.

Any small business (1–500 employees) can then bid to undertake projects against those solicitations. The US Department of Agriculture issues solicitations once a year, receives about 500 applications for “Phase 1” projects (those up to US$100,000 over up to eight months) and funds about 15–20% of them. If a project is success at Phase 1, they can apply for a Phase II award, which can be up to US$500,000 over two years. Some departments have further, larger Phase III stages, although the USDA doesn’t.

For the Department of Defense (DoD), 2.8% of its extramural R&D spend is a very large amount of money indeed. Moreover, if the Department of Defense is soliciting proposals for new work, it is very likely it’ll become the first customer of that small business if the project is successful.

The DoD already has a stake in the product, and is thinking about how it might work in its own ecosystem. Given the extreme complexity of military procurement procedures, having the DoD already staked in your product is a major advantage to a new company.

Carry on Phase II and then Phase III funding, sometimes in multiple series, are available in much larger amounts from the bigger agencies, and can run to tens of millions of dollars.

Don’t imagine that means all SBIR projects are short-term or lack scientific challenges. The US Navy uses about 1.4 billion tonnes of fuel annually, and the head of its energy program, Captain Jim Goudreau, said climate change transcends politics when you are talking about that much fuel.

He pointed out that the US military is already affected by climate change in many practical ways, like having less available live fire practice days each year in California. And as he said at the TechConnect World audience in Washington last week, the Navy is contracting for materiel to be delivered in 2040, which needs to be effective into the 2070s and 2080s. So it needs to cope with a changing climate.

Pull and push

At the TechConnect meeting in Washington last week, there were literally dozens of US federal groups talking to the science and business community about their innovation needs. Big departments, like defence and energy, are represented by many specialised teams seeking out companies to work for them.

It is “customer pull” in its rawest form. The science community is here in big numbers offering new technologies to the market. When “science push” and “customer pull” mix, then the chances of successful innovation rise to a new level.

At the same time in Philadelphia, the gigantic annual biotechnology conference, BIO, was underway with more than 15,000 participants from across the globe. The two big US science funding agencies – the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were there in force helping their SBIR companies meet up with big pharma and other collaborators to bring technologies to market.

It’s like a science festival writ large, but also in extreme detail, as companies search for new opportunities from the vast American research community.

Could it work in Australia?

The recent joint paper from Ian Macfarlane and Christopher Pyne, “Boosting Commercialisation of Research”, floated the idea that Australia needs an “SBIR-like” scheme. The Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) has often pointed out that the lack of such a scheme is a gaping hole in the Australian innovation ecosystem.

We do have some “customer pull” oriented schemes, though. The Rural R&D Corporations definitely fall into this category, as do many of the Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs).

The government’s response to the recent “Miles Review” of the CRC program was to push CRCs to be even more industry-led.

Industry leadership is the mantra for the new Industry Growth Centres, but they are not going to be funding very much research. The ARC’s Linkage Projects and the newer Industrial Transformation Training Centres as well as the NHMRC’s Partnership Centres are each attempts to have push more of the nation’s R&D investment into more market-facing efforts.

But none of these schemes are aimed at boosting innovation from small businesses. Or at least, not exclusively so. They are often encouraged to do so, and make sporadic attempts to improve their small business engagement, but it is clearly a weak spot in the Australian innovation context.

Small businesses that are trying to expand with innovative technologies constantly struggle to raise funds at early stages of development.

Bridging the gap

SBIR is not of itself a scheme for collaboration; the small businesses involved can undertake all the R&D themselves. But the experience in the US is that SBIR fosters collaboration as high technology start-ups seek to source expertise from universities and other research agencies.

Universities immediately increased their rate of spinning out companies on implementation of the scheme in 1982. The SBIR funding attracts further seed and venture capital funding, bridging that “valley of death” between early research funding and the business becoming self-sustaining.

Ultimately, many of the small businesses get bought out by large companies, particularly in the defense and pharmaceutical areas, where massive ongoing investment is needed to introduce new products.

There’s no doubt that an SBIR scheme would fill a major innovation gap in Australia, and no doubt we could make the necessary administrative arrangements. But for an SBIR scheme to truly succeed in Australia, there would be a few hurdles that I’d suggest must be overcome before we spent the first dollar. I call these the “Fair Dinkumness” tests to ensure an Australian flavour.

Fair Dinkumness test 1

Would there be true political support?

Unless a scheme enjoyed bipartisan support, there would be no point in introducing one. With one of the shortest electoral cycles in the world, Australia is at a major disadvantage in terms of stable policy in relation to innovation.

If the political support is there, then an SBIR scheme would need a significant investment of new money. Scrounging money off another under-funded program would simply be setting both up to fail. It takes some time for industry to become confident with new schemes and start to invest in a meaningful way. We’d need a real commitment.

Fair Dinkumness test 2

Would there be true bureaucratic support?

SBIR in the US works because it is a procurement scheme as well as an R&D scheme. The bureaucracy would need to seriously commit to using the scheme to improve its own departmental knowledge or services.

That means a solicited report to the Department of Environment on management of an endangered species would need to be implemented, not just sent to the library. That means the Army would need to buy the better boots from an Australian small business.

This is perhaps a bigger mindset change than either the politicians or the business community, and would need to be monitored closely, even if there was initial high level support.

For a small country such as Australia, it is often easiest to take the pathway of least risk – so Senate Estimates would need to cut bureaucrats some slack for backing Australian inventiveness too.

Fair Dinkumness test 3

Would Australian business truly back it?

If small businesses are formed just to access SBIR money, and want to survive on providing some research to government, then we are no better off. If peak industry bodies view the money as simply an entitlement for their members, then nothing new will happen.

The whole point of giving a big innovative boost to small businesses is to turn them into high-growth businesses. Existing bigger businesses would need to accept that they won’t be able to access the scheme, and they might even be faced with competition from those that do become successful innovators. An SBIR scheme by its very nature involves giving a leg-up to the new players in town, and the incumbent players need to accept that situation.

If the federal government did undertake to create an SBIR-like scheme in Australia, it would easily be the biggest reform of the innovation ecosystem in the country since the Hawke government’s raft of “Clever Country” policies.

It may not be the size of the Medical Research Future Fund as that scheme grows, but it is significantly more complex to implement. There is no doubt the government wants business and research agencies to come together much more closely. An SBIR scheme would be a massive step in that direction.

– Tony Peacock

This article was first published by The Conversation on 25 June, 2015. Read the original article here.

Environment, Features, Technology

Exploring carbon capture and storage futures

June 24, 2015 Karen Taylor-Brown Leave a comment

The Great Ocean Road, about 200 km southwest of Melbourne, draws millions of tourists to view the spectacular cliffs and limestone stacks known as the Twelve Apostles, carved by relentless Bass Strait waves and winds. But this region is as rich in fossil fuels as it is in scenic beauty, and several commercial gas fields have been opened in the Otway Basin along the continent’s southern margin.

There is also the CRC for Greenhouse Gas Technologies’ (CO2CRC) flagship carbon capture and storage (CCS) trial: the CO2CRC Otway Project – the world’s largest demonstration of its kind.

Since the project started in 2008, the Australian government, US Department of Energy and CRC partners have funded the injection of more than 65,000 tonnes of CO2 into the Otway Basin’s depleted gas fields, without leakage or measurable effect on soil, groundwater or atmosphere.

The project was further boosted by $25 million in Australian government funding in February this year. “The wide-scale deployment of CCS is critical to reduce carbon emissions as quickly and cost-effectively as possible,” says CO2CRC chief executive Tania Constable. “This funding will enable CO2CRC to embark on a new program of research to improve CCS technologies.”

Australia is well-endowed with natural resources. Its known uranium reserves are the world’s largest, and it is rich in natural gas. Traditionally, the most important resource has been coal: Australia has the fourth largest coal reserves globally and is the world’s second biggest coal exporter behind Indonesia. Coal exports – which have grown 5% annually over the past decade – will earn $36 billion in 2014–2015.

Figures like these have led Prime Minister Tony Abbott to declare coal “an essential part of our economic future”. Professor Chris Greig, Director of the University of Queensland’s Energy Initiative, a cohort of research expertise across all energy platforms, anticipates the country will continue to be reliant on fossil fuels, including coal, until at least mid-century. But just how far beyond that depends on how the world – particularly China, one of Australia’s biggest coal customers – addresses future climate change.

In 2014, the US-China emissions deal set China a goal to source 20% of its energy from zero-emissions sources and peak its CO2 emissions by 2030. In August 2014, amid worsening public sentiment over air pollution, the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau announced that it would be phasing out coal-fired power in the capital’s six main districts by 2020.

China has been pouring money into the development of renewable energy technologies, spending an estimated US$64 billion on large-scale clean energy projects in 2014 alone. This was five times more than the next biggest spender, according to market analyst Bloomberg New Energy Finance. China is also investing heavily in CCS technologies, with at least 12 projects currently underway.

There are several pathways toward reducing emissions from the electricity sector – from the adoption of nuclear energy and greater uptake of renewable sources and natural gas, to more efficient power plants and modified diesel engines that can burn liquefied coal. CCS, however, is one of the most promising methods for reducing emissions from coal-fired power stations. Capture technologies isolate and pump CO2 underground to be stored in the pores of rocks (see graphic page 29).

Rajendra Pachauri, who until early 2015 was Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told the UN 2014 Climate Summit in New York, in September 2014: “With CCS it is entirely possible for fossil fuels to continue to be used on a large scale”.

Dianne Wiley, CO2CRC’s program manager for CCS, says CO2 capture technologies are already available to install. Their deployment is limited by high costs, but there have been strong successes. Wiley points to the commercial scale Boundary Dam Integrated Carbon Capture and Sequestration Demonstration Project in Saskatchewan, Canada – the world’s first large-scale power plant to capture and store its carbon emissions – as a good example of what’s possible with CCS technology. It became operational in October 2014 and, its operators say, is already “exceeding performance expectations”. The CAN$1.3 billion cost of the system should drop by around 30% in subsequent commercial plants, says Brad Page, CEO of the Global CCS Institute.

Greig says that investment decisions in favour of CCS in Australia won’t happen until more work is done to find high-capacity storage basins around the continent that can safely and reliably store CO2 emissions for several decades.

Constable says the recent injection of capital from the Federal Government to the Otway Project will help the CRC take the necessary steps to meet this challenge. She says it will “lower the costs of developing and monitoring CO2 storage sites, enhance regulatory capability and build community confidence in geological storage of CO2 as a safe, permanent option for cutting emissions from fossil fuels”.

Retrofitting CCS technology to existing plants isn’t an option: Greig likens that to “building a brand new garage onto the side of a house that’s falling down – you just don’t do it”. CCS would therefore require investment in new coal-fired power stations.

“A well-conceived energy policy for the electricity generation sector would see ageing, low-efficient plants replaced with high-efficiency ultra-supercritical [coal] plants,” says Greig, adding that these plants have lower emissions simply by virtue of their efficiency and could achieve emissions reductions of 25% compared to existing plants.

How CCS works

The first step of carbon capture and storage (CCS) is capture. It involves separating CO2 from other gases in the exhaust stream from a fossil fuel power plant or some other industrial facility. This can be done with solvents that absorb CO2 or with ceramic and polymer membranes that act as filters. Once isolated, CO2 is compressed into a state in which the difference between liquid and gas can no longer be distinguished. It is then transported via pipeline to a prospective storage site. Here, the CO2 is injected into an underground reservoir, such as a geologic formation or depleted oil field. The CO2 has to enter the rocks without fracturing them, and can then be stored underground for thousands of years.

– Myles Gough

CO2CRC

Innovation, News, Technology

Armour forged through collaboration

June 24, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

Forged from plough parts, heated in a makeshift iron forge and moulded into shape over a Stringybark log, the homemade armour worn by Ned Kelly and his gang is almost as famous as the man himself. Although the suit of armour deflected many bullets, it weighed in at just over 44kg, and left his hands and legs unprotected.

Now, the winner of the Cooperative Research Centres Association (CRC) Award for Excellence in Innovation 2015, the Defence Materials Technology Centre (DMTC), have developed a unique manufacturing process that produces armour with the same level of protection as traditional combat body armour, but is far lighter.

The DMTC developed a cutting edge manufacturing process for shaping ceramic boron carbide armour. Very difficult to manufacture, one of the key issues for the team was maintaining quality control as the material expanded and compressed in response to the heat of the production process.

“Up until recently, body armour design has been relatively simple, durable but so heavy you can’t move quickly…Think: the Ned Kelly suit,” says DMTC CEO Dr Mark Hodge. “Having optimal equipment enhances survivability. Mobility is a significant contributor to personnel protection and with less weight and more mobility, soldiers are able to get out of trouble more quickly,” he says.

Body armour designs trade off protection against weight and bulk reduction with highly protective systems often proving heavy and restrictive. Successive models have been designed to offer more comprehensive levels of protection, with vests made from industrial strength fibres to deform bullets upon impact, and plated metal inserts to provide extra protection to vital areas. Although significantly lighter than Kelly’s original armour, today’s combat body armour remains heavy and unwieldy, a troubling fact as soldiers carry up to 58kg of gear in certain situations.

As one of the hardest substances known to man, boron carbide is frequently used in the manufacturing of body armour. However up until now it was very difficult to bend boron carbide into a variety of different forms to be used for specific body shapes. As a result, heavier materials had to be used.

With this new near-net shaping technology developed by the DMTC, body armour made purely from boron carbide will allow for manufacturing of lighter armour panels such as helmet inserts and customised ballistic panels for combat vehicles.

The development of the specialised process will yield many benefits for the Australian defence industry, says Hodge. Rather than having to outsource research and development from another country, it is being done right at home. Allowing the defence industry to make adjustments and improvements at any time to accommodate the needs of defence personnel.

Contributions included academic support from The University of Melbourne and Swinburne University of Technology, advice from the DSTO, the Army’s Diggerworks Program, Australian Defence Apparel, and research and manufacturing expertise from BMT, CSIRO, and VCAMM. The collaboration allowed for strides in industrial design capability as well as guidance from the defence department as to what threats the armour should be designed to withstand.

“It would have been impossible to find all the expertise needed for the project under one roof,” Hodge says. “In order to source the appropriate equipment and variety of expertise, we needed a collaborative team that shared a common sense of purpose,” he says.

In the next 25 years Hodge says the integration of the unique net shaping process will be applied broadly to the defence industry due to the extensive use of boron carbide in combat body armour. However, this does not mean that work stops for Hodge.

“Bullets are made to defeat body armour, so we must learn the limits of the material so that we can continue to improve and offer the next level of protection.”

– Kara Norton

Defence Materials Technology Centre (DMTC)

Cooperative Research Centres Association (CRC)

Careers, Health, Highlight, News, Society

Award-winning app boosts mental health help for youth

June 24, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

You are 16 years old and have a secret, which you’ve been carrying around for what feels like your whole life. You feel trapped so you turn to marijuana and alcohol to numb the pain. Your grades begin to slip and your parents are worried so they send you to a psychologist. During your first visit, the clinician in the waiting room starts asking questions, and all you can hear is your heartbeat ringing in your ears.

When it comes to receiving effective mental health treatment, early diagnosis and non-judgmental support are essential. In order to assess what types of treatment options are available, many clinicians start with a verbal assessment. However this verbal assessment is a barrier for many young people, preventing treatment. Psychologist and PhD candidate Sally Bradford recognised that young people between the ages of 12–25 could benefit from a different kind of assessment.

“They’re going into an environment where they’re expected to verbally relay everything that is going on in their lives – to tell their deepest, darkest secrets that they may have never said out loud before,” Bradford says. “It can take a long time for them to find the words – especially if the clinician doesn’t ask the right questions,” she says.

As part of her PhD focusing on the use of technology in face-to-face mental health care with young people, Bradford created the electronic psychosocial assessment app called “myAssessment” that helps clinicians evaluate young people quickly and easily. Speaking to the National Mental Health Commission’s review of Australia’s mental health system, this new screening process underscored the need to improve health services and support through innovative technologies.

“The app could be beneficial in any field where you’re needing groups of people to be truthful, and give answers in a way that they do not feel judged,” Bradford says.

Based on the strides Bradford made in youth mental health with the invention of myAssessment, she was awarded the $5000 top prize at the CRC Association Early Career Research Showcase at the CRCA’s Excellence in Innovation Awards Dinner in Canberra.

The app was developed in close conjunction with the Young & Well CRC, youth focus groups and clinicians, and subsequently trialled at a headspace Centre in Canberra over nine months in 2014.

“The app was designed with significant input from young people and clinicians, and puts their needs and requirements first. For clinicians, it follows an evidence-based format and doesn’t require changes to the way they currently provide services. For young people, it’s interactive, engaging, and easy to use,” Bradford says.

The way it works is a patient arrives for their appointment. Prior to seeing a clinician, patients complete myAssessment on an iPad in the waiting room. The app is a simple survey, but with a range of different response options. Topics include alcohol and drug habits, sexual preference, eating habits and anxiety and depression. Questions include screening and probing questions. Screening questions can be a yes or a no answer that prompts further questioning: Do you drink? Smoke? Have you tried or used drugs? What have you tried?

A probing question allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the issue, such as, how do you (and your friends) take them? (drugs). After answering and submitting these questions, a personalised ‘Clinician Summary’ details the patient’s risks and strengths, providing the clinician with a foundation for the first interview.

Bradford’s trials proved to be particularly enlightening, with an 87% response rate, and ¾ of patients reporting that myAssessment provided them with an “accurate” representation of themselves. The results also showed that young people were up to 10 times more likely to open up about drug and alcohol use, sexuality, and self-harm when the application was used, in comparison to a verbal assessment with the same questions.

“There was a wealth of data generated over the course of the trial, which could be particularly useful for policy reform in the future,” Bradford says.

–Kara Norton

Young & Well CRC

Innovation, News, Profiles

Australia’s leaders in research and innovation are honoured

June 23, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

The IP & Science business of Thomson Reuters, the world’s leading provider of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, today is honouring 43 Australians and eight institutions leading scientific research and innovation in Australia at the 2015 Thomson Reuters Australian Citation & Innovation Awards, held today at the University House at the Woodward in Melbourne. Eleven Australian Research Groups have been selected to receive Citation Awards in recognition of their outstanding contribution to research. In addition, Eight Australian organisations have been recognised for their excellence in innovation.

The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) has won an Innovation Award in the category: Government (Government or Government funded) for delivering specialised advice, scientific services and products to government, industry, academia and other research organisations through the development of new knowledge, delivery of quality services and support for business opportunities.

Research recipients span myriad areas including astronomy, the environment, oncology, technology and others. Institutional honourees fall within seven categories, separated into large and small-to-medium sized organisations, government institutions, universities and most collaborative organisations. The awards are based on a proprietary methodology and analysis of Thomson Reuters data that recognises domestic innovation and significant research contributions originating in Australia.

“We are very pleased to have the opportunity to honour the individuals and institutions making significant contributions in Research & Innovation,” said Jeroen Prinsen, senior director for Australia and New Zealand, Thomson Reuters.

“Australia plays an important role in the global scholarly and commercial ecosystem and it is through the use of Thomson Reuters data that we are able to qualify and quantify this contribution, and give credit where credit is due. Congratulations to all of today’s honourees.”

The scientific research awards are part of Thomson Reuters Citation Awards and are determined by analysing the volume and impact of a researcher’s contribution to his/her subject area. The recipients were selected using a quantitative process identifying the average number of citations their research generated over a period of time, as indexed in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science®. This covers all articles, reviews and proceedings papers with at least one Australia-based author. The average citation, in turn, reflects its impact and influence on the given subject and the importance attached to it by subsequent research.
The fields from which the Citation Awardees were drawn represent national strengths, either because of the size of the Australian contribution to the global body of knowledge or because of its impact. The wide range of subject areas covered – from astronomy & astrophysics, ecology, and environmental studies to economics, neurosciences and psychology – is an illustration of the strength and diversity of academic research in Australia and a reflection of the innovation inherent among the country’s scientists.

This information was first published on 23 June 2015 by Thomson Reuters.

Health, Innovation, News

Understanding athletes’ immune function to optimise performance

June 18, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

With the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games looming in 2018, a key concern for athletes will be how to prevent illness from interfering with their training and performance.

This is the focus of new research at Griffith University. Partnering with the Australian Institute of Sport to examine the effects of exercise on the immune system in order to help athletes compete at their best, the research team say that illness during competition can destroy years of effort and dedication.

“On average, highly trained athletes spend 8 to 12 years training to compete at their best,” says Professor David Pyne from Griffith’s Menzies Health Institute Queensland (MHIQ).

“Given the time, effort and financial considerations made by athletes, their coaches and support staff, there is a need to find ways to keep athletes healthy during heavy training, travel and competition.”

Dr Nic West

Susceptibility to illness

Professor Allan Cripps, a leading immunology researcher at MHIQ has worked with Pyne and Dr Nic West in a bid to understand why athletes seem prone to illness during heavy training and competition.

“There is evidence that endurance exercise compromises immune function and increases illness in some athletes,” says West. “Intensive exercise, particularly endurance exercise, such as triathlon, long distance swimming and ironman events, can be associated with exercise-induced immune suppression where the number and function of immune cells is decreased and their ability to respond to challenge is lowered.”

For the current study the research team is seeking highly trained male triathletes and iron men between the ages of 18-35 years who undertake 12 hours or more exercise per week.

Athletes will have their immune, gut microbiota and metabolic systems profiled and compared with non-athletes.

A significant benefit of the study is that participants will receive information regarding the status of their own immune function that can be used to tailor individual training programs.

The study is taking place at Griffith University’s Gold Coast campus.

“We hope that participation and knowledge gained from this study will help elite and non-elite athletes to attain their performance goals,” says Pyne.

This article was first published by Griffith University on 16 June, 2015.

Agriculture, News, Technology

Help to combat pest animals is only a click away

June 16, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

The toolkit is a one-stop shop of practical knowledge to arm farmers and land managers with the information and connections they need to combat pest animals.

IA CRC digital communications manager Keryn Lapidge said, “We are pleased to have the Minister for Agriculture, Barnaby Joyce, officially launch PestSmart Connect today, recognising this as an important knowledge hub for tackling pest animal problems such as wild dogs, which have become a really big economic and social issue for Australian farmers.”

The website also links to the FeralScan website and app which provides people with the capability to map pest animal sightings and damage and then to use this information to track and control the problem.

“This website is really strong on connecting people and communities. A feature is the ‘connect’ portal which aims to provide contact details of agencies, organisations and groups that are active in pest animal management and can provide people with services, useful advice or assistance – at a practical on-ground level, but also at a policy level,” she said.

The PestSmart Connect website features pest animal species that are a having a major impact on biodiversity and agriculture in Australia including wild dogs, foxes, feral cats, rabbits and carp. There are handy glovebox guides, videos about trapping and baiting, case studies and links to assistance.

“We hope this will be a useful knowledge hub for farmers and land managers and we plan to continue to improve the resource over time,” Lapidge said.

The PestSmart Connect website www.pestsmart.org.au is the culmination of ten years of information gathering and research by the IA CRC – Australia’s largest integrated pest animal management research organisation.

Minister for Agriculture, Barnaby Joyce, launches the PestSmart Connect website – a handy toolkit of pest animal management information for farmers and land managers.

This article was first published by the Invasive Animals CRC on 16 June, 2015.

Opinion

Science Australia’s business heart

May 20, 2015 Heather Catchpole 1 Comment

The outcome is loud and clear, the government wants to use CRCs to put science at the heart of Australian business.

CRCs will remain a feature of the Australian innovation landscape. The government only wants to support CRCs that are highly industry focused and only for a single term of up to 10 years. The application process is going to simplified to make it easier and more attractive for business to bid for a CRC.

In a bold and exciting move, they’ll be a new stream in the CRC Program called CRC-Projects (CRC-P). These will again address highly focussed industry issues but at a smaller, more nimble level than a full CRC (which are generally 7 year enterprises of maybe $100 million of activity). CRC-Ps will be up to three years, up to $3.0 million of government support and will be open for application three times a year. This is a huge development to open the CRC Program up more readily to smaller businesses and more specific projects.

Reviewer David Miles recommendations are aimed to discourage CRCs going on for very long terms. While this is a big concern for those addressing long-term innovation issues, the intent is to make the CRC concentrate on solving the problem at hand and exiting, leaving the industry players better off. This is a particularly interesting approach from Mr Miles because, prior to the commencement of his review, there was one train of thought that success in a CRC meant an ongoing body. The previous Parliamentary Secretary, Bob Baldwin, had publicly asked why more CRCs don’t continue as self-sufficient organisations beyond their government funding period?

Miles downplays the importance of an ongoing organisation in his review, making it clear that the real benefits from a CRC come when the industry players involved implement the research.

Miles also sees the industry training role of CRCs as very effective and important, encouraging more of them to do more in training postgraduates for industry roles.

CRCs that are not specifically aimed at solving industry issues are the potential losers in this Review. Time and again, the review says industry should be “front and centre” of the CRC program, arguing that when the Program tries to do everything, it achieves less. But Miles holds out a possible future for “non-industry” CRCs, encouraging other Government departments to directly fund CRCs through the Department of Industry and Science, Miles points out that this happens already (the Department of Defence funds the Defence Materials Technology Centre through the CRC Program). He points out that the CRC model works and is effective, but the Industry Department shouldn’t have to front for the cost of CRCs outside its portfolio area.

So while it is disappointing that some important areas of research may not qualify for CRCs anymore, the government is leaving the door open for other government departments to participate in the CRC Program.

For Australian business, the CRC Program should become more flexible and simpler for them to get involved in.

Dr. Tony Peacock

Chief Executive

Cooperative Research Centres Association

Health, Innovation, News, Technology

Cell manufacturing links research and industry

May 4, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

CEO of the Cell Therapy Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre (CTM CRC) Dr Sherry Kothari said it puts promise in what she believes is the future of medicine.

“One of the biggest advantages that cell therapy holds is that it has the potential to cure. So with drugs and pharmaceuticals you tend to manage and treat conditions but you can’t generally cure them,” Kothari said.

“So the stem cell will go into the wound and it will dampen down any immune response and any inflammatory response to try and get the wound into a state where the normal skin cells can take over the healing process.”

CRC Partner the University of South Australia has a team currently working on a patch that will help cure chronic wounds.

Project Leader Dr Louise Smith said chronic wounds affect sufferers for years, and sometimes decades.

“One of the ways we’re looking at healing it is by delivering stem cells to the wound to try and help it heal,” Smith said.

The CTM CRC.

Chronic wounds are a burden to patients and healthcare systems as they are expensive and persistent, and without treatment can lead to extreme procedures such as amputation.

Around 450 000 Australians are affected by chronic wounds, while the US government spends an estimated $25 billion per year on treatments.

Smith said the project would not have worked without the CRC pulling everything together.

“We wouldn’t have access to the specific cells, we wouldn’t have access to the companies that we’re working with, and we wouldn’t have access to the clinicians and the cleanroom facilities,” she said.

The CTM CRC takes a promising cell therapy, finds an appropriate industry partner and facilitates the therapy through the manufacturing process until it’s ready for use in patients.

Kothari said academic researchers often struggle to source funding for their projects without industry partner collaboration.

“It’s what I and many others describe as the valley of death,” Dr Kothari said.

“You’ve got your academic research which stops at a certain point and then you’ve got the big companies, but often that research is still too early for them to invest in.

Chair of the CRC’s board Dr Leanna Read said bringing down costs is crucial to the future of medicine.

“There’s always a pressure on medicine because the health system is getting more and more expensive,” Dr Read said.

“If you can bring down the costs of producing the cells you’ll be able to expand opportunities for use in clinical practice because they’ll be affordable in mainstream medicine.”

The Cell Therapy Manufacturing CRC is the only one of its kind in Australia and one in a small handful of facilities around the world.

In an effort to build up a global presence in the growing industry the centre has recently formed collaborations with two cell therapy and regenerative medicine institutions in Canada and the UK.

“We have a lot of intellectual capital and know-how here in Australia and South Australia,” Kothari said.

“What we have here is this critical mass, the expertise, the know-how and the infrastructure, so we’ve got a real chance to make it work, to put South Australia on the world stage when it comes to the development of cell therapies.”

This article was first published in The Lead.

Innovation, Profiles, Society

Designing the future

April 20, 2015 Karen Taylor-Brown 1 Comment

^{Mr David Hobbs demonstrates the OrbIT Gaming System and Orby Controller to a young child. Photo courtesy of the South Australian Department of State Development.}

Laura Diment and David Hobbs are both former students and now staff at the new Flinders University campus at Tonsley, a world-class facility that brings multiple disciplines of STEM research together with industry. Diment and Hobbs began their Biomedical Engineering studies within the School of Computer Science, Engineering and Mathematics (CSEM), and have each received international acclaim for developing assistive technologies that enable children with disabilities to make the most out of the creative potential of modern software.

Hobbs, currently completing a PhD in rehabilitative engineering, has received significant attention for his work creating an accessible computer gaming system that incorporates a unique orb-shaped controller nicknamed ‘Orby’. The novel trackball controller can be operated without the need for fine motor skills. This makes it accessible for children with cerebral palsy, who are often unable to use mainstream controllers.

The novel trackball controller nicknamed ‘Orby’.

The gaming system and 15 interactive games developed for Orby have been a huge success with the 18 families that trialled the technology, with most reporting increased social closeness for the period Orby was in their homes.

For Hobbs, whose main motivation for studying engineering is the potential to ‘give back’ to society, this is an ideal result. He is now in the processes of commercialising Orby and hopes it will eventually be available to families, though is quick to note the difficulties in finding a balance between the inevitable costs of research and development and creating an affordable end product.

It is clear, however, that Hobbs relishes the challenge; a past recipient of both Fulbright and Churchill scholarships, he is determined to keep building upon assistive capacity of the technology. Trials will soon begin investigating the potential of Orby to help in the recovery of stroke patients.

Making a splash

First-class Honours student, Laura Diment, is also keen to use her STEM skills to help people who need it most. Diment chose to spend her compulsory five-month industry placement during her third year of study at a leading rehabilitation centre in Toronto, Canada – following the footsteps of Hobbs, who mentored her exchange from back in Australia. Here, she began creating Splashboard, an art program that uses Microsoft Kinect’s infrared technology to enable children with cerebral palsy to create musical art on screen. The technology can track movement in three dimensions, allowing children to interact with buttons on screen that trigger colour tools and sound by waving their arms.

Diment, who has since won a number of awards nationally and internationally for her creation, acknowledges the benefits of the opportunity to build industry partnerships early on in her Biomedical Engineering degree. “The future really is about connecting the industry and research earlier on, because they know what’s going to be beneficial in the long run.”

From these solid foundations in research and industry, Diment looks to be building a formidable career. She starts her PhD in Oxford as a John Monash scholar later this year, where her research will focus on creating a future in which developing countries have access to the skills and expertise necessary to design their own assistive technologies, rather than having to rely on Western-developed finished products that are ‘posted across’.

Much the same as Hobbs, Diment is confident in the capacity of STEM careers to create a better world. “We are designing the future,” she says.

With such bold ambitions, it seems only fitting that these two are working in Flinders’ new campus in the Tonsley business hub. The centre is quite literally amplifying the work that STEM disciplines at Flinders are capable of; the Biomedical Engineering discipline now takes up more than double its original size in order to make the most of the opportunities in this new environment. “People can come to us or work alongside us; it’s much more flexible and approachable.” Hobbs is grateful to have had the opportunity to help shape the new campus; “It’s a once in a generational opportunity… now it’s really up to us to maximise what we’ve been given and to do the best job we can.”

– Breana Macpherson-Rice

Innovation, Opinion, Society

The spirit within

January 20, 2015 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

WE OFTEN HEAR CALLS for a more entrepreneurial culture. But what does that mean in practical terms? Yes, it is affected by our national psyche, outlook and attitude to risk. We hear that Australians don’t ‘embrace failure’, and that our finance sector is too conservative in its attitude to science and innovation. These opinions might be true, but regardless we also have to get the building blocks right.

The ‘next big thing’ might come from a series of small steps in developing the environment for more innovators and entrepreneurs to thrive. The government has just released an Industry Innovation and Competitiveness Agenda, which features a few of the steps that will improve the situation for entrepreneurs in Australia.

Issuing share options to employees is an important way of attracting talent. New companies have an idea, a prayer and not much cash. But brilliant young people are often willing to take shares or options in lieu of salaries for a year or two to join the startup entrepreneurial adventure. They might take a very low salary, or spend a year couch surfing or forgoing the benefits of deodorant.

The incredible stories of the likes of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the rest mean that by taking shares in lieu of salary they may strike it rich. In Australia, rules introduced in 2009 killed off this pathway by demanding that tax be paid on those shares immediately. The government has now fixed that issue.

Removing barriers is another important avenue to increase business competitiveness in Australia. Simple things like vaccine companies undergoing identical audits from different regulatory agencies draws cash – and focus – out of the business. The government has decided to have a serious go at lowering those barriers.

For the Treasurer’s coming tax review, the Minister for Industry has flagged two more innovations: crowd sourcing of equity finance, and patent boxes. Australia is slow on the equity issue, with the USA, the UK, Canada and New Zealand all ahead of us. But the government has received a very comprehensive report detailing the necessary changes, and action is expected soon. The patent box concept, which started in the UK, allows companies to isolate earnings from patents and have them favourably taxed.

Apart from government, financing of innovation is slowly improving. Westpac has provided $50 million to Reinventure, a venture capital company. CSIRO’s new CEO, Larry Marshall, is an Aussie with 25 years of venture capital experience. If the equity-financing model allows self-managed super funds to invest, then who knows the limits?

Firing up the entrepreneurial spirit in Australia is the next big thing. The foundations are quickly being laid – next we need the builders to come in. The gap year has become common after senior secondary school. Wouldn’t it be something to see a ‘growth year’, when graduates or postgraduates gave themselves a year to pursue an idea?

KnowHow founder Tony Peacock is the CEO of the CRC Association and 2014 Monash University Churchill Fellow at The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.

Agriculture, Features, Innovation, World

The new class

December 12, 2014 Heather Catchpole Leave a comment

THERE ARE INCREASING signs that Australian R&D investment in smart sectors such as finance and agriculture is reaping benefits overseas. Federal Trade and Investment Minister Andrew Robb points to a 10.4% rise in annual gross R&D expenditure to $31 billion (by 2012). This is twice the 4.9% per annum average among countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

“Australia is a world-class innovation destination,” Robb says. “This is built on solid foundations of modern infrastructure, strong levels of investment, generous research and development incentives, and strong intellectual property protection.” In the Global Innovation Index 2014, Australia achieved its highest rank for innovation inputs, coming in 10th out of 143 countries and placing 22nd for outputs.

“We have seen a near doubling of patents filed abroad by Australian entities over a 10-year period,” says Ben Mitra-Kahn, Chief Economist at IP Australia, the Federal Government’s intellectual property office. He believes this is an encouraging indication that organisations are taking their innovations to foreign markets.

“Our national scientific research organisation, CSIRO, ranks in the top 1% of the world’s scientific institutions [in 15 of 22 research fields],” adds Robb. He cites Australia’s development of the bionic ear and CSIRO’s pioneering wi-fi work as high-profile examples of Australian innovation.

To that list, IP Australia adds ResMed’s patented sleep apnoea devices as well as Sportwool – a composite superfine Merino wool for endurance clothing, developed by CSIRO and WoolMark and adopted by foreign firms.

There’s also: the 3D-absorbent fabric developed by CSIRO and Textor Technologies, which is being used in the next generation nappy by global brand Huggies; Vision CRC’s ongoing work in contact lens technology worn by millions worldwide; and the Total Channel Control System to rejuvenate outdated irrigation systems. Total Channel Control is now used around the world, and was jointly developed by the former CRC for Sensor Signal and Information Processing, and Rubicon Water.

Relatively speaking, Australia’s weakness is innovation outputs. But efforts by many of the CRCs are building global relationships that will continue to boost the nation’s growth. In 2012, a report by Allen Consulting Group (now ACIL Allen Consulting) predicted that $5.9 billion in direct economic impacts would accrue during the five years to 2017 from CRC-produced technologies, products and processes – on top of the $8.6 billion in direct impacts already accrued since the CRC Program began in 1991.

“No one is more interested in or committed to maximising research impact than CRCs,” says Tony Peacock, CEO of the CRC Association.

Taking finance further

An example of successful Australian innovation on a global stage is the European Capital Markets CRC (ECMCRC). Established in early 2013 by the Australian-based Capital Markets CRC (CMCRC) in collaboration with European universities, more than seven universities were involved at the time of writing, with plans for at least another seven by early 2015.

The CMCRC was born out of the Securities Industry Research Centre of Asia-Pacific (SIRCA), set up in the 1990s by current CMCRC CEO Professor Michael Aitken as a model under which universities could collaborate and share knowledge and infrastructure and then jointly apply for research funding.

Like its Asia-Pacific predecessor, the CMCRC enables the finance and business departments of Australian universities to build and share valuable infrastructure.

A large amount of time in financial market research is spent collecting and collating data and the CMCRC has developed programs that expedite this process. These innovations also enable the data to be shared, with the result being a drastic reduction in research time.

One of the CMCRC’s earliest and most successful innovations was the SMARTS market surveillance system, which was sold to the US stock exchange NASDAQ in 2010. The proceeds of that sale allowed further developments, such as the Market Quality Dashboard.

“The Market Quality Dashboard takes all that data and produces basic metrics that everyone needs to use to analyse things like transactions costs and market volatility,” Aitken explains. It means researchers and academics no longer need to develop these metrics from scratch, thereby improving productivity.

In Europe, the ECMCRC will attract new members by providing academics and universities with access to these tools.

“What we’re doing is encouraging the universities to get together – by giving them something they couldn’t hope to achieve in a million years – and once they’re together, we collectively apply for funding from the EU to be matched by industry funding, thus sharing the very successful CRC model with other countries,” Aitken says.

The university PhD students who use the data, and are in industry placements, have the joint role of linking the research to commercial applications because they best understand what companies need.

Aitken says the CMCRC has already built three major pieces of technology and created at least 200 new jobs in Australian spin-offs as a result.

“We hope that we will do the same in Europe but we need to get the universities together first,” he says. “By focusing on industry engagement first and foremost, we will build interesting technology for businesses. This will build up ‘brownie points’ with industry partners who will provide access to their unique data, which will in turn foster scholarship.”

CMCRC’s predecessor, SIRCA, has 39 member universities from across the region, and Aitken says there are already plans in place for a capital markets research centre in North America in the next five years.

A global effort

The area of agriculture and agribusiness is one of Australia’s five key strengths, points out Robb, and agricultural CRCs have also been very proactive when it comes to international cooperation. Two years ago, the Dairy Futures CRC launched a global research project to create the world’s biggest collection of DNA sequence data for dairy herd bulls.

The aim of the 1000 Bulls Genome Project was to build a database of DNA sequences to be used for breeding Australia’s dairy herds. From that data, mutations that affect animal health, welfare and productivity could also be identified.

A scientific paper analysing the genomes of 234 bulls from three dairy cattle breeds – Jersey, Holstein-Friesian and Fleckvieh – was published in the international journal Nature Genetics in July 2014. It explains that the research team identified 28.3 million genetic variants and was able to use the database to identify a recessive mutation linked to embryonic death in dairy cattle. The researchers also identified a dominant mutation linked to chondrodysplasia, a type of bone disease.

“There’s a real opportunity here if we can find the genes affecting traits that are important to dairy farmers, like fertility, milk production and disease resistance,” the project’s leader, Dr Ben Hayes, recently told the ABC’s Country Hour. “We’re combining the DNA information with the herd records that farmers have kept over a large number of years… to sort through those 28 million variants and come down to a few thousand that really do predict milk production, fertility and disease resistance.”

The project involves 20 international research partners from Australia, France, Germany, Canada, Denmark and the USA. Hayes is based at the Victorian Department of Environment and Primary Industries and leads the Dairy Futures CRC’s animal improvement research program – a partnership between dairy farmers, pasture and cattle breeding companies, government and researchers.

Hayes explains that identifying a gene mutation that causes embryonic loss in cows can help farmers build a healthy, more productive dairy herd. “We know that this particular mutation is already present at low frequency in Australian dairy herds. Locating the mutation means we can test for it and avoid matings between animals that both carry the mutation, to keep it from becoming a problem in the future.”

The CRC is also using the project’s genetic sequence data to design improvements in the routine use of DNA to predict the genetic merits of dairy cows.

“The ultimate challenge in making genomic selection more robust is to find the variants that are considered to be causative – the small fraction of all known variants that are responsible for major changes to the function of important genes,” Hayes says.

“We now have data for the entire DNA sequences, including mutations affecting the traits dairy farmers are most interested in. We are tracking down the causative genes for fertility, longevity and meat production, to equip farmers to make more informed breeding decisions and boost the quality of their herds.”

THE PORK CRC is another good example of global collaboration. The CRC has strong links with the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) on genetic research around disease resistance and environmental resilience in pigs. Pork CRC Chief Executive Officer, Dr Roger Campbell, credits the collaboration to the reputation and efforts of their geneticist Dr Susanne Hermesch, an Associate Professor at the Animal Genetics and Breeding Unit, based at the University of New England in NSW. Hermesch says international collaboration is particularly important in her field of pig genetics.

“It’s a small, very specialised field, and you really need to look for collaboration to get the people you want,” she says. Hermesch also has collaborative arrangements with researchers at organisations in New Zealand, Scotland and the Netherlands.

Pork CRC’s attitude towards commercialisation of research at a national level also means that any collaborative international research is quickly adopted in the field.

“Research is part of the adoption process,” says Hermesch. “We are recording information and data on farms in the commercial setting.”

Australian breeding companies collaborate in research, which means they must have faith that the research outcomes will result in commercial benefits for their business.

“This international collaboration is valuable,” adds Hermesch. “I’m pulling people from all over the world into my extended research team with links to the Australian pig industry.”

Campbell expects there to be global advantages from the current genetic research because of these ties.

“The pig industry globally is not all that different,” he says. “I would expect that all geneticists, and therefore all breeding companies, are likely to benefit.”

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