The Staff Association endorses the Venturous Australia (VA) recognition of innovation as a broad social process occurring at all levels within and between enterprises. Importantly, valuing innovation in all public sector agencies and departments, not just in ‘science’ agencies or universities. We also welcome proposals to increase resources to enable broader employee and community input towards creative innovation.
Public Funding for government funded science agencies
The Staff Association welcomes the recommendations of the VA Report for the ‘urgent restoration of public funding levels in universities and government research agencies’. In particular the Staff Association urges increased funding of CSIRO and other agencies to at least match the OECD top quartile of funding by 2020. Committed funding, without arbitrary measures such as efficiency dividends, is fundamental to fostering an innovative culture in the public sector.
Industry Innovation and Incremental Innovation
The Staff Association welcomes the balance in VA towards government support for industry innovations and programs in order to interface basic science with problems and opportunities in industry. Greater participation, incentives and reduced transaction costs are essential to enhance the flow of ideas into productive industries. Funding for small-to-medium enterprises to access public sector research will ultimately transform industries with sustained incremental change and transformational breakthroughs.
Innovation Leadership: employees as well as management
VA calls for a ‘new institutional framework’ that will ‘enhance leadership and improve co-ordination across the system’. The Staff Association believes that innovation must be bottom-up from employees, as well as top-down from management. Employees must have direct stakes in productivity gains from innovation and creativity in the workforce. Collective staff action is a valuable resource and can facilitate effective experimental and exploratory approaches as suggested in VA. Emerging innovation strategies should place more emphasis on workplace reforms and laws. This includes the participation of unions in bargaining, in industry and innovation councils and in forums to develop innovative workplaces and charters.
Training and Development
The Staff Association welcomes the proposals in VA for ‘Quality workplaces,’ and in particular seeks to have training and development outcomes and expenditure more explicitly resourced and reported. Investing in people is essential to progressive workplaces and produces more creative and innovative enterprises. Professional associations and unions need to be involved in processes regarding accreditation and flexible use of capability in the innovation systems, with appropriate systems of standards and regulation maintained.
Open Access
The Staff Association welcomes the opportunities for increased knowledge transfer and public sector efficiencies that are possible with open provision of data and reports from science agencies. However, to facilitate public good from open access, the changes necessary for open provision of CSIRO research must be adequately resourced. This will allow maintenance of output and new means of distribution. Innovations in open access will be enhanced with whole-of-government national approaches, rather than isolated public sector ‘innovation experiments’. CSIRO could become an important repository for collections of open knowledge with revitalisation of its libraries and data collections for broader dissemination.
Food Security and Scientific Collections
The Staff Association welcomes calls for greater priority for long term research into food security (agricultural production) as well as maintaining diverse national scientific collections. Both are recognised, but under-resourced, current roles for CSIRO, and need to be strengthened to underpin national stewardship of large fractions of the earth’s land and oceanic territories. An anticipated increased priority for tropical science is welcomed, but it must be practically linked to industry/producers and implemented as a growth capability, without redirection of resources away from other agricultural production capabilities.
Measuring, adapting and evolving
The Staff Association believes that science is an evolutionary innovative process and supports calls in VA for better measurement of the innovation system and open disclosure of the data (including full costs of research). Open, transparent and evidence-based evolution of both innovation and science is possible with broad staff participation. This produces better outcomes than narrow top-down planned science. Ineffective information flow between the science capability (the staff and knowledge base of CSIRO) and the Board/executive management and inefficient bureaucratic systems of management are counterproductive in a broad independent science agency like CSIRO. Better staff participation in direction setting is therefore crucial for productivity and creativity in CSIRO. Similar models of participation for innovation could be applicable across the public sector.
Advice to government
The Staff Association recognises the role and ongoing need for a Chief Scientist to help government interpret the science produced in its own agencies, the universities and international providers. A broader innovation council serves other purposes and may legitimately have a broad composition: Ministers, experts in all disciplines, peak bodies, unions and associations for example. The Staff Association also welcomes opportunities for industry councils to steer innovation with similar broad input. However, a chief scientist, rather than simply offering an authority in decision making for government, must be recognised for a broader role in advocating for science with a variety of stakeholders in the innovation system. To this end, we recommend that the Chief Scientist’s office be within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. The Staff Association also maintains that CSIRO has a unique role in advice to government, provided that it is recognised and accountable (including through Senate Estimates) for its independent science.
Global Networking and Internationalisation
The Staff Association believes that science is necessarily an international activity where global participation enables access to a broader and deeper range of science than that restricted to our shores. Enhancing this activity requires adequate resourcing of staff drawn from international workforces, including support for integration into our health systems, our education systems for children and partners, and training and development. Reciprocal arrangements within global partnerships should be negotiated to support Australians working offshore and for foreign workers in Australia. We note as an exemplar the long history of effective engagement by the Staff Association, CPSU and ACTU with Unions International as well as with other public sector unions, including advancing science and working conditions for scientists.
