 Mae'r gwahanol yn fwyaf, fe gynnwys i'n mwyaf i gyda'n i'w'r awsdraolion yma o'r llans llwyaf. Ac i'n ddod i'r gweithio ar y llans llwyaf, a gweithio anodol. Felly, ydych chi'n gofio'r llans llwyaf o'r Lans Lwyfyr Ndeu Llywodraeth yma. Ond rwy'n fyddo, onlwch, mae'n dweud o'r 114 llwyfa ar y Llywodraeth. Rhyw gweithio. I'm Rosie Hicks, CEO of the Australian Research Data Commons, ARDC. ARDC is enabled by the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Our mission is to accelerate research and innovation by driving excellence in the creation, analysis and retention of high quality data assets. Welcome to the ARDC Leadership Series. Today's forum, which is industry and research, is the third in a series of panel discussions aimed at providing decision makers in academia, government and industry with an opportunity to work through major data challenges impacting Australia's researchers. For years, Australia has ranked very low in the OECD rankings for insufficient transfer of knowledge between researchers and business. Last year, we ranked 25th in the World Intellectual Property Organisation's Global Innovation Index 2022 behind nations with lower GDP and lower R&D investment. However, we are making progress as shown by Knowledge Commercialisation Australia's 2021 Survey of Commercialisation Outcomes from Public Research. It reports a growth to £251 million in the commercialisation revenue derived from the work of 43 Australian Research Institutes. It's also encouraging that the Australian Government acknowledges the value of commercialisation of Australian science. In 2122, £11.8 billion was invested in R&D and £2.2 billion of which went into a commercialisation packages for universities, but there's still more to be done. National Digital Research Infrastructure plays a key role in supporting research translation, providing industry, government and researchers with opportunities to connect, to build on our national data assets and to collaborate in a secure online data analysis environment. At the ARDC, we're supporting research translation through projects such as Research Link Australia, a new initiative which has been funded by the Australian Government that will see us create a one-stop shop to link industry and research using persistent identifiers. Currently, there's no easy way for Australian businesses, policymakers and citizens to find and access research expertise, research conclusions and research products. In the same way, there's no simple way for researchers to identify industry research and development opportunities, and I know that that's brought some of you to today's discussion. Connecting Australian researchers and business will help us find the people and resources that we need to address some of the most pressing problems facing society, like climate change, food and energy security. The ARDC's Translational Research Data Challenges programme creates a pathway to impact by bringing together researchers and industry to tackle key societal challenges. The programme is currently focusing on food security and is looking to address our data challenges with the aim of improving Australia's production, consumption and distribution of safe and high quality food. The challenges in commercialising research data are many, but we all agree there are great benefits for Australia's economy and resilience to generating innovative research solutions. I look forward to hearing the perspectives and insights from the motivated and informed thought leaders on our panel and in our audience today. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much, Rosie. I, too, would like to acknowledge that this meeting is held on the traditional lands of the Warrangy people and of the Cullin nation and to pay my respects to their elders, both past, present and emerging. Industry research is the third of the series of these panel discussions. It's aimed at decision makers of academia, of government and importantly of industry and looking at the insights from industry, government and research sectors on the value of improving collaboration and translation of research for the prosperity of our society. That's what motivates me. My name is Russell Yardley and I joined the predecessor to ARDC Nectar. The University of Melbourne invited me to chair that back in 2015 and they wanted someone who was commercial, someone who was in business to really try and help build bridges between research and business. Liz Sonnenberg said to me, oh Russell, it'll be an easy job. You'll do this on your ear. It's one of the most difficult jobs that I've had. To really understand both sectors, it's been a learning curve since then. At the time, I'd just come off being on the board of Nectar for a couple of years and that was merged into CSIRO. When I looked at Nectar, I went from Nectar to Nectar. And Anne's and RDS, over the next few years it became obvious that they should be merged together. In 2019, as you know, we created the ARDC. Data has always been part of my career. When I joined IBM in 1978, which is a few years ago, we were all called data processing professionals. It was DP. In the early years of my career, most of the companies that I was working with were installing computers for the very first time. My first five, six years of work experience was taking paper to computers. When I looked at that, the role of data processing was brand new to business. After working with IBM for seven years, I left to start my first startup. That was called decision engineers. The whole concept was around decision support systems, DSS and software engineering. Hence the name, decision engineers. The whole idea was looking at how to get computing to this next level. Very quickly, I realised we needed to pivot. Of course, 20 years later, everyone knows how to pivot. Let me tell you, in 1985, pivoting was new. We changed Anne to applied learning to apply multimedia technologies to be able to use technology to deliver that learning in industry. We were very quickly identified as an innovative company that could do new things. Jeff Kennett came to us and said, he wanted to build a government portal. We didn't know what a government portal was either. We had to think about people's mental models of data and of systems across government. The big challenge was that in those applications that we were putting online, for the very first time in our industry, the audience that we were aiming these applications to was not under our control. We couldn't run training courses on how people would use the internet to use this new government portal. We went to the human factors group at Swinburne University and we said to them, we really need some much better ways of thinking about data, thinking about the human computer interface. It was the combination of the research teams and our developers that really generated a very innovative Vic.gov.au. When Bill Gates visited Victoria in 1998, he saw that and he saw the work that other companies were doing around Accumentum at the time. Bill Gates said, this is really extremely innovative. This is new. Our prize was that he wrote about it in his book, Business of the Velocity of Thought. Page 391, if you've got a copy of it, it was framed in my office for a long time. When you think about this, solving difficult problems, real world problems by engaging research teams as we did then, the collaboration between business and research really created a virtuous upward spiral. The more innovative you were, the more problems you solved, the more people were accepting and engaged to implement them. Part of my role as Chair of Nectar, Jim McCluskey introduced me to a guy called Ben Schneiderman. If you are interested, do a search. He's got a book called ABCs of Research. He looks at three decades of data of what I've just described about research teams and business and what's the benefit to both in that collaboration. His thesis is that when you look at the data, researchers that engage real world problems have 40% more citations than those that don't. Importantly, the industry business research projects that engage with recognised research institutions had double the internal rates of return of those projects that they themselves didn't use research. In other words, research provides business with a real competitive advantage. I'm sure we'll get into the conversation around this a bit later, but when you look at the Australian R&D tax system, we spend $6 billion a year on innovation. As Rosie said in opening remarks, the linkage of industry to research projects to validate that so that those funds are really going to fund innovations important. Rosie in her opening emphasised for years Australia has ranked very low in the OECD rankings for insufficient transfer of knowledge between researchers and business. That I've lived, we don't do as well as we could, but we have some fantastic examples, CSL, Cochlear, Atlassium, Canva. When you look at those companies, when I was on the board of NICTA, Atlassium built a very valuable and important relationship with NICTA. The good companies in Australia are doing outstandingly well at collaborating, but we don't want to use those few companies as a reason why the whole of industry needs to up their game. So, today's session, I want the panellists each to take some time and introduce themselves and what they're passionate about and give you a bit of background to them. And we'll then have a conversation across the experiences that we've got here and then open up at about 2.40 or thereabouts to we'll have a break and open up to question and answers and then we'll bring it back and summarise at the end. So, I think that let's kick off with Lee, many of you know Lee and Lee is a member of the Department of Biomedical Engineering with the School of Chemistry and Biomedical Engineering and the Director of Melbourne's Brain Centre of the Imaging Unit in the Department of Medicine and Radiology. And our primary research focus is around medical imaging, in particular magnetic resonance imaging MRI. And I've had a few MRIs, so a few of us know what that's all about. So, Lee, why don't you explore how your background is relating and why you're excited about the topic we've got today. Thanks, Russell. So, I must admit when Russell first asked me to speak at this I thought and I actually wrote back to him and said, are you sure that I'm the person that you want for this because you will not find my name associated with any start-up companies. I don't have a long list of patents associated to my name but in conversation with Russell it actually has made me think more about my role, particularly going into more of the university leadership to actually be supporting researchers, particularly in the medtech space. And so, let me tell you a bit about my background. So, I'm an electrical engineer and I have a degree in computer science as well and really didn't like what I was doing particularly much, you know, one of those people that got good marks but hated electronics. Never wanted to play with the circuit, you know, and I think I got through four years of engineering without actually doing much lab work at all because there were always more interested people that I was project partners with. I went into a PhD because I knew at age three I was going to do a PhD because my parents had PhDs. And in fact, you know, there's a lot of… Melbourne's a small world, right? And there's a lot of talk with six degrees of separation. I was struck, Russell, that you talked about the human factors group at Swinburne. My mother was actually part of that group so it's usually men that is this six degrees of separation. I was quite happy to think that that was a… anyway. It wasn't until after four or five years of being a postdoc overseas and I was doing statistical signal processing, loved the maths, absolutely had no interest in what I was doing that I came back to Australia and was in a position that was doing neuro-engineering, forming collaborations between engineering and neuroscience, particularly the flurry. And I had been one of those annoying people that had a hierarchy of sciences and maths was at the top, physics was a close second chemistry. Biology was down there somewhere, right? But it quickly opened my eyes to what I had been missing, which was the passion, right? And in particular, using all of my electrical engineering and computer science skills to play with magnetic fields to be able to get three-dimensional pictures inside the human body, blew my mind. That was 15 years ago. And every day I learned something new about MRI and other technologies like CT and PET. And as a researcher that's just so rewarding to work on something that you can learn something new every day. But that's a very privileged position to be in that makes it sound like the old school academia of just I work on what I want to work on because it's interesting and I am adding to the knowledge base. But it is the fact that we are doing, and I say we because I work with a large team of people, right? And what we're doing is we are trying to solve real-world problems. So it's not enough just to find magnetic resonance a fascinating physics concept. It's also the fact that clinicians use our technology every day. And so in the time that I've been involved in doing medical imaging, we work with the vendors who sell the machines, right? So we have a very close relationships with Siemens Healthcare and they have a model of commercialisation where they work closely with the researchers over a long period of time, right? This is one of the things I want to discuss today is the timelines between research and industry, right? And maybe it's because they're a big company, maybe it's because the imaging technology is quite, what's the word, mature, that they can afford to have these people based embedded in the research units solving incremental problems that are going to give them a competitive advantage, right? But it works so well from a research point of view. But it's very different, I believe, to what you'll hear from the type of companies that Adam and Josh are involved with in comparison, right? And then, sorry, I can talk about imaging until the cows come home, but let me talk about my role as the head of biomedical engineering at the University of Melbourne. So many of our academics and all of the postdocs and the talented PhD students, seeing one in the audience there, are involved in commercialising their research and our master students are involved in commercialising their ideas. And it's such an exciting area to be in, and it's seeding this groundwork for Melbourne to become even more of a MedTech powerhouse. But it requires training, it requires the government support, it requires the buy-in from industry and it requires some kind of a shared understanding of these timelines that we're working on. So I'll probably leave it there. Our next panelist is Adam Clarke. Adam's currently the CEO of a robotic surgery evolution based in North Melbourne and it comprises two divisions, the International Medical Robotics Academy and the Pindari Surgical Education Solutions, which Adam will tell you a bit about it. And as soon as he starts talking, you'll know that he began his career in the United States of America. He's an army specialist operations guy that moved into military and commercial and spent 20 years with MedTronics and Intuitive across the MedTech industry. So I won't take any more of Adam's thunder. He can tell you his story and over to you Adam. Well, first off to the audience and to Russell and Rosie. Thank you for having me as the newest Australian on the, probably in this entire room I would imagine. I'm just thankful to be in this beautiful country and thank you for having me as a new resident. I couldn't be more pleased to be here with all of you today. And I think how all of this connects. I'll walk a little bit through my background, but I think you did that fine. I want to talk more about how this all connects together. Let me ask the audience, how many of you know or yourself have had surgery in the last five years? Know of someone or yourself have had surgery in the last five years? Just a rich show of hands. So virtually everyone in the panel and in the room. As we think about the subject today. You know, you can learn more about a restaurant you're going to go to tonight in Melbourne. Or a hotel you'll stay in anywhere in town. Then you can about the predictive outcome of the surgeon skill training and quality. The hospital experience, et cetera. That information is captured, but not always shared. And it needs to be massaged and it needs to be learned from. And we need to use that to drive better outcomes. And that's what drives me. And I think about robotic surgery evolution. What we do is he mentioned there are two divisions. The first one is the International Medical Robotics Academy. And, you know, we know that there are technologies today that can enhance surgical skill. It can take a good surgeon and make them great. It can take a great surgeon and make them better. Can't take a bad surgeon and make them good. I don't think that's necessarily possible. And we know that, you know, if you graduate the bottom of your medical school class, you're still called doctor at the end of the day. But the thing is the public doesn't know who that is. Is that the doctor you have? Oh, they have good bedside manner. Oh, they're really nice. This really resonated at home for me when my mom had a hip replacement a few years ago. And of course in the industry I reach out to a bunch of people who know orthopedic surgeons, who work with surgeons, who's the best in this area where I grew up in America. And of course I get that information, hey, you definitely want this doctor, not this doctor. This is their approach, they're very cutting edge, blah, blah, blah. That information is stored nowhere. Those surgical outcomes, it's sort of word of mouth. And in 2023 as we're approaching, right, isn't that shocking? It's absolutely shocking that that's the case. So at the International Medical Robotics Academy what we do is we teach surgeons how to use this technology safely and efficaciously so that they can achieve better outcomes. And we'll talk a little bit about that today with robotics and how robotics surgery particularly enables the ability to track movement and data and outcomes much differently than existing or older modalities of how surgeons operate. And the other side of our business that I get really excited about is the Pindari surgical education solution business. We call the Pindari because we want to keep some authentic Australian to this international business where our goal is to replace the need to use pigs and cadavers in training. Every year tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of pigs and dogs are used in surgical education and training. And we think we can change that by creating synthetic bio-inert organs that can replace the need to do that, providing surgeons a really reproducible high fidelity experience. So they can practice certain simple parts of a procedure moving on up to advanced parts of a procedure, do it at a cost that's less than using an animal but not euthanizing an animal needlessly. The most important part of that is that we can track the outcomes of those surgeons in training objectively. And that's the important part. Rather than the surgeon who's teaching me and evaluating me knows my father or knows my uncle or whatever and that's how I get scored and graded on maybe a little bit of a curve. When the data is objective, then obviously you're getting a much different view of it and that's information that we can help. When people know where they're at, surgeons are elite athletes in that mentality, right? So when they know that they're in the bottom 20%, they want to be better and they'll work harder at it. So that's why I think this data matters and the subject material matters today. So, again, thank you for having me. Excited to be here and to talk to you about all these things. No, I think you'll add a lot to the conversation, Adam. The next speaker is going to be Amanda Capels. And on the weekend Amanda texted me and said, Russell, you need to know, I've got a bit of laryngitis but I think I'll be better by Wednesday. And yesterday she texted me, fine, I'm coming. And this morning I'm on the train coming down from Wood End and I get this text. I can say about two words and I'm terrible. I'm going to have to pull out. And I'm really disappointed because I first met Amanda in 2002 on John Bumbies round tables on technology and there was a real effort there to bring academia and business together. And so I was really disappointed because I know what Amanda would have been able to contribute today. But she is a real trooper and she wrote out this morning, this is what I would like to have said to the panel today. And so if you could imagine that Rosie is actually Amanda, Rosie's going to go through and cover just in the first bit, just general comments Rosie about from what she's written. And then during the conversation Rosie will be able to contribute comments specifically from Amanda's written work. But there will be times when Rosie might wish to specifically speak on her own right as CEO and for ARDC but will be very specific about the difference. So do you want to just give some opening comments Rosie from the email that we got from Amanda? Thanks Russell. Well as many of you know, flexibility is one of the ARDC organisational values so we'll give this a whirl. And I think most importantly we thank Amanda for her ongoing support and hope that she gets very well soon. That of course is the most important thing. But I do have some comments to share from Amanda with you and the first is on the role of government. And she says that the primary role of government is to support the supply of talent, tools and technologies into the economy for businesses to use. One of the points that Amanda makes is that Encriss, the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy is a great example of this policy in action and indeed for us to have that feedback from Amanda today when I know that not only do we have ARDC in the room but we have other Encriss capabilities represented. It's wonderful that we all feel Amanda's strong support there. But much needs to be done to raise awareness with industry and other governments, state governments to ensure that the essential capability provided by Encriss facilities is appropriately supported and indeed used. From time to time government provides incentives to stimulate the uptake and adoption of the talent tools and technologies often by the way of grants that are provided through a competitive process that's often framed through sectors. Amanda does highlight that certainty is a key issue here with many programs not given sufficient runway to achieve impact and I think that will come back to Lee's comments around the timelines there as well. The most efficient and effective incentives have been vouchers here in Victoria and the Victorian market validation program which was the equivalent to the US SBIR activity which I'm sure some of you will be familiar with. These incentives had many benefits but particularly facilitated university industry engagement. The federal R&D tax concession that we have here in Australia has got certain benefits. We don't have the data to understand how efficient this instrument is in lifting R&D performance and the complexity across the Australian economy. So those are some thoughts on government and then I also have some thoughts here on university business engagement and I know the first of these will resonate with all of us here. We need both curiosity driven research and applied research, it's not one or the other. But we do have a challenge, the challenge we face is to improve the way that science is coming from our research universities and put at the disposal of industry. We have many government policies that are seeking to drive the university industry interface so the ARCs, industry research transformation hubs, the CRCs and other schemes and Amanda gives us the question why hasn't this been solved. She suggests that we need structural change and better metrics of success. Currently researchers are measured on the grant income they bring in so the behaviour that we see can be grant hunting rather than value creation and it doesn't provide a good environment for engagement with industry. Tech transfer offices are also rewarded on funds secured and quantity rather than quality of start-ups which can lead to a transactional rather than strategic outcomes being a focus and builds in certain failure rather than businesses with a chance of success. Thanks Rosie. Josh, you're the mirror image of Adam. You married an American girl and now you're back in Australia. Josh is really here because he's working with SIA Medical but he's had a career as an entrepreneur out of the FinTech industry in the United States and is able to bring both a data in finance perspective but also having joined SIA Medical in August 2021 has been able to look at the way technology is used in SIA Medical so Josh, why don't you outline your background and some of the things that you've learnt and that we've talked about. Sure. It's interesting. As Russell mentioned, I've just moved back to Australia after about 20 years in the States and in America I was the founder and CEO of probably the first sort of Neobank FinTech company called Simple. I didn't have a background in financial services, I had a background in data analytics and software engineering but I saw a need for doing banking better and sort of taught myself the skills and built up a team to do that and saw it through an exit and all of that and moved back to Australia with a young family and COVID and all of that wanting to be closer to my family and unlike you Lee, I don't have a degree in computer science or electrical engineering but I spent most of my career doing computer science stuff. Actually I went to university in Melbourne for medicine and dropped out in my final year to go work as a systems engineer at a technology start-up because this is .com era and didn't incur a lot of medical school debt so why not? Because the wonder of newborn life, I was doing obstetrics at the time and that wasn't so exciting to me whereas writing C code was super exciting for me so I went off and did that but anyway, so I came back to Australia and I'm sort of an avid electronics hobbyist and a friend of mine said you have to go meet the team at Cia Medical because they just do really cool stuff with electronics and I got a tour of their facility here in Calton and they just had really cool machines and they were doing really cool stuff for those of you who don't know, Cia is a business that started about four years ago actually started as a research collaboration data platform for EEG data then the founding team quickly realised that they needed to collect a lot of EEGs to build that platform then realised that the hardware that existed in market was not great so they needed to build their own hardware manufacturing company and we now run Australia's largest sort of epilepsy diagnostic service using hardware and software that we've built in-house we just got FTA clearance a couple of months ago we're launching in the States in a couple of months and we just had our first patient in Europe last week so that's sort of the history of the business and I came on the tour of the office and I've come out of sort of fintech and I was pretty jaded I started this business in fintech with this idea of really trying to help people get better control of their financial lives and saw how much the financial services industry really praise on consumers and I was jaded with that industry and I saw Cia and I was like wow there's really clear connection between the incentives of this business doing well and the incentives of their customers, namely their patients I thought it wouldn't be great if I could work at a company like this but I got home from the tour and looked at everyone's page on LinkedIn and like wow these people have like PhDs in computational neuroscience and they have PhDs in electrical engineering and they have PhDs in all these amazing things and they have great publications and there's no way I could work there but I thought it wouldn't be cool one day a few weeks later they said hey do you want to come in no they said we're looking for a CTO and I responded back saying look I've just got back to Australia I don't really know anyone but if I find someone I'll let you know and they said no no why don't you come in and interview and I'm like I'm unqualified but sure and I came in and at the end of the day they gave me the offer and it was surprising to me because the company had really started with a really strong research background and I think what they were looking for is that they'd grown from a 20% to 200% company with that strong research bent they wanted to work out how do we turn this into sort of a scalable global business and that's sort of where I come in where I get to work with really smart people and help them do all the sort of dumb silly stuff that you need to build a good operating business like budgets and finance and team structures and sort of translate from a research mindset to a commercial mindset that's where I'm interested to have a chat today So I think as you heard the panelists talk there's a terrific amount of skill and experience sitting in front of us here I'd like to in the first instance though look at and Lee perhaps maybe you'd want to comment first but the benefits that Josh was just alluding to there about the societal benefits from the collaboration between research and business to deliver an outcome let's explore what's the impact of translation of research on society beyond the commercial results of a start-up what are the sort of things that researchers see that society can benefit from their core research Now or in the past? Well I think let's start with now and reflect on the past So there is not an area of health that I'm speaking for engineering in IT let's say that we don't as those STEM scientists and engineers touch and no innovations are going to be about I mean it's the same as what used to be said kind of about people that worked in the defence industry that nothing happens in human advancement that hasn't had defence money at some point well it's kind of like that's changed that now nothing's going to happen in the health space unless there's clever engineering in IT involved in it and so every colleague that I work with has some area that they are passionate about and that they are looking to make an impact on society so be that from people that are working with Adams company in the robotic surgery area but to people that are developing drug delivery modules to those of us that are dealing in the high end very expensive big pieces of kit and then of course there's all of the people that are doing machine learning and that's I think has to come up in our conversation at some point today about how this all fits together but I think that part of the strength in what we have in Australia and tell me if I'm getting too off topic here Russell but is that we have as Amanda's notes alluded to the increased platforms and so I'm part of the national imaging facility which is an increased platform and we work closely with the IRDC but that strength of having the engineers and scientists embedded in nodes at universities around the company that are working with clinicians and the clinicians are working with drug companies for example that are looking to commercialise their Alzheimer's drugs they can't do that without access to the patients multisite studies and multisite studies don't work unless you've got people that know how to harmonise data that comes off multiple places this is the strength of Australia that we have a relatively small community people tend to know each other and yet we're all working quite independently but now we're networking and the power of that network is just beginning I think and will be exploited more over time to see real patient outcomes real commercial benefits as well Adam I'm interested in you reflecting on Medtronics and Intuitive not in terms of the commercial benefits that they got out of the research to build their products but what are the broader benefits that business gets from collaborating with research what are some examples from your 20 years there that really would encourage businesses to collaborate with research well look first I think and great points by the way I think that there should be a healthy degree of skepticism and apprehension between industry and say academia and government data there has to be safeguards built around that and identify what you're trying to solve but I think the more it's collaborative and networking and sharing ideas I do think it'll advance it an area that I've seen a lot is this where it's not worked well for example in the states where historically hospitals will control their data or states or governments will control their data they know where probably the dark spots are they don't want people to see but they don't want to expose that to anyone for fear of reputational damage or some other thing and together what I saw intuitive surgical do really well in the last few years is really cracked the code and saying look let's de-identify all of this data find a place where we can share it to maybe a third party centralized and let's try to figure out what problems do we need to solve what's worth solving and then coming up with some solutions where they can learn together one application of that in the future as it relates to machine learning and AI and I know that's a subject for some folks in the audiences and some collaboration between industry and some academic hospitals they're actually tracking the movement and the measurement of surgical how they move their instruments inside the body compared to the best surgeons who are world renowned and they're tracking that to oncologic outcomes that means you can't attract the medical records all the way through like is the patient still alive a year from now, two years from now, three years from now and do you think there would be differences between some surgeons and other surgeons and how they approach tissue for example and the oncologic outcomes and the answer that we found was absolutely there was a direct influence to that but that only happened because academia and research and industry got together and had to finally find a way to say look I know that it's bad if it turns out that the oncologic rates, the outcomes were lower in this certain cohort but we need the data, we've got to work together so you've got to take a little bit of vulnerable position and I know that can be hard but when it works like that did in that instance and there where you share data with one another I mean in Australia I tell everyone this is the land of milk and honey and I mentioned at the beginning I'm so excited to be here we have to look for things to complain about for the most part but there are things to fix and there are areas to do that and I think that's something that I'm getting a sense from the State of Victoria particularly working with the Department of Health a lot over the last few months I applaud them they're really starting to take that approach with industry and trying to solve some of that so I don't know if that answers your question but I'm seeing how that's playing out right now and I sense that there's a desire for these parts to all work together but nobody really knows how to make that fit yet and to build the trust and if we can break through some of those barriers through an organization like this we can move it faster Adam in terms of the actual researchers and business people how do they how does that encouragement occur how do you build the motivation of people to really understand if you're a VP of sales in Medtronics understanding what's the motivation to understand the research team have you got examples of really good communication between those different sectors let me come back to that one I think there's probably a lot of really good examples of where we've collaboratively please go ahead I was going to go to you next Josh on that a really simple example from a couple of weeks ago so part of our focus is on a supremely comfortable experience of patients and one of the things that we did is we replaced the adhesive that's used to connect electrodes to the scalp and we have a great part of our founding story this sort of Thomas Edison testing of different materials people without a background in material science found a right chemical process to produce an adhesive that's way more comfortable for patients and we're proud of the fact that we sort of discovered this by ourselves but there are things we wanted to change about the properties of that material and there was part of an initiative at the company which is like yeah let's get that sort of start-up spirit and just mess around and work out what to do there was also another part which said we have great connections to academics in the research community here in Melbourne we had a grant under which we could position some of this and I had sort of this interesting challenge which is how do we get the team internally to be okay with us handing this to a researcher to look at because the concern I think the status quo was oh if we hand it to the university they'll come back in two years time with a paper which will look great but we won't know how to actually translate that to a product we feel like we're this far away from just working out the solution ourselves and we're going to be giving up all this time so we had a meeting we had the researchers involved and there was a material scientist there and we described the problem and just off the top of his head he just rattled off six things that were completely obvious in hindsight but someone who's spent their decades in material science would know and very quickly made it clear to us that actually letting an expert look at this problem is not a bad idea that just because you've got a PhD in computational neuroscience doesn't mean you understand polymers and there are people who understand that so we're now working with RMIT on this project and it'll probably take a little longer than futzing around in our homebrew chemistry lab but we'll get a better, more scalable solution where we'll really understand the science and it's the right approach for a company of our size and I think that's where some of the comments from Amanda's email and I know Victoria has listened in the United States there's the Small Business Innovation Research Grants and that grew out of a program which was part of DARPA in the 1980s and what they did is they put up to entrepreneurs in industry problems that they had that they couldn't find an off-the-shelf existing solution for and they required small businesses, I think at the time you had to have fewer than a couple hundred employees to partner with a university to solve that problem and Victoria has really embraced that and it was interesting when Amanda reminded me with her email of the program I did a search and I found Adam's previous company, Intuitive is on today when I looked at it was the poster child because they were solving before they got to now it's 500 employees they were able to get a government grant to actually go and investigate and solve a problem which they did in collaboration with the university and so I think that looking at how to really bring research and industry together in that way we've both got a common interest I think that's a great thing Rosie do you want to comment on that at all? I might just share some of the detail Amanda's provided about the program so at the moment we've got the $2 billion breakthrough Victoria program but prior to that it was $2 million for the science technology and innovation or STI initiative which was one of the largest investment programs in science and research capability by an Australian state government when I saw these notes from Amanda earlier today I was able to say to Russell ah well actually I was one of the reviewers for that program so I finally know what I'm talking about so that was a good thing some statistics from here that the STI delivered a return on investment of more than $3.50 for every dollar of Victorian government funding created $1.2 billion of additional investment and 7600 full time jobs built relationships between industry and universities with over 2400 researchers working for industry and the knowledge and intellectual property generated with 260 PCT patent applications so really a very successful program but I think I can speak from having sat on the review panel some of the characteristics of the program were really looking at the speed of the turnaround so that we're responsive to industry needs the other point that I shared with Russell earlier on before the discussion today is that the quality of applications in terms of the writing was perhaps a little bit less than we would have in our nationally competitive grants the words you used before Rosie all right I said they were shocking but I think this is a really important point and it's where bringing the skills and capabilities of the researchers that we have previously said well they're good at grant hunting and putting them with the industry partners in really strong collaborations to make sure that they can get the support for translation of research into solutions for societal problems it really is creating a win-win situation bringing out the best in both parts and Rosie to explore that a little bit further when you think about the links project one of the things I've observed in business is that they often undertake what they think is research on things that are novel and new only to learn too late when they spent the money that it's not novel and new and so how do we help in the interaction between research and business and the linkage project to help people find what's been solved and what hasn't been solved I think this is actually a very systemic issue right the way across our research institutions that we have the capability within the ARDC working with persistent identifiers to be able to link to grants to publications to data to elections to people and to bring that information together so we've got the expertise in doing this but it comes to more than that it's about how this is taken right the way across the system so we need for instance our national funding agencies our research institutions our researchers themselves to commit to that system and use appropriate persistent identifiers but we have the technology and then you have to think we've had to think about what's the demand is this real is it really going to work and then I'm really pleased that some of our discussions with for instance MTP Connect when we were testing these ideas they've actually come back with really clear examples of even within a research institution the work that's being undertaken doesn't have sufficient visibility so as we work on the research link Australia project over the next 18 months we'll be building that framework so that we can put the technology in place and then of course the second layer as always is the cultural layer and I think so I'm actually going off script here this is me with the other hat on with the ARDC hat it's so often it's not just the technology that's the problem it's how people are prepared to embrace it engage with it it's all very well for industry to be told you can search the information is available I don't know that the appetite is always there the time or the inclination to do that and I do think that one of the things I would like to see is to have both sides available through research link Australia and to make it easier for researchers to identify companies that are of relevance to them so I think it is actually a partnership that through research link Australia we're really seeking to provide the tools to support those activities I think that's really a wrapping up of the first part but a critical part of this discussion today I'd like to turn the focus now to in terms of research and the fact that there's often said the taxpayer pays for an awful lot of research whether it's done in business or in research institutions why should one company be given a monopoly to exploit that research and so perhaps Leigh if you'd start first but Adam and Josh there's a companies always want to be able to keep things confidential and be able to make and establish patents but you know how do we overcome that challenge that the researcher wants to publish and the company wants to patent so Leigh do you want to publish or perish publish or perish that's really tough because it's not just companies that want to protect IP universities also do and that can be tricky and there is perhaps an argument to be made and hopefully nobody from higher up at the University of Melbourne is listening to this but maybe there's an argument to be made for university research to not have IP associated with this but then it comes back to your question why then is the advantage given to industry to be able to exploit that where you know you can look at a university as a corporate entity that's also accessing government money that's a really tough question I don't know is it looked at as a revenue generator or is it as a research like what's the mandate are you there to produce education higher education and research or are you there to be some sort of incubator for building little companies and selling them off to fund the endowments and I think that's where to the question you asked earlier I've seen and actually I have seen this with Uny Melwyn on our benefit we worked with them I won't disclose it but on a very important game changer technology we're working on and we are sharing IP we take the IP as it relates to what we care about and they take the IP as it relates to anything else they can ever use it for and so we're trying to find sort of this win-win scenario where and then that was through the efforts of Professor O'Connor and other faculty in the leadership of the university but not easy to get done to Lee's point and I think more of that will spur I think a lot more solution orientation and I'd even say from academics like if you could reach out more to industry asking them where are you stuck we might want to do research on some of these things and maybe they would even give up the IP if they could solve a problem so I think there's a collaboration there I commend the university as well I've negotiated a few IP agreements with universities over the last few years and there's a real willingness now to come up with a pragmatic intellectual intellectual property agreement and as the universities get to templated agreed standards I think business and universities will find that a lot easier but if you think about your comment Adam that the background IP can be split with the foreground or direct IP are there any other classifications that you think that when you're looking at Wendy so if you want to get a patent are there any critical things that you know that people should understand that it is patentable yeah I mean I think doing good research usually I think doing a background we always our company we start with what's out there what we're trying to solve for and try to figure out that collaboration and have a very purpose oriented on trying to solve a specific gap and where there's a void in the market with regard to IP but you know I think that you know one of the things that gets overlooked a lot of times is for example it's not just the invention itself but it's maybe is it the how you manufacture it intellectual property around the design to manufacture or to scale or whatever I think there's a lot of places that get overlooked and you know in a lot of conversations I've had often keeping a trade secret is a better way of protecting the IP than in fact the patent and often with patent you know when you've got a really decent patent farm you still say let's keep we don't have to no one needs to know this and if you don't know this it's pretty hard to reverse engineer it totally we have some situations like that where we've intentionally made the process really difficult I think the challenge if you file for a patent maybe this is where you're going is you have to disclose all of your secret recipes and all of your processes and if you're unfortunate in gaining a patent or someone challenges you then you're now exposed you've just given away all of your secrets and so we're looking at both you know IP as a strategy but also trade secrets and sometimes as you mentioned I think trade secrets can be more valuable if you protect them properly as well so someone like Cia Medical Josh what are the techniques there at being able to help people decide no we've got to keep this secret or we can publish this we have definitely a bias towards publication I think because of our founders of genetics and the academic history that's what they want to do I think if we were started by a different set of group of people we wouldn't have published as much as we do we have a dedicated research team within the company where we have postdocs working with us we have also full time employees who just dedicated to research and publication and the value for us is less about there's a trade off like yes we can keep this research to ourselves we can keep the findings to ourselves we can build our business better by it but there's a lot that we research that's sort of just fundamental science in the field particularly of epilepsy and we publish that because we're operating a diagnostic business and a big part of that business is producing hardware and software there's plenty of places where you can buy hardware and software that'll track an EEG or an ECG but these are medical device manufacturing companies if you want to buy an ECG from them you'll get an ECG you want a blood pressure cuff they've got one of those as well you want to get they've got a huge range of product lines that they provide because we're so actively engaged in the research community as active participants ourselves not just consumers of research like we've established a brand that we are an epilepsy company like we deeply understand not only the patient experience but the experience of the neurologist and the research community and so that's enabled us to open up doors to major hospital networks internationally where they wouldn't have given the time of day to a start up company in Melbourne that's producing EEG machines because it's a bunch of interesting electronics because we've connected it through to all of the research and we've built that brand like it's hugely valuable to us that's awesome it's a great example and I think if you look at that and you say well what's driving it we're all familiar we've become part of the vernacular this is our moonshot remember JFK's statement in 1961 wasn't it a 62 by the end of this decade we'll put a man on the moon and safely return them to earth we've had a great hit in Hamilton and that's really rekindled the interest in Hamilton Jefferson and Adams one of my hobbies is I've actually read all the letters between the founding fathers of America which are fascinating and Thomas Jefferson gave major challenges to both science and scientists and to business with the discovery of America the exploration of America to not only go and open up the United States but he set them research goals to actually add to the knowledge of America and in the same way as JFK did with the moonshot and so I'd be really interested thinking about when you're looking at the external motivations of who sets the agenda right so if you each think of your companies but also from a researcher's perspective you know what influences your agenda as a researcher what interests you know as a CEO at Adam what are the external influences that get you to think on some of these really challenging moonshots I think the Bionic Vision Australia was a a moonshot idea that originated out of groups of academics working in the clinical space and the history with the Bionic Ear in Melbourne and it was a we will restore sight to the blind that's you know we will put somebody on the moon and it's going to be easy if you do it with proper signal processing and control theory no not quite but there was that's about being academics being willing to take a risk and I think we're seeing that a bit more now with academics looking to engage with industry and create their own startups like as what happened with CIR there's risk involved in that and I don't think it's a natural personality type for many academics such as myself you know there's great job security about being in you know the second largest employer in Victoria second only the crown I believe um yes more job security possibly but that's what we need to do is be ambitious about the ideas that we're having and what the effect can be on society at the end of the day right so what's what's your thought about Adam well look I think we're trying to actually do two of those one I personally have seen the future and know where gravity will take us the idea of machine learning robotics and the interface of a super computer between a surgeon and a patient it's the future we're a bit behind here in Australia but I've seen what's happening around the rest of the world and it's adopting to the standard of care and it will here as well when the costs come in line and it's a better safer way to do surgery with better outcomes and I think that will take place so I'm excited to be a participant in that with our company and helping teach and collaborate with the government and the hospitals and educate the surgeon so they're prepared to use the technology properly and the moon shot I think is you know is it possible between the university of Melbourne and robotic surgery evolution to create tissue that is so realistic that it can replace the need to use pigs and cadavers and surgery and and really train surgeons in a way where you know we can narrow the learning curve of a new surgeon so that we can minimize the outcomes you know I think there's some data out there that is researched around the number of complications in surgery if people really knew that data they would actually be quite frightened it's a major opportunity to do good in the world all across the world and I think that that's what gets me out of bed every morning trying to solve that problem but data will be key because again the collaboration between the university and us is trying to solve a really difficult problem but I think we can get there so Josh in terms of setting the research agendas at SIA what's been your experience? There's probably two broad themes of the work that we do there's much more I guess day to day operational sort of work that we're doing what we're working with again with Melbourne Uni and some other folks around machine learning projects we have a lot of doctoral students coming through where they get to collaborate with us go back to your question from before of like you know we're getting all this benefit and the government's paying for it is a sort of two way street so we're funding a lot of these ITTC centers I think that's a double whatever but we're funding those but also I think giving a lot of real world experience and donating a lot of real world data to not only the students who are coming through the programs but also to the researchers they work with so there's that work there's the work I mentioned before the material science work it's all very sort of day to day it's interesting research but no offence it's not moonshot stuff the moonshot stuff is really informed by just the patient experience of someone who's been living with epilepsy it is just one of these diseases that the prevalence is a lot higher than what people imagine I think 1% of the Australian population has epilepsy a much higher percentage will have a seizure at some point in their life if you're living with epilepsy it can take you about 10 years if you don't have a clear surgical path forward 10 years to find some sort of control with drugs the side effects of these drugs are horrendous it's a very difficult condition to live with and there's an absolute paucity of understanding of what's going on both of the physiological level and then what that translates to from a treatment and management perspective and so I said that the business was founded to build this data platform for collecting EEG data and there's 250,000 people in Australia with epilepsy Australia has done in the order of tens of thousands of sort of gold standard diagnostic EEG studies on folks with epilepsy so there's a huge gap for what physicians can see about their own patients and then there's a huge gap in terms of medication adherence finding the right medication for people in terms of side effect tolerance how that interacts with their genetics and disease progression a huge amount of data that would help and so we're investing pretty heavily in getting this data together we're sort of seeing our business as a way of serving the immediate need that's helping patients but also allowing us to build up a really robust data set that can address this moonshot of how do we radically transform how epilepsy is not only diagnosed but treated and managed and there's a cluster of businesses like we talked about Epiminder a little bit beforehand and businesses that are involved that are working on this problem from different angles I'd like to ask you a question as the CEO of ARDC with the development of the increased roadmap there's a lot of bringing together of different views to set an agenda have you got any thing to share with us around how do we bring government researchers and business together to help set research agendas I think that what's very interesting is we have a roadmap in place at the moment that was formed under the previous government and it includes a set of eight different challenge areas research challenge areas and it was in that context that the ARDC and other increased capabilities were putting their own priorities together for the next five years and now of course we have a new government with a new set of priorities and the nations reconstruction fund and we also saw very recently that Australia's chief scientist Dr Cathy Foley has been tasked with revisiting the national science and research priorities so as increased capabilities we're trying to set our five year plans in a context that is changing somewhat but the bit that really gives me a lot of confidence is when we focus on what is the societal challenge that we're trying to address regardless of the colour of government we need to address health we need to address energy we need to address food security and I think in words that Joshua has been using today that focus on the patient experience if we put the long term beneficiary at the centre of our thinking it gives us a really clear guiding light so however we describe the particular sector or category that an increased facility or the ARDC is seeking to address the societal problems are the same and I think it's with that confidence that we can say for the ARDC over the next little period of time we have our thematic research data commons one of which is focusing on health and medical research data another one on environmental earth and geosciences and the final one on humanities arts, social sciences and indigenous research capability so regardless of how other things are moving around us we know we are focused on meeting these challenges and I think that gives us a very secure framework it's very very sensible comments writing things Josh I'd like you to we've got a lot of researchers who are thinking about communicating with and connecting to business what's your advice to them about how do they you've worked with researchers now and see you've started your own startup that employed 300 people you know what it being on a premise like what would be your advice to a researcher in terms of how to engage either business people to help develop their idea or to engage a business it's a super broad topic I think there's a bit of a different mindset and I've never worked on the research side so I could be totally getting it wrong and please feel free to throw water at me or whatever but I think there's the paper isn't the end of sort of the research process there's so much more that goes on towards commercialisation and as I was thinking ahead of this panel I think there's two sort of broad themes and one is really sort of understanding the user experience or the patient context or whatever the end I'm thinking from our perspective the context in which this research operates I'll give a little anecdote so one of the things that came out of research that were commercialising at SIR is the ability to give folks with epilepsy the ability to predict their future seizure risk like if you look on Wikipedia it says that seizures are unpredictable and through fundamental research that was before SIR's time that is stuff that we're working on we found that's not necessarily true for a lot of people and so we've been engaging with the academic community to test this out we also have an application that's available in the app store and we were doing a test and we were looking at the results and they looked great and we were comparing them to what we were actually seeing in the app store in terms of just random persons behaviour and it wasn't quite the same and what we didn't realise is that the RAs the research folks were reaching out to the patients in the study and speaking to them every day about what they should be able to see in their app you don't get that you're in an app store and downloading it by itself there's a very different context to gathering data just the act of gathering data can change the outcome and so there's a lot to think about about how to present particularly if you're working on behavioural change with your general public how to present rich information that could be foreign to them in a way that's understandable and can lead to behavioural change that's a huge area by background in financial services and now at SIR and it doesn't seem like a very sexy or exciting work except a lot of folks in HCT or HCI that's a big slog and it's a lot of work to actually translate that research to get behavioural change of people the other part is on the cultural side I think one of the challenges that I face when I joined the company is just looking at our software development team we had a lot of people who had a lot of academic experience writing code writing software but it's very different to write software that needs to live for the length of your study and then to write a paper and then you never have to look at it again if you're writing scalable software that you want to grow the number of users on that if you want to have a team that comes and then reads the code and can try and understand it you'd write that code a little bit differently and if you're just writing it for yourself and you're going to forget about it in six months time so trying to pivot our organisation to build better development practices architectural practices I think that came as a surprise to some of the folks coming from the academic world that you don't have to reinvent the wheel for how the software development lifecycle works and it's quite different in an academic environment or commercial environment I don't think that directly gets to your question but those are definitely things I think about Adam, would you like to comment on that as well? Can I just figure that out on that point? So I think the integration there where if you're a researcher and you have some field whatever that is and there's a startup company that's out there, his company is at a different level than where mine is as more of a startup one year in and I've had a couple of situations where maybe some researchers have come in and said hey, we think this is a worthwhile topic maybe on how to train surgeons or how to track outcomes for patients related to X, Y or Z but then here's the project and it's going to cost $400,000 that you now have to give the university to fund that project so for me it's like man, that would be really worthwhile, that would be great but I'm trying to figure out how to pay the light bill next month and so I think that's an opportunity again maybe the government has an opportunity to help bridge the gap between bringing the parties together particularly here in Victoria, I think Victoria Government does such a wonderful job of trying to help at least that's the sense I get from some of the communication but I think we could put that on some, you know, put some gas behind that but I think coming together where if academics and a small startup could innovate and create tens of thousands of jobs eventually here in Victoria, it's like okay well we need to do this work but I can't afford it and the university doesn't have budget so can you help and go ahead please we've funded a lot of research but we've also accepted a lot of grant money and I'm trying to build in my team rightly or wrongly a greater degree of skepticism towards grants because yeah hey look it looks like somebody is going to give you a lot of money we're a more mature startup or a scale up optionality is really valuable to us if we want a grant that ties us into a three year project that project may have made a ton of sense the day we signed and won that grant and we all celebrated winning it but our business changes we learn things every six months what we think is really important today may not be relevant six months from now but we're now dealing with the fact that we've accepted this money we've committed to doing the work and we'll maybe just continue to do the work because we've said yes but it's not actually going to drive long term or at least medium term value to the business so going back to I think what your original question was is I could really demonstrate to a company how you're going to drive value beyond just grants or dollars like what's the tangible like multiplicative leverage you're going to give to a business through the value of your research because I think I've gotten just in my short time it's here a little leery of hearing oh we can bring in half a million dollars of grant money I'm like there are professional investors who can give us half a million dollars with less strings attached and I think that that gets back to your strategic objectives and I'll be interesting you mentioned Adam about the the building of real competitive global competitive advantage Rosie mentioned really understanding the ultimate benefits of the ultimate beneficiary maybe we should tease that out a little bit in terms of how do you communicate between research, government and business that the creation of that real competitive advantage has to be the the goal for business yeah I mean it's you know anything worth doing obviously is you know the worthwhile work is going to take time and it's going to take money and it's going to take investment but you know I think that at the end of the day you know everybody has their with them what's in it for them whether it's the research side and academia or the societal good that we should all be really driving for you know how to bring it all together I think is what we're trying to do is just you know collaborate and get everybody in the room at the same time and try to get everybody aligned to this vision and be trying to do and how it impacts that and if we do all of those things if we do something that really makes a difference in the world and obviously it's publishable etc but the money should follow if we do a good job so I think for us it's not necessarily I don't do things necessarily just although the investors don't listen to this right but it's not just about the money it's about doing something that's worthwhile I would have taken this role if it was just about doing money it's about doing something worthwhile I think getting all three entities around where's the day to say where's the problem getting everyone together and collaborating around a common vision and then sitting down and doing that is it's not easy but it can be done I feel like we're making some progress and look forward to the next few years on that I think over the last few years I've read a lot of business plans as an investor this is my business plan and what becomes obvious to me is that very quickly you can see whether the business plan has been written to raise some money so it's been written for the investors or whether it's a business plan to actually build a business a real business plan and obviously as I've come to investing from doing three startups I'm very I recognise very quickly that that's the case and I think that it's those that have clarity about not just this is we want to put a man on the moon but they actually have what's the crisis of realisation every day and have you really got in your business plan things that you can use in your weekly meetings in your monthly reviews in your quarterly reviews have you built the assets to be able to achieve that vision before we go to the break Adam I had to smile when I went back through Ben Schneiderman's book I was flicking through it and knowing that intuitive called one of your products Da Vinci Ben uses a quote from a Leonardo Da Vinci and it's a classic and I'll read it but I'd like you to comment on why was the product named Da Vinci and what were the aspirations but the quote is classic he who loves practice without theories like the sailor who boards a ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast so the question is how well did research guide intuitive and that product and it really interesting for those of you who don't know the company he's referring to intuitive surgical is the world leader in soft tissue surgical robotics it's a company that started as a DARPA project in the early 1990s for the defense department through research and a lot of investigation to see if it would be possible for there to be truly remote surgery i.e. you have a surgeon on a submarine in a safe zone and or in some safe location and a soldier on the battlefield needs a surgery could you have the surgeon in a different place than where the surgery is taking place that's what the initiative was and that's what but back in the 90s the internet speeds were way too slow as you of course if you live in rural Victoria you probably have the same problems still today but the lag time was too slow so it never really took off and they drifted over to silicon valley and that's where the project really started the company initially thought well this idea about adding precision super fine precision incredible 3D vision with 10 time magnification that has an application potentially in heart surgery and why they named it Da Vinci is not as fancy as you might think I believe it has a lot to do with the initial prototype was named Mona Lisa and then they just kept going on with that theme but the product initially they aimed for heart surgery and so they started to do robotic heart surgery but the problem with heart surgery is these are really sick patients so you have an investigational technique sort of a robotic platform for the first time doing robotic surgery the risks in those cases the surgical procedures are already really high and it really struggled and then a urologist before the early 1990s mid 2000s I should say if you had a prostatectomy virtually anywhere in the world it got done open and the rates of incontinence and impotence were 40-50% in some places so you can imagine if you know somebody who has prostate cancer the idea that you might wear adult diapers for the rest of your life is a 50-50 shot that's not ideal so quick story they basically said I think we can solve this with the use of robotics and so the robot quickly adopted in robotic surgery both here in Australia which is one of the first innovative markets for robotic urology adoption and then the funny story with intuitive surgical is that the company started aiming for the heart but ultimately they just hit the prostate and that's kind of how the technology really took off and adopted and now it's sort of the standard of care in surgery in many many fields right well we're about to wrap up for a 10-minute break for those online as well as in the room but I'd like each of you is there any final reflection of the conversation we've just had and I would ask the online and the audience here to start to think about what are the questions that you'd like to ask because we'll reconvene in 10-15 minutes and at what is it at 240 so if you've got your questions you'll be able to explore those with the panel so just some closing remarks who would like to go first, Rosie? Thanks Russell I think one of the things that we've focused on in this session is looking at the societal benefit from these activities now something I can't say often enough is that the value in increased capabilities is the staff that works in them and it's the increased staff that we cherish one of the things I'd also like to share with the audience though that I hear so often from our increased staff is that they value the ability to contribute to meeting those societal challenges and that is an enormous motivator for our increased staff and I think that's a really positive situation for us to be in. One thing that's been circling in the back of my head as I've been listening to the comments is a lot of the debate between research and industry is already happening inside companies outside of the context of research as companies grow on the scale they develop better rubrics for evaluating the value of certain opportunities and research is just one of those things and there's constant debates inside business about how to evaluate the value of any particular project and I don't know if enough of that language is happening at the research industry level so that they're talking the same game that might be interesting to explore in the next half. I look forward to taking any questions when we get on that I again appreciate the work that all of you do and I have been approached throughout my career from a lot of doctors and some scientists who are trying to publish a paper and I think it was mentioned earlier in it and in their mind it was something that they thought was cutting edge and actually I know it had been done many times before and if you're in the medical field you kind of seen a lot of research like that where it's sort of like okay so what and I think that my challenge to everybody in the room as we get going is like everything we should all do in our lives make it count figure out what those worthwhile problems are for society to solve and collaborate with small companies and innovate with us together to do that but don't publish or just look at data just for data's sake let's try to solve some problems and I think together we'll be able to do that. I'd like to echo Rosie what you said that the increased staff are so vital to making Australian networks of researchers and industry work and you can have all the expensive equipment and the supercomputers in the world but if you don't have the experts to run it it doesn't go anywhere but a question I guess I would pose and it relates to both what Adam and Joshua said what happened so as an academic I can make a decision to work on something for the benefit of society but what happens in industry when it genuinely isn't going to lead to the best commercial outcomes and how does that tension get resolved because we've been I think painting a fairly rosy picture about the choices that industry that you have to make but surely it can't be like that all the time and that's not a question you need to answer now but I would like to explore that a bit That's a very fair comment just my final comment would be I'd go back to the story of Jeff Kennett he was a really demanding sophisticated customer he just questioned and questioned and pushed and pushed and as I said earlier the team that was working on that project described that behaviour as you've all seen it in a lot more colourful language but having real competitive information from real customers about what they need and how can they benefit when I think about the ARDC our impact what really is the impact of what we do and I think that today's conversation I'd really like to thank the panel I think we've had a very valuable conversation because we've shared that and impact is really important and I look forward to everybody's questions after our tea and I think it's 2.31 so we're one minute over time my apologies so have a break and see you at 2.40 welcome back everybody we've now got a number of questions from the online audience as well as I'm sure there are a number of questions from the audience here today but to open it up I was just chatting to Rosie and to Adam Adam you mentioned that the role of of essentially open data how do you take data and make it open reliably and Rosie chatted to me as well that this open data question is really important and it's a two edge sword but it's critical so maybe Rosie you'd like to kick off and just explore that issue of open data and its importance to us absolutely so we spoke earlier about publications being the end point one of the bits that the ARDC is particularly concerned with is making sure that data collected from research data assets is made available for reuse and I'm very carefully not using the word open is fair findable, accessible, interoperable reusable and I think that's a really important message for industry when we talk about accessible it's not the same as open it's as open as possible as closed as necessary and I do think that that degree of comfort is a really important part it comes back to the trusted environment for collaboration so talking about fair data it is still extraordinarily difficult to persuade researchers to make their data fair behind that we've got a number of different reasons one is the it's my data problem the other is it takes a bit of effort to do it so there's a few things that we need to be thinking about how can we work with the instrument manufacturers to increase data being born fair collected fair I think is an opportunity for us but the other important stream in the conversation is how do we recognise the sharing of data as a beneficial research output how do we reward researchers for making their results available now I think in today's panel the groups that we have represented here are in a particularly interesting space because it is actually easier to make a very compelling argument when we're talking about health and medical research there are instances where we simply do not have enough information about the particular disease type in Australia and we're looking at how we get the data from international research as well so that we can simply achieve the minimum statistical standards necessary for our own research so there is a compelling argument with health and medical research we simply can't do the research without making data fair it is harder in other areas but it's certainly a key part of the ARDC agenda as you're talking about fair and open data standards I'm thinking back to my time in financial services like you think it's bad in medical so when we were starting the bank I wanted to go look at academic published research on consumer behaviour with financial service instruments like you could find things in finance journals and whatever and like the end 20 person study is sort of done in the lab like there were no large open data sets on consumer large data sets where 100 really for financial behaviour and it made it really hard for there was absolutely no academic ecosystem around it because there was no data to research there was a lot of very small scale sort of behavioural finance behavioural economics psychology work but in terms of rigorous not to say it's not rigorous but in terms of the sort of approach you'd take to the sort of things we're doing in medicine or in other places it just didn't exist because there was no data because that data was all held by industry and there was absolutely no incentive for industry to share that data there was one example where Bank of America did a project where they funded a program under the media lab of all places at MIT where they donated a data set of 50,000 consumers financial transactions over the course of a year these were anonymized and shared securely but this was orders of magnitude more data than what was shared in any other sort of academic setting and it led to this flurry of papers that were published Bank of America ended up pulling out for a bunch of interesting reasons and Dan Ariely who led that group he left for Duke but like what ended up changing in the landscape was government involvement so the consumer financial protection bureau came out of the financial crisis they put together a new set of legislation and they required data interoperability between banks and that was not open but it wasn't fair is it the way they described it but it was those same sort of principles and so I think where there's research involving individuals and consumers like government can play a really interesting role in mandating that consumers can own their data for competitive reasons but then it also can lead to a lot more research and better understanding of behaviour so that's just a really fascinating story out of the states and finance Any other comments around that? I think that interesting models of understanding people's motivation to be able to know why someone would want to share their data set and one of the examples that I saw 20 years ago was construction data management where they took a whole lot of information from architects gave them a quantity surveyors tool but then sold that information so the architects got the information they gave information for free and they received information and a tool for free but they made their revenues $400 million a year from selling that data to people that manufactured items to sold to the project the architects were designing so I think if we can think about data as to where are the motivations for collecting it where are the motivations for sharing it and what are the rules we want to set around it so it's equitable so I'd throw to the room now and I know a number of you got questions because you mentioned to me in the break so who would like to ask the first question? So a question is related to and Adam referred to earlier on about what's happening around the world in this space in terms of collaboration between research and business you said some are doing it much better than others we're reportedly number 25 on the list at the moment how do we take ourselves up that list and how do we utilize could we utilize things that initiatives that are being used in other places? Yeah it's a good question I think it really was hard to get it started when we first approached hospitals and said give us your data and we promise not to misuse it and we promise not to look at anything that's not relevant and they were like yeah right no way they kind of did one of those deals and it took a lot of legal wrangling and doing that but we finally broke the ice and then of course it was like reference stories once one academic institution or hospital was able and felt comfortable doing it then others would say well maybe so I don't know how that is today in Australia but I do think somebody has to start it education some institute of higher learning or hospital for example in the medical field has to be the one to say we really want to look at this we have to build safeguards around the data it's not open data but there are places and there are mechanisms we can build to make it secure but that's how we did it and again we just sort of parlayed one to the other then it became a very huge thing and then hospitals really felt a lot more comfortable an industry has a responsibility to be responsible with anything that they get it's got to be purposeful what they're trying to accomplish and they have to be very sensitive with that data and protective of it and I think if everyone can sort of behave themselves be a lot of societal good that comes out of it another question I'd like to visit the question of culture I think Josh you mentioned it from your experience but we have really two different worlds represented in this discussion the world of industry and the world of academia and each one of you has expressed sort of opinions around it's different on my side of the fence and so I'm really interested in that cultural side Josh you made reference to you had an industry problem around adhesives and you needed help solving it and so you were able to engage with university practitioners and you got some help but I think culturally often what happens is within the university the university researchers are trying to sell you on their great ideas in the hope that industry then turns around and funds the great ideas within the university but what I heard all of you talk about was it's actually much more of a partnership in co-creation that's needed as opposed to industry viewed as a cash cow to fund the research in the academic institution so if you were to wave a magic wand and say dear university researchers this is what I would like you to do differently or this is how I would like you to behave differently so that it makes it easier for that industry engagement what would you tell us in universities? We're doing some stuff like this I think I'm sure she's probably really time for as important as you are something though where if you could almost come in and before we set everything up maybe sit down and just start the dialogue strategize, open the discussion maybe invest a little bit in one another we need to probably invest more in learning what the institutes of higher learning are really focused on from their research and figure out how that all plays together and then figure out a place that you can try to align and get resources funded I think sometimes it's very transactional I have this idea, you have this idea here's not much money it costs and you haven't taken the time to really listen to one another and do that I'm sure there are people who do it really well we're trying to but I think that's what's needed is just that sort of fostering ideation if you will in listening to one another and what your goals are I think we've mentioned a couple of times that everyone has six degrees of separation to each other on this panel but probably two degrees of separation or one degree that's cool and cute but I think it's also emblematic of a problem which is that the ecosystem is so small like the reason why Stanford has a great connection to the startup community is because there were startups that were successful that funded positions at Stanford professors became rich out of the process there was a deeper sort of alignment of interests and because the ecosystem was so large they were much more aware of what they were doing, what they were both trying to achieve and it was less transactional it was more about building a larger ecosystem I think Melbourne, yes we're highly connected whenever I ask why CIS in Melbourne it's about our connection to the academic world and the community and the healthcare system is really strong but there's not a ton of companies yet that are doing this where there's the competition of ideas that lead to the sharpening of what industries are asking for and what research can provide I do think that University of Melbourne there's a lot of amazing institutes of higher learning here doing a really good job with the idea of partnering with the government on this Tin Alley fund for those of you who don't know there's sort of this large fund and it's trying to take and bridge the gap there so you have some experience with that as well but it's kind of just now getting off the ground but it's really designed to foster that small startup companies or incubator funds there are other things and then aligning it with the university's interests not just giving money for money sake and I think when you look at that structure there's the funding of the research your question, you know is there a way of industry feeding some money into researchers to be able to get the research done but once you've got something that's a little bit exciting and you've made some progress there's a very critical phase of being able to take that and actually get it ready for other investment and I think the genesis fund that University of Melbourne is doing is really well targeted at getting, solving that second phase and Tin Alley with Breakthrough Victoria and it really is such a pity that Amanda's not here today but you know that third phase of yes we've got some research that we've got the proof of concept we've got the business model and we now want to scale so I think that's the critical areas but I think that researchers need to understand that when you apply grant funding alongside industry money industry wants to know that this has actually got a life so often I've seen investment proposals where you've got all this 8, 10, 15 million dollars of the grant money we just want a million dollars of your money to be able to do this and we've de-risked it because we've got all this grant money but no you haven't unless you've got a future that million dollars is really at risk so I think that's the problem that I see that we need to understand other questions Thanks so much for your perspectives today I'm also from the University of Melbourne but just for context I have a background in ecology research but have now moved into education and I'm working with an ARDC funded project with the famous group to build mobile learning platforms for field data collection for students though because one of my really keen interests is on how to provide authentic learning experiences for students and it seems to me like that connection with industry would be a place where the students will be able to further understand how real world works and how software development might be actually done in companies and so on at the same time as providing industry partners with great sources of data to test their ideas out so I'm wondering for the panel just what opportunities do you see for including educators and technology enhanced learning specialists into your teaching and training operations say in a hospital setting to be able to do that sort of collaborative generation of data and also great learning outcomes for our students So I think we're doing that a lot in the biomedical engineering space it's pretty easy in a sense there's lots of low hanging fruit but there's a program that we run called Biodesign Innovation which is run by Professor David Graden and two colleagues at the Melbourne Business School so it matches up groups of engineers with groups of MBA students and it's been the semester not actually designing anything but going out and finding an unmet clinical need and then the second semester is about decided on what they're going to do and then they take it through to a prototype and they develop a business case around it and over the five or six years that that program has been running there has been something like 29 startups come out of that and about 14 of which still exist so it's a really exciting thing and that's being so that's based on a Stanford model to measure Stanford has amazing history in these areas and most of you would be familiar perhaps with the Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discoveries, the ACMD that's in Vincent's and RMIT, Swinburne, University of Melbourne a whole bunch of industry partners that's being built currently at the St Vincent's Hospital site and that concept of Biodesign Innovation hopefully will be expanded to be an ACMD creating something called an ACMD Academy because this is about training the people to have the job ready skills and be embedded in industry during their during the university and actually I should say this idea of an ACMD Academy goes beyond just university masters, bachelor's masters PhD graduates but also to vocational training so how are we setting the groundwork for Victoria to actually have enough of the skilled people in the right areas to do all the different jobs that come with the medtech sector I think it's really exciting I'm sorry I've once again taken it to the medtech area but yeah Any other question? There's one from online that's come in looking at collaboration with industry and saying is there a difference between collaborating with small businesses or large businesses and I know Adam you've got a you've been in a small business and you've been in a very big business I started at J&J, Johnson & Johnson which is the biggest in the industry and then went to Metronic which is smaller Intuitive which is smaller yet and now a total start-up with 12 employees but the bureaucracy and the ability to get things done it's challenging because it's a big company if you're trying to do collaborative research in a project it can take I imagine it's hard on the academic side it's even harder sometimes in the corporate world so start-up companies I think give you a lot more flexibility and the ability to move quick although will they have enough data for you or the ability to deliver what you need I think that's the big question but it's certainly red tape and bureaucracy that can be cut out in a small company but a start-up focus should be number one and unless there's a really strong alignment between what the researcher wants to accomplish and what the company wants to accomplish it can just be quite distracting there's a question online which is that is there room for failure and so in that alignment of researcher and industry objectives research you cannot know the answer before you start your research businesses want you to know the answer before they pay you so if they're paying for research how do we have any ideas about how do we reconcile that irreconcilable mutually exclusive situation is there tolerance for failure there has to be in that you know I was a part of a project years ago and I was learning sort of the leadership principles of the business and it was in combination with another some research and different things but the president of the division of the company I worked at killed the project after we had spent $40 million on it and I was sort of a gas we've been working months on quarters on this thing I said to her I said I can't coach me on a project that she said that we spent $40 million in two years working on it she said I just saved us $80 million and the data showed that it wasn't going to work out and all of that and so I think there's room for failure that was an example in my experience where we just learned more as we got further along and we did some more data analysis and clinical publications with researchers and found that kept going we were just we'd ultimately lost a lot more right so that mantra of it fail often but fail early is important early enough and for sure and you had a question at the break which I thought was worth exploring yeah thanks Russell it was about the some I guess global problems don't really have a very good commercial outcome so malaria or smaller number of diseases like freerichs attacksure or things like that well they have definitely a benefit for humanity to solve that how is it possible to translate that into a commercial context where you can actually see how to make money off that a lot of the work that we're doing around seizure forecasting there's no clear revenue model that you could maybe sketch something out but it's super speculative the reason why we're doing it I guess fundamentally is because we should think it's cool and we think it's really beneficial for people but the more sort of capitalistic answer is it builds our brand to the point that I was making earlier which is that if we can demonstrate that we're doing this we're operating this industry because we deeply care about patient outcomes and it means we're more likely to be able to get a foot in the door to sell a device versus just someone who's another device benefactor so it's like a branding exercise one thing else and I think it hits a mandate if you read like the Harvard business review today over the last few years versus 20 years ago you can't miss a single issue and there isn't something about the societal impact of running a business that's for some ethical purpose or good that wasn't the case 20 or 30 years ago and so I do think whether it's brand power or just doing good it's a mandate now in many companies to have something that they're tied to whether they're even in companies you wouldn't think so that are in the fossil fuel industry or whatever they still have many of these ethical mandates to try to do so I think and I reflected on what you said I've been on the boards of a number of companies that are competing for a very small pool of talent and I've seen if you cannot offer for purpose this is the reason why we exist it's very very difficult to attract talent in today's world and I think that that would be my point is that it needs to be something that every company needs to think about and address those problems but also I when I look at capital raises increasingly we're having people that have made a serious amount of money are looking to invest that and they're looking to invest with purpose so they're trying to find start up companies that they want to still make money but they want to make sure that they invest with purpose but then there's the actual philanthropy of that cohort and philanthropy is essential to really clever people that have been successful and made a lot of money they actually want to solve those problems and look at what the big glow Bill Gates is by far the prime example in fact we mentioned malaria and that's one of his big projects so I think that researchers and academia should work with business to collaborate and look at clever ways of funding and I think that there is a role for philanthropic funding that can you throw enough mud at a wall some of it will stick you throw money at these problems and suddenly you've got something that's really worth not providing philanthropy but investing in recognising here is a real business opportunity so I think your questions are a great one and I do think we all need to think about it talk about just being in this industry for 25 years and how much these complete cyclic changes and how human behaviour the young employees that we have today are newer in their career their motivations are far different than mine were or other people's and the sort of purposeful work or flexibility it's just shocking to me how much that's evolved in the last 20 years and so I do think industry if they're looking out for their business like you said it's really going to be important to attract the next generation of talent I think if you're trying to sell snake oil you're going to be in a tough tough recruitment business no matter how much you're paying in the future very true another online question is that how can academia and fundamental research better utilise the commercial intelligence for results driven research and research translation so leveraging off at earlier discussions that what are the ways in which we've talked about it but not dug deep in how can business and real world problems be really part of the research agenda for research teams do you want to comment on that so I was kind of reflecting on that before this session that perhaps one model and an outdated model is that the researcher at the university is following their interests for discovery research and industry and they're travelling that path and industry are dipping in and out when it suits right that obviously isn't going to lead to the large scale impact of the research what we want is researchers and industry actually having longer term relationships so this is not this is getting beyond just quick seeding of startups because anyone can create a startup and it's about whether it can actually succeed but that's what I want to see more of is travelling a journey together where industry has its laser focus and some things you say no we don't want to do that but the researcher has more of the time and let's say you can fail more I was going to say 9 out of 10 but it's probably 99 out of 100 things that I try and subject to the torture PhD students with don't work but every now and then things do and if you have that really deep connection with trusted industry partners trusted researchers then there is that ability to do something and it's going to take a longer time but it's actually going to result in better outcomes more significant outcomes I should say I think my comment on that Lee is that if I look at the portfolio of investments in the science commercialization one of them came out of the university of North Korea New Zealand and the the startup the CEO became the postdoc that did the research became the CEO of the startup and within a very short period of time he realized that he should be the chief technology officer not the CEO of the company and as the investors we then introduced a board member and we did a switch and that board member then became the CEO but what I observed over from our first investment was in 2011 by 2015 the company had gone to the opportunity to open an office in Europe and the way that that company had scaled their office in Europe by 2017-18 was about 70 or 80 people so it was a really successful startup and what we observed was that the research team inside the company because James had actually come from the university he didn't leave and lose all of the relationships with the researchers in the engineering faculty of Canterbury and so there was research continued with the university and there was research with the company and it was that spiral that interaction that really led to really good outcomes so I think that's that really is critical in the way in which we look at this relationship between researchers and industry so it's one of the questions here is it really is it a spiral rather than you know a serial collaboration yes so I work at Oscope which is the Geoscience and Chris organisation and what Lee was talking about before and yourself just then is also my experience in Earth Science with long term collaborations with industry partners that they grow kind of almost organically where you have students coming and going and they're almost career long collaborations and I was just wondering to place that in a global context is that how it works like in the States because also I mean we have this small community right so we have the only place to get people with the expertise that we need to do the research come from like your research group but I suppose the two guys with the US experience were talking more about you know like the Stanford model where there's huge number of people coming and going and lots of different types of activity and lots of different aspects I've been doing a lot of talking you go ahead I think the challenge is when I was over in the States my interaction with the research community was pretty at a distance like as I said earlier like in financial services there was so little done I'd attend conferences and speak to individuals but there wasn't that same interconnection that I have in now and medtech my experience is that there are some places that do it really well Stanford schools in Boston some places in New York or other hubs of sort of innovation and there again it's a lot of faculty driven who are also creators and inventors and then they sort of seed these companies with their own talent and their students and and all of that but not all of them of course again I'm sort of seeing everything with rose colored glasses here in this amazing country I do think I know that there's a legacy and some challenges like it was at the beginning that was started with regard to where you're at but I do feel like being a newcomer here and seeing this through an objective lens I think you're doing a lot of things really well in this collaboration it seems like there's a real concerted effort to acknowledge where it's at today where it needs to be in the future and trying to bridge the gap and I get a sense from a lot of the meetings that I'm in again at both the universities and the Uni Melbourne and the Department of Health and Victorian Government that they're once like everybody is aligned to solving the problem and bringing it together and so I think we can get there I think we can be the Stanford of whatever here in Melbourne I really do It's interesting that when I was in New York I'm a user of the R programming language and I started the R user meetup in New York and I was looking for places to host and like there was no problem getting Columbia or NYU or anyone to want to have us in there even though I had no affiliations with those institutions because they wanted to have people from who are academic users of this software plus industry users like VCs would host our meeting we were from a VC office one month to a different university different month because they just knew the value of that cross-pollination of ideas and a bunch of cool things came out of it it's grown into a very large community now but it wasn't started with a large grant program or a proposal or lawyers it was just like oh San Francisco has this I knew the guy who ran it in San Fran I was like why doesn't New York have this and it became a thing and I think it was just well timed with the sort of growth of machine learning and data and the university just wanted to collaborate with VCs to put money in to pay for our pizza and it grew into a big thing A question has popped up online which is again refers to an earlier discussion but how can we stop research or industry coming up with questions that the other domain has already answered and I think Rosie you might want to comment about that Well I think that this is where our Enquist facilities have a really good role to play Joanna and I were having a bit of a chat in the break and of my reflections is that the solution that industry needs isn't always breakthrough research it could be a particular material that is well known used in other applications the properties are known it's trusted, it's robust it's exactly what's needed by the company but isn't necessarily going to be exciting research and so having our capabilities in a position where they're able to be the anchor point for that is very valuable but I would inject one other point that I think is really important we've spoken about the networks and the communities and I think sometimes we're always putting pressure on ourselves to know the answer and perhaps the most valuable thing that we can say in Enquist facility is to know that saying actually I don't know the answer to this but I have an idea who might and doing it quickly could be the most valuable thing I think that's a great point on which we should end I'd just say I've been delighted running this discussion and panel it's been a real pleasure and I hand over to Rose to wrap up Thank you very much Russell so all I'll do now is add my own thanks my thanks to those of you in the room for joining us this afternoon echoing that and sending my thanks to everyone online I really hope that you've found it to be a rewarding experience it wouldn't be possible without the ARDC staff that have worked to bring this together it's the third as you heard earlier it's the third of our leadership fora for 2022 and particularly for today's efforts I have been advised my thank you list includes Adele and Asher and Aleem and Catherine your name doesn't begin with A try Amanda it works for me but of course my thanks to today's panellists for your time for your passion and your commitment to making this very successful and Russell thank you for navigating us on today's journey my pleasure great thanks everyone networking drinks are available outside for those in the room for those online I'm afraid you've got to put the kettle on yourself