Australia does not have an ideas problem. It has a systems problem

Australia produces research of extraordinary quality.

Australian discoveries have helped create Wi-Fi, vaccines, medical devices, advanced mining technologies and globally significant capabilities in quantum science, astronomy, biotechnology and clean energy.

Yet too often, the industries and enduring economic value created by those ideas emerge elsewhere. Promising companies are acquired or move offshore before reaching scale. Business investment in research and development remains weak. Collaboration between industry and publicly funded research is harder than it should be.

The usual response is to ask which part of the system is failing.

There is truth in all these prescriptions. But none is sufficient, because Australia’s central problem lies not only within its institutions but between them.

We call for collaboration while funding competition. We ask for long-term capability but support it through short-term projects. We urge researchers to take risks while assessing them through conservative measures. We celebrate start-ups but provide too few pathways for them to become medium-sized, globally competitive Australian companies.

Over time, Australia has added hundreds of grants, rules, reporting requirements and coordinating bodies. Most were created for good reasons, including to protect public money, ensure quality or manage risk. But complexity accumulates. Rules outlive the problems they were designed to solve, and new programs are layered on top. Eventually, the energy that should drive innovation is spent navigating the system.

I saw the alternative through LANDTEM, a superconducting mineral exploration technology developed from CSIRO research. The scientific breakthrough was only the beginning. It also required engineering, field testing, software, patient industry partners, trust and people able to work across disciplines and institutions.

It took about 12 years from an early field trial to a commercial product adopted by industry. That experience taught me innovation is "science plus" – science combined with engineering, finance, regulation, communication, customers and time.

Innovation is not a pipeline in which an idea passes neatly from laboratory to market. It is a network, with feedback, setbacks and repeated movement between research, engineering and users.

Australia already knows how to do this - think Cooperative Research Centres, ARC Centres of Excellence, NCRIS, the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, and our growing quantum capability.

The question is why we treat these conditions as exceptions rather than design principles.

The recent Ambitious Australia review offers an important opportunity because it treats research and innovation as a system. Its recommendations connect foundational research, business incentives, capital, workforce, national priorities and government leadership.

The new National Resilience and Science Council could become much more than another advisory body. At its best, it could help government see the whole system: where public investment is fragmented, where national capability is vulnerable, where procurement and regulation are blocking adoption, and where sustained effort could turn Australian strengths into strategic advantage.

We must choose a limited number of areas where research strength, national need and market opportunity genuinely align, while preserving a broad base of discovery research.

We must connect institutions without making them all the same and make it easier for people to move between universities, industry and government.

We must fund selected work for success, including its real costs, infrastructure and workforce.

We must create demand through intelligent procurement, standards, demonstrators and credible first customers.

And we must persist. That does not mean preserving every project. It means remaining patient with national missions while being rigorous about the projects within them: scaling what works, changing what does not and retaining the knowledge gained through failure.

The hardest reform may be subtraction. For every new program, we should ask what can be simplified, combined or stopped. For every risk control, we should consider not only the failure it may prevent, but the opportunity it may delay or destroy.

Australia has spent decades producing world-class ideas. Our next national innovation should be redesigning the system that turns those ideas into Australian industries, jobs and prosperity.

This is an abridged version of the annual Warren Centre Innovation Lecture that was delivered at the University of Sydney by Dr Cathy Foley AO PSM FTSE FAA, President of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and Australia’s former Chief Scientist.