Some Practical Advice for Government to Truly Support Innovation

Olga Sawtell | September 21, 2009

It’s something I am still complimented on, which is why it is so incredibly frustrating to read of current innovation and development policies that seem to miss the point. It was with no thanks to stirring innovation rhetoric that the board achieved results, but through practical measures.

 

Credit should be handed to a number of practices we implemented, which are all grounded in business principles learnt from experience in the real world.

 

Often it is not that the innovation policies are outright wrong, but more often than not the way they are regulated an implemented leaves something to be desired.

 

It is true that matched funding requirements are one of the best tests of an idea’s roadworthiness. If nobody is prepared to invest in a concept then that is a pretty reliable indicator that the end product will not be commercially viable.

 

However, just because an applicant doesn’t have the matched funding already secured when they arrive at your office for their first interview doesn’t mean the project is incapable of getting it.

 

The most impressive innovations usually have a strong basis in technical or scientific research and development. Technologists and scientists are a very clever bunch, but it doesn’t necessarily follow they will have any business sense. In fact it is naïve to expect them to. After all, entrepreneurial experience is not gathered in a university lab.

 

So first things first, look for the very best and most innovative research. Decisions about public investment in innovation need to be made with an emphasis on the quality of that being proposed, not on the quality of the proposal document.

 

Sometimes entrepreneurship skills can be taught, and this is where mentoring may come in to the picture.

 

But, sometimes entrepreneurship skills can’t be taught, and that may be where partnering can step in, matchmaking innovators with investors.

 

Pick the ones who arrive with a really fantastic seed of innovation, and then train them. Where necessary, force them to take good advice by making it a compulsory requirement of receiving funding. 

 

There are resources that can be provided to help with administrative tasks, but an absence of top quality research and development can’t be found elsewhere so easily.

 

Mentors, partners and the funding body may all be able to collaborate on identifying potential market applications for exciting innovations.  

 

Compulsory reporting and benchmark requirements also play a key role in successful innovation programs; because they help innovators develop sustainable business practices. A period of government subsidy should be treated like an apprenticeship with responsibilities, so that by the time the support is removed it is no longer required. To properly ascertain the success of an innovation grants program the outcomes must be measured over a meaningful time-frame. If three, five, ten years down the track the fruits of that seed money is evident in an ongoing business then that is success. 

 

At the time, the program I oversaw as Director of the Federal Government Industry Research and Development Board was criticised as “middle class welfare”, a label that is still bandied about today; but let me tell you, that is not what it was. Properly administered government support for local innovation is a highly efficient way to foster domestic job creation and economic growth and should be supported.