By Venni V Krishna, University of New South Wales, Sydney.
University-based science parks might grow to be extremely engaging websites for deeper engagement with business, enterprise capitalists, and start-ups, and assist procure authorities funding too, as confirmed within the UK, Singapore, and China.
Economists name it the Australian Innovation Paradox.
Despite persistently ranking among the many world’s finest for its high quality of schooling and primary analysis, the nation has struggled to attain sustained innovation management or financial affect by way of commercialization of the analysis.
Over the previous decade, greater than half of Australia’s primary analysis has been performed by universities. However, Australian universities have remained constrained by funding fashions, governance buildings, and coverage settings that reward incremental excellence over risk-taking and system-level innovation transformations.
As funding tightens attributable to numerous elements, issues are rising about its implications for analysis.
Academics comparable to Brian Schmidt, Nobel Laureate and former vice chancellor, Australian National University, and economics professor Richard Holden of the University of New South Wales, have raised critical issues about declining public funding in analysis and growth, notably inside universities.
Schmidt said: “I look around and I am scared”, pointing to the Australian authorities’s funding in its sovereign analysis functionality, which was 50 % increased 15 years in the past as a fraction of its GDP.
Student charges and public funding
Over the years, the analysis mannequin of Australian universities has grow to be overly depending on aggressive public grants and international student revenue, reinforcing a ‘culture of revenue, profit and competition’.
In 2024, worldwide pupil charges accounted for 47 percent of complete enrolments throughout the Group of Eight (Go8) main universities. They additionally conduct 70 % of all college analysis.
Government help accounts for less than around 20 percent of complete analysis funding for the Go8, the Group of Eight universities that account for the majority of college analysis.
Consequently, in March 2025 , when the Trump administration cut research funding to seven Australian universities by A$600 million, it got here as a serious shock.
In the nationwide context, Australia’s Gross Expenditure on Research and Development (GERD) fell from 2.25 % of GDP in 2008–09 to 1.7 % in 2024, properly under the OECD common of two.7 %, and behind Japan (3.3 %), the US (3.59 %), China (2.6 %), and South Korea (4.2 %).
As authorities help continues to say no, the administration of this income stream dangers turning into the dominant goal of college governance. This emphasis is unlikely to encourage universities to pursue translational analysis and growth, and innovation for significant industrial and financial affect.
It is subsequently comprehensible that Schmidt is “scared” about Australia’s analysis capability.
The lacking hyperlink
When we flip our consideration to university-led innovation, a essential lacking hyperlink comes sharply into focus.
Over the previous decade, main Australian universities have experimented with ideas comparable to “innovation districts, hubs and parks”. While these initiatives have had some success, they haven’t resulted in a elementary transformation of universities into frontiers of nationwide or international innovation methods.
Their affect has largely been ‘incremental’—supporting native collaboration, start-ups, and utilized analysis—and to strengthen inside innovation capabilities inside universities.
But these efforts have fallen properly wanting producing ‘radical’ or ‘blockbuster’ improvements of the type related to Silicon Valley, Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science Park (HSP), or the dramatic reinvention of Oxford and Cambridge over the previous three a long time.
For a lot of the twentieth century, British universities—notably Oxford and Cambridge—have been deeply conservative establishments. Commercialisation, entrepreneurship, start-ups and utilized analysis have been usually considered as distractions from the college’s core educational mission.
However, by the late Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, this stance grew to become more and more untenable. The rise of the US Ivy League and main public universities—fuelled by federal mission companies (National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), enterprise capital, and university spin-offs following the Bayh–Dole Act—made it evident that Britain’s most prestigious universities have been shedding floor not in educational high quality, however in innovation management and financial affect.
The success of Silicon Valley, Route 128, and university-linked biotech and ICT clusters uncovered the bounds of the British mannequin.
In response, Oxford and Cambridge undertook a deliberate and far-reaching strategic shift within the Nineteen Eighties in selling science and innovation parks round their campuses.
Over time, this technique produced dense native innovation clusters—most notably the “Cambridge Phenomenon”—characterised by college spin-offs, enterprise capital, multinational R&D laboratories, and sustained authorities help.
The Oxford Science Park, for example, hosts about 100 companies using 3,000 professionals, whereas Begbroke Science Park accommodates 20 analysis teams and round 30 corporations in 2025.
The complete economic impact related to Oxford University was estimated at about US$21 billion in 2019, round 50 % of which got here from analysis and knowledge-exchange actions—together with IP licensing, 168 spin-out corporations, and 32 different corporations throughout each parks.
Multiple reports indicate that these impacts have elevated by practically 50 % over the previous six years.
Similarly, the innovation complicated in Hsinchu Science Park (HSP) and its proximity to National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) and National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) has propelled Taiwan to international management in semiconductor know-how—spanning design, fabrication, packaging, and gross sales—because the Nineteen Nineties.
Drawing on the confirmed position of science parks in injecting dynamism into nationwide innovation methods, the Singapore authorities too began making massive, sustained investments in science parks from the early Nineteen Eighties as a part of a deliberate long-term technique to place the nation as a world information and know-how hub. Its strategy was systemic, state-led, and tightly aligned with nationwide know-how transformative insurance policies.
A defining characteristic of Singapore’s science park technique has been its aggressive attraction and retention of worldwide expertise. Foreign researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs are attracted by aggressive funding, world-class infrastructure, regulatory readability, and a top quality of life.
Unlike these international examples although, Australian initiatives have lacked scale, sustained mission-oriented funding, deep business anchoring, and affected person capital.
Innovation precincts have remained adjuncts to the college system relatively than catalysts for the emergence of recent know-how platforms, globally aggressive corporations, or transformative industrial clusters.
Frontiers of innovation
Universities worldwide are more and more transferring past their conventional roles as suppliers of schooling and mills of scientific information towards a extra complicated entrepreneurial college mannequin.
University-based science parks might grow to be extremely engaging websites for deeper engagement with business, enterprise capital, start-ups, and assist procure authorities funding, as clearly demonstrated by the UK, Singapore, and China.
Interestingly, the Strategic Examination of R&D discussion paper cites the UK’s Catapult Centres —a community of 9 organisations arrange by the British authorities to advertise analysis and growth and exploit market alternatives — overlooks the extremely profitable fashions of the Oxbridge science park or the Melbourne biomedical one.
It is time the Australian authorities and the mandarins of science coverage recognise this omission.
Given the confirmed success of science parks, it’s shocking that Australian universities and authorities coverage discourse have thus far accorded little or no or no significance to constructing science parks at main universities, with Melbourne’s biomedical precinct being a notable exception.
While AUKUS, the QUAD, and the newly introduced Pax Silica do open up potentialities to develop innovation, participation in these teams alone is just not sufficient. Strategic nationwide technological autonomy in quantum applied sciences, semiconductors, AI, renewable power, biomedicine, and different rising domains can be crucial.
The success of those will rely largely on universities as frontiers of innovation, superior abilities formation, incubation and start-ups, and early-stage technological growth.
Yet Australia approaches this transition from a place of vulnerability. Chronic underinvestment in science and know-how, mirrored in a low Gross Domestic Expenditure on Research and Development (GERD) to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio, sits uneasily with the size of ambition now required.
A fast doubling of GERD as a share of GDP inside the subsequent two to 3 years is crucial if universities are to function anchors of technological functionality and nationwide resilience.
Originally revealed beneath Creative Commons by 360info™.
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