Friday 1 August 2008
The AIC's general response to the Productivity Commission report into Public Support for Science and Innovation
The AIC’s core mission is to facilitate the demand-driven application of knowledge, which we refer to as commercialisation. Such application requires a source of knowledge (in the current context, a research organisation) and a developer of knowledge that can then take it to market for application (typically, a company, but sometimes government). Core to fostering such knowledge application is establishing collaborations between the ‘supplier’ and ‘developer’ (although such a characterisation is a very crude way of describing their respective contributions since knowledge transfer is neither binary nor linear). It is the AIC’s experience that SMEs, because of their agility, are well placed to identify and satisfy market demand, but because of their size and capacity for risk, are frequently unable to form such collaborations unassisted, since they require significant levels of trust (and resources) to establish. For this reason, the AIC has developed its active intermediary program, TechFast, to reduce the transaction costs, lack of trust, and market failure that work against SMEs collaborating with the research sector.
