Australia's ARC (Australian Research Council) Centres of Excellence program is designed to break down research silos by funding cross-institutional teams working at the pinnacle of Australian basic research.

Subscribe now for unlimited access.

Login or signup to continue reading

As well as forming synergistic collaborations, these centres naturally spawn successful commercial ventures, because high-tech venture capital depends on deep technical advantage.

Spinouts over the past decade in fields spanning quantum, photonics, sensing, and synthetic biology have valuations exceeding $4 billion. That output happened largely without a coherent commercialisation strategy across the centres, leaving substantial untapped potential.

Today, Centres of Excellence, industry partners, and investors are coming together in Sydney to launch ARTIC, the Australian Research Translation and Innovation Consortium. Our goal is to work together to improve the research to translation ecosystem in Australia.

At present, our efforts are fragmented and sub-scale.

Working together we can use the collective expertise to embed commercial thinking early on in our research, provide appropriate mentoring and support to those with entrepreneurial ideas, and better connect our knowledge to the people and capital that can take an idea to a real-world outcome.

The government's decision to become an associate to Pillar II of Horizon Europe, the EU's 93.5-billion-euro research program addressing global challenges, presents an extraordinary opportunity, provided we build leading capability in our focus areas.

Capturing value from this global pool requires generating foundational knowledge through basic research, then translating that knowledge into projects capable of competing globally.

Centres of Excellence are built for this task because they generate at-scale, world-class knowledge. ARTIC will help make Australian research Pillar II-ready, equipping our teams to lead international consortiums........

© The Examiner