HortNews
	CRIs Flex Their Muscles In Science Carve-Up

WELLINGTON 10/10/2002 - New Zealand's state science companies are set to make themselves heard at tomorrow's meeting of the Government's new think-tank, the Growth and Innovation Advisory Board.

The country's nine Crown Research Institutes (CRIs) appeared to have been left out in the cold when Prime Minister Helen Clark announced the board in May and said it would play a key role in her Government's growth and innovation policy, announced in February.

But since then, Rick Christie, the chief executive of Rangatira Investments and a member of the Knowledge Wave Trust advisory board has been appointed chairman of the biggest CRI, Agresearch.

Tomorrow's high-profile meeting of the Growth and Innovation board is expected to consider a radical proposal from Knowledge Wave consultant McKinsey and Co for restructuring New Zealand's science sector.

The New Zealand representative of McKinsey and Co, Andrew Grant, is on the Knowledge Wave Trust and said the Government should heavily alter the public funding of science and start matching rivals such as Australia in giving companies tax breaks on their research spending.

He also accused the Government of trying to spread too little public money over too many research institutes and universities, and failing to put enough emphasis on those institutions teaming up with industry, or having top international scientists check the local research is up to scratch.

Now, in a late development, the meeting will also be attended by the peak body for crown research companies, the Association of Crown Research Institutes (ACRI), chaired by Paul Tocker, chief executive of Crop and Food Research.

Mr Tocker will take to the meeting the state science companies' own prescription for change, a 21-page paper, Transforming New Zealand Through Science, to present "concepts" for a performance-based science system.

The ACRI paper is less focused on slashing the state science companies than the 62-page equivalent work from the Knowledge Wave: Making Research and Development a National Priority.

"At a superficial level, there's probably not much disagreement that the New Zealand science system is not currently best practice," Mr Tocker said today.

Getting the science sector up to scratch would be a matter of looking at what was best practice internationally and fine-tuning it to what suited New Zealand.

But it would be important to also look for ways in which all of the sector's stakeholders could get research done and commercialised.

"This is certainly not an inference that there would be organisational change," Mr Tocker told NZPA.

Instead New Zealand needed to identify the competencies which it needed to fund on a secure basis - those that gave real competitive advantage - and to then fund them in way to retain the best scientists in the nation.

But a big difference would be that such an approach should be "performance based" with a clear expectation of outcome. In the case of pure, or "blue skies" research it would be necessary to define what was wanted out of that sector and how it could be measured, and signalled back to the funding process.

Similarly, in the area of applied research, there had to be decisions about targets such as start-ups, and then feed the process back to the funding mechanism.

"That means - we suspect - better collaboration between universities and CRIs," Mr Tocker said.

Rather than academics and state scientists each independently shooting for the same pot of money, they needed to work together.

One pathway would be for universities and crown science companies to form "virtual" centres of excellence bring all the capabilities of particular disciplines to bear on a project.

Crown Research Institutes had $482.6 million in revenue during the 2001 financial year, $252.3 million of it from the Government's public funding of science.

But the Government also funds the $36.7 million Marsden Fund administered by the national science academy, the Royal Society.

Since 1994, the fund has doled out funding to any New Zealand-based researcher, on the basis of the excellence of their work, rather than whether there is any commercial application for it.

When universities persuaded the Government in 1996 to fully fund the projects chosen for grants, the fund's coverage was widened from the science sector to research in areas outside the "hard sciences" to include research in sectors such as sociology, political science, Maori studies and psychology.

Mr Tocker said applied science projects and "blue skies" work would have slightly difference performance criteria.

"We're going to have to make some decisions about how much goes into each of those categories," he said. If international practices indicated more money should go to the Marsden fund, then the science sector should identify what the nation would get by providing more funds.

"This is not an issue about having more than one scientist looking at the same stuff, but about making sure we don't have duplication of effort.

"A team of people working to a common goal is better than having two small teams re-inventing the wheel."