conVerge - Partnerships

Partnerships - Sue Rowley

When I said earlier that I know where the money is, I was needing to remind myself that actually no, the ARC's role is to come in as a 'partner' and new source of money. This is particularly appropriate for people working in the area of art and high technology because of 3 key issues.

- First, the very high international standing that Australian art and science/technology has and continues to enjoy historically.

- Second is your understanding and emotional investment in research practice that 'your idea makes sense to you'. An example of that is the number of people who hold PhD's in this area, which is obviously not important in the arts industry but it certainly is in the research community.

- And finally you're going to need a lot of money and I wish to acknowledge the very real contribution and momentum for that development that comes from the Australia Council. As well as the ARC in making Australian research money available to artists, which is part of my job.

I wanted to talk about the national context which will flesh out what Nigel's been saying and remind you that in the last year, the Australian Government has doubled the funding to the Australian Research Council to $150M thereby doubling the funding to Australian research. It did so in order to strengthen our ability to generate ideas and undertake research, to accelerate the commercial application of these ideas and to develop and maintain Australian skills. This year the Government announced that a third of the ARC's grant money for 2003 will be directed to designated areas of priority and those four areas of priority are nono and bio materials, geno and femolink, complex systems and photo, science and technology.

Now I know that artists are excellent opportunists and that you immediately see a role for yourselves in those areas of priority, which is great but I should say that from the outset see and advance twelve areas of priority which included areas from the humanities, the arts and social sciences. So I'm actually trying to give you some concept of Governments agenda in supporting innovation and I want to ensure that you hear Nigel's message that commercialisation is a really important part of it. I don't want you to think that I insert myself themelesly into this priority of course. The idea of funding priorities in research was to promote and develop excellence in Australian research - to develop opportunities for international leadership and Australian competitiveness in areas of research and as I've said there is absolutely no question that there is excellence in research and opportunities for leadership in research in all areas that we support and fund research for.

So it is important for you to understand that the reason why those priorities are supported is in relation to the national research policy and funding that supports the concept of innovation. This is happening in the UK, New Zealand and Canada so Australia is moving with everybody else and we have successfully argued for the role of publicly funded research in the new knowledge-based economy. Australia's competitiveness in the global market place is really underlying the research policy and the funding that we're seeing and at the deepest level of this discussion is 'partnerships'.

The 'politic scientist' has played a very significant role in developing the Government's support of Australian research and he has argued that to be successful in the global market, economies need a world class research base as a well defined pathway for commercialisation and access to the latest ideas and technologies. The other critical need is a culture where innovation is encouraged and pursued.

In that context you can see exactly why Nigel's work is finding a very interesting place but it is also important to address issues in security in that place for the artist. The reason why the Australian research and scientific community has been successful in working with Government is because it's been able to demonstrate qualifiedly and quantifiably that publicly funded scientific and technological research will lead to economic benefits and the particular mechanism that we used is a study that was commissioned by the ARC of US patents studies showing that it's possible for us to argue there's a link between the publicly funded research and the commercial benefit.

One of the things I'm looking for, and of course I am interested in hearing your perspective on this, is ways in which we might demonstrate through a similarly rigorous and discriminating process what we mean by 'cultural and social benefit'.

At the moment we have what I call a 'soft way' of measuring that and need a more rigorous approach. Over the last decade, the Australia Council has shown ways of doing that for the arts - the challenge of arguing for the value of research in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Two aspects of this are critical; - first is our contribution to the innovation agenda - our relationship to work done in art, science and technology for economic benefit and international opportunities for Australia; and - in defining and securing the concept of cultural and social benefit in a politically utilitarian context of Government policy. How do we persuade a government that we are interested in economic returns and that cultural and social development are crucial aspects of that.

So the next goal is to ensure that we are included in Governments deliberations for defining the next funding priorities, which should be approximately 2004. So briefly, let me remind you what the ARC research programs will support. In terms of the development of research within the national system, we need to focus on; - developing greater scale and focus in our research - research training that goes beyond the investigator and has a longer duration - our infrastructure needs - what is emerging in the new e-environment - how to build on international networks - how to ensure that our existing international strength is recognised; and finally - partnerships with corporate sector organisations

When the ARC talks about industry partners, it's actually including public sector organisations like museums and in fact the Australian Council has been a great industry partner with some interesting linkage grants. Most of the material I have read recently on art, science and technology as well as the converge exhibition documentation, focuses on what we would call our 'discovery programs'. That is, programs directed towards fundamental research and new applications of existing knowledge. From the artists' view point, here are opportunities to push the boundaries of scientific development, to problem solve and to challenge paradigms and perspectives.

I should emphasise that it's really important we continue to talk about practice in terms of conceptual breakthroughs, critique and investigations in art and culture. Anecdotally, if you put to us a partnership investigation that is cross-disciplinary - say between engineering, humanities and the arts - what will happen is that the executive directors read it and my science colleagues will be likely to say it isn't actually going to get up in the science panels because they don't see it as a break through in science research. I would also remind you that one of our key partnerships remains with the humanities.

In the ARC's Discovery Programs (Discovery is our program for linking research projects, fellowships and post doctorates) the aim is to achieve greater scale in focus and impact and to encourage people to see their work as having a longer duration. We fund for up to five years and to $500,000 a year so it means that we recognise fundamental contributions to knowledge are done by teams working over sustained research programs and in research training. In our linkage programs we encourage partnerships with industry and partnerships which will enable the development of infrastructure and international connections. It's interesting that when I read what scientists say about the collaboration with artists, they tend to talk in linkage terms. Not in terms of the fundamental break throughs in scientific knowledge but in terms of the relationship of artists enabling a better interpretation of scientific process, the education, communication and nurturing of community awareness and indeed acceptance. I have many long discussions with one of my CSIRO colleagues about community acceptance of issues like genetic modification. I'm not sure that should be our prime task here but it is a task that we could take. Finally, scientists are interested in our ability to assist them in showcasing science as aesthetic and scientific processes as aesthetic in themselves.

So there are ways that we talk about linkage partnerships and we are enthusiastic when artists develop those partnerships in seeing ourselves as possible third partners in contributing to the research component of that. There are two things that we could be saying and if we talk about priorities then in the end we are going to talk about

Looking forward then - lets discuss the development of 'centres of excellence'. A substantial amount of ARC's budget for next year is going into the development of these centres of excellence and I would ask all of you to consider the following questions; - would such centres be sufficiently geared to competitively compete for research funds - because competition will be intense? - what needs to happen for us to be able to think in terms of developing centres for excellence? - would they need to be distributed across a number of universities and CSIRO divisions. - what kind of infrastructure needs could such centres need and could they provide? - what magnitude of scale and focus would we need to generate?

Considering these questions will ensure that we are well placed to present a cohesive and comprehensive proposal to government for their consideration in the 2004 round of priority setting and I think this links nicely to what Nigel was saying in terms of security, sustainability, longevity and continuing to strengthen Australia's position as a strong international partner in the art and science technology arena.