Focus on enabling new commercial enterprises

CAPA supports the thirty-second recommendation of the Senate Committee report, Universities in Crisis, that an Innovation Grants Scheme should be established to assist new university enterprises.

"The ability of universities - particularly small and newer universities - to provide adequate seed funding for potentially beneficial new commercial off-shoots would be greatly enhanced by the introduction of such a scheme," said President John Byron today.

"In yet another example of the Howard Government's incapacity to manage the public education system, universities have been told to go out there and drum up their own trade without any dedicated seed funding scheme to enable them to get these enterprises off the ground," he added.

"The entire Howard government has been quite happy to support Dr Kemp"s ideologically-driven push for universities increasingly to fund themselves from commercial enterprises, yet nobody in Cabinet seems to have asked the rather obvious question of how institutions might be expected to fund the establishment of such enterprises," he observed.

"So much for sound economic management on the part of the Coalition."

The emphasis on the use of commercial operations to cross-subsidise other university activities is regarded with considerable caution and reserve by CAPA. However, if appropriate regulations are introduced and enforced to prevent unsound or improper practices, and if the support of teaching and research remain enshrined as the fundamental priorities of public universities, then such independent sources of revenue may be of benefit to students, staff and the public.

"Obviously, the humanities, social sciences and creative arts all have the capacity to contribute along with the sciences, and should also be beneficiaries of such a scheme," argued Mr Byron.

"To achieve this, the idea of "Innovation' needs to developed with more imagination than the present Government has been able to muster, despite all its straining and posturing.

"There needs to be a formula to recognise the equivalence of commercial application in areas that might produce results in terms of artistic practice or policy development, say, instead of patent registration.

"The Prime Minister made it quite clear at the outset of Backing Australia's Ability that his Government would not be capable of supporting true innovation, which must be a whole-of-society enterprise if it is to means anything at all," observed Mr Byron.

"Labor's Knowledge Nation, in stark contrast, opens with the assumption the idea that all areas of the academy must be engaged in an interwoven and generative programme of innovation," he concluded.