Personal Incentives to Innovate
What are the personal incentives to innovate in Australia?
In stereotypical portrayals, innovators are often depicted as solely driven by financial gain, fame, and disruptive potential, whereas in reality, incentives to innovate are multifaceted, encompassing aspects such as personal fulfillment, social impact, problem-solving, professional recognition, competitive advantage, and the intrinsic drive to create and explore.
Innovation
Innovation involves transforming an idea or invention into a practical process, product, or service, and introducing it to the market to address a need, generate value, and foster economic and social progress. Retaining innovation within Australia has the potential to strengthen our sovereign industrial capacity [1] and increase economic complexity [2].
Unfortunately Australia has a problem with innovation [3].
Whilst we excel at invention (and other knowledge inputs) we struggle to effectively translate these ideas into viable products or services (knowledge outputs). The measure of this conversion is known as innovation efficiency [4].
Additionally, our low innovation diffusion impedes productivity growth [5].
It is not all that bad. IMHO Australia is quite good at inbound innovation [6]. Which in our case, is dominated by the extraction and delivery of commodities.
But tech innovation is where the action is [7]!
So how can we improve tech innovation in Australia?
We have been talking about improving innovation for decades [8].
Whilst many reports and strategies mention tax and STEM incentives [9], there is little mention of personal incentives.
Incentives are very important because they influence behaviour [10] and over time behaviour creates habits, and habits become culture [11] and as we all know - culture eats strategy for breakfast [12].
So any innovation strategy MUST start with incentives.
Strategy
Tech innovation is no longer about two guys in a shed [13].
Innovation is a team sport [14]
And yes scientists can become CEO's [15] and be rewarded.
But not everyone in the innovation team wants to be a CEO.
So how do we incentivise these people to innovate?
If we consider creative people, including researchers, it is believed that they are driven by autonomy, mastery and purpose [16].
However, I propose that there is a fourth aspect: attribution, which represents one of our moral rights, alongside the protection of the integrity of our work.
Attribution
Innovation is a collaborative endeavour, akin to a team sport, necessitating cooperation between academic and non-academic researchers, where academic researchers typically affiliate with universities, research institutions, or academic organizations, while non-academic researchers are commonly associated with industry. However, in my perspective, individuals employed in non-academic capacities within research institutes, whether as consultants, engineers, managers, business developers, product developers, marketers, legal experts, etc., should equally be recognized as "non-academic researchers."
Moral rights, as traditionally understood in the realm of intellectual property law, are more closely associated with the protection of individual creators' rights in artistic and literary works rather than innovations. However, the concept of moral rights is evolving, and discussions about the moral and ethical aspects of innovation are becoming more prominent - see responsible innovation .
Within academia, the concept of attribution, also referred to as authorship attribution or academic credit, holds significant importance, being a cornerstone of scholarly practice. Recognizing the original author is vital for upholding academic integrity and guaranteeing transparency in research contributions.
Outside academia, attribution is rarely acknowledged - it is often hidden [17].
Industry conceals the identity of innovators to safeguard proprietary information, protect intellectual property rights, prevent talent poaching, or prioritize promoting the brand or product over individual contributors.
Impact
Promotion for academic researchers primarily hinges on their academic impact, gauged through metrics such as citation counts, h-index, and journal impact factors, which collectively serve as quantitative indicators of the reach, influence, and significance of their scholarly contributions within their field. Certainly, the system is not perfect - it can be "gamed" and is susceptible to perverse incentives [18], yet the relationship between behaviour and rewards is clear.
Conversely, promotional routes for non-academic researchers are often unclear, mainly due to the inherent challenges in assessing their impact, lacking equivalents to citations or h-index. In corporate settings, a non-academic researcher's contributions can directly impact a company's financial performance. However, within research institutes, although these researchers drive innovation through proposals and projects, there is no established method for evaluating this impact; there's no equivalent to project citations or project index (p-index).
The Australian Problem
In Australia we rarely document projects - nor the outcome of projects - the products and services that lead to innovation. And even when we do, the documentation is ephemeral and not archived. Even innovation awards disappear after a few years [19]. So in this environment it can be a challenge to establish the provenance of any innovation, let alone the contribution of individuals in a particular innovation process.
Compare this to EU's Cordis Program - which is the primary source of projects funded by the EU's framework programmes for research and innovation. Here there are over 135,000 projects archived over the past 30 years. Each project lists the objectives, finances, people, papers, patents, collaborators, outcomes, and final summary documentation. In a number of cases impact assessments have been conducted. In this environment, it is much easier for an individual to establish their role in a project and hence their contribution to an innovation.
Without project and impact documentation, researchers have no collateral to establish their value. They can make stuff up on their CV - but they have no proof.
The lack of collateral has a signifiant impact upon their promotion and mobility.
Mobility
The fluid movement of personnel between employers and sectors is crucial for facilitating the exchange of skills and knowledge (knowledge diffusion) to nurture a dynamic innovation ecosystem. Yet, this mobility is often unidirectional for many researchers, transitioning from academia to industry or government, or vice versa, as organizations prioritize and reward particular skills, experiences, and capabilities that may not seamlessly transfer or be equally esteemed across different sectors.
The role of issue of mobility was mentioned in this report [20] with the quote:
"Turnover of CSIRO’s personnel is as low as 4% annually. Not many CSIRO’s researchers went to industry. Most people who left went to university. CSIRO has a history of not taking its people back after they left, though they are valuable human resources."
Recommendations we made in the recent ACOLA report [21].
领英推荐
"The current approach to research assessment in Australia does not incentivise knowledge translation" with the recommendation that we the adoption of the primary indicators of "Translation and Impact - Commercialisation Metrics including Revenue and patents - Influence on public policy and legal decisions."
This is an excellent recommendation, but without documentation, without collateral, it is not practical.
Recommendation
It should be the responsibility of employers who receive public funding, to:
I will expand on this issue in my next article "Where have all the projects gone?"
Unless we address the issue of attribution and impact for non-academic researchers, Australia will continue to have an innovation problem.
References
[10] Freakonomics
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Director of the QUT Centre for Robotics, ARC Laureate Fellow, ATSE Fellow. Positioning Systems for Robots and Autonomous Vehicles. Expert Speaker & Advisor on Autonomous Vehicles, AI & Robotics. Educational entrepreneur.
8 个月One of the interesting developments that may help drive a "fix" of the some of the issues outlined in your article Elliot Duff, is the much-signalled (reality yet to be determined) move in academia (assessment) to move away from h-indices, citations, paper quality and quantity, grant income metrics to "impact" type measures - if enacted, that will bring the career "challenges" in academia a bit more in line with the career challenges outlined in your article in non-academic pathways... so there'll be more commonality of challenges which may help.
Drive Meaningful Innovation
8 个月Absolutely, the call for individual researchers to take responsibility for generating impact is crucial. However, it's equally important to recognize the non-research efforts involved in surfacing, developing, and closing deals that ultimately ensure the capture, creation, and delivery of value. Acknowledging and incentivizing the broader spectrum of essential work carried out will undoubtedly foster a more holistic and impactful research environment. #ResearchImpact #InnovationCulture ????
CTO
8 个月What Tim said. My experience too. Excellent article.
Thanks Elliot - good thoughts. As someone who has left CSIRO and moved into innovation within industry I can definitely say it provides a very fresh perspective when you’re much closer to understanding clients, markets and their business models. Yes, achieving change and cutting through to commercial success with new innovations never happens easily, but it can only happen when you can truly understand a market problem/opp. Closer partnerships between unis/research agencies and industry really has to be a key focus for Australia.
Strategic Consultant and NED | GAICD | MAIG | PhD | NED
8 个月Thanks for putting those insightful articles together to highlight the significant changes required in Oz (and mostly everywhere!) to encourage true innovation, collaboration and impact. There has always been a lot of talk about collaboration - however truly bringing that to bear in the real sense of the word is always a challenge whilst we continue to destroy value whilst ignoring the potential to really create value.