FUTURO by Eduardo Chavez

Just came back from the Medical inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs - challenges in a global market lecture at UNSW and took two observations from the event:

Australia innovation track record is mixed. Talent and research output is abundant, yet when it comes to commercialising inventions the track record is far from brilliant - Paul Kelly’s presentation had Australia ranked at #20 worldwide for innovation.

Start-up and entrepreneurship funding is inadequate. Funding institutions (Government, VCs, PE and Investment Funds) have not been able to plug the funding gap between early stage research and full grown business.

Paul Kelly, Chris Roberts and Professor Philip Hogg gave many reasons why this was the case. Two of them stood out for me.

First, in Australia failure is negatively perceived, which in turn leads to risk aversion. Why take a risk if things could go wrong?

Second, many Australian researcher work on technologies for the sake of technology, yet fail to fully engage with the market to identify the key problem they are aiming to solve. It is common to see that researchers, entrepreneurs, or even businesses get caught up in what they are doing so much that loose market focus.

I recognise that a market-led approach to research could have a marked impact on commercialisation. After all, innovation is there to solve a problem, and in the words of Mitch Kapor from FoxMarks A Successful Business Solves Problems.