Queensland Life Sciences Industry Report 2012 (PDF, 3.5MB)

Our organisation’s experience in working with personnel employed
by DEEDI has been highly positive. Personnel have on all occasions
been thoroughly professional and always helpful.
DEEDI interact very well with research organisations and provide
a reasonably good level of service. DEEDI events are great. 2012
scheduled events including the ‘Development Pathway’ workshop
series are beneficial for early and late career researchers and
postgraduate students. The Smart Futures scheme is fantastic and
should be run annually. One criticism: where philanthropic money
has been raised independently by [our organisation] for large
research programs this money has not been matched by the State
Government on application. This is disappointing. There are very
limited opportunities to attract matching dollars through Federal
funding schemes.
The Department’s economic development domain appears to
be skewed in favour of large organisations and projects, not
the sort of smaller value-adding projects that are key to SMEs
building equity value and making themselves investor-ready.
The one program that appears to be relevant to SMEs (the Proof
of Concept grant) is not well constructed, as it precludes either
IP protection (patents) or full-time wages to key researchers
within a company. The key problems for researchers within an
SME are (a) to have enough income to enable them to work
full-time on their companies to build enough value/construct a
prototype to be attractive to Australian or overseas investors, and
(b) to have a source of financial support to assist in patenting/
patent preservation, required before engaging with multinational
companies (to provide precisely the kind of market signal that
investors require). The Commonwealth R&D tax concessions are
of limited use in this respect, due to the way they are structured,
limiting their utility for cash-poor SMEs. This issue is particularly
bitter in the current economic climate, where debt and equity
resources are both very limited, preventing the initial cash flows
that the R&D tax concession scheme assumes the marketplace
would provide. Obviously regulation and oversight is required to
prevent wage claims and patent expenditure from being ‘gamed’,
but the appropriate solution is scrutiny by project officers within the
Department, not fixed regulatory exclusions that kill off the utility
and relevance of the grant scheme. What is needed is initial grant
funding to ‘prime the pump’ such as the Queensland Government’s
former (excellent) Innovation Start-Up Scheme. There is an
opportunity and a need for the Queensland Government to show
leadership where the Commonwealth Government has failed,
and in so doing render Queensland a more attractive place for
innovation to prosper and provide economic benefits.
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