R&D missing out on the economic and social benefits of the NBN.
During the next few years international attention will be focussed on the developments around our National Broadband Network. Australia is embarking on a ‘nation building’ program that is unparalleled anywhere else in the world.
If we execute it well it will have enormous social and economic benefits for our country.
A key reason for our potential success here is that we don’t view the infrastructure deployment of the NBN in isolation. It is clearly recognised as being a facilitator for the emerging digital economy. The government has simultaneously initiated a range of trans-sector initiatives – such as the Smart City/Smart Grid project, the broadband to schools plans and various health initiatives – that will see sectors other than telecoms making use of the NBN.
We generally lag at least five years behind in developments such as this, and usually end up importing the innovations that others have already been able to commercialise. This will be the first time that Australia has taken an ICT leadership role to such a degree. It will enable Australian organisations to lead a range of activities in and around the digital economy and it will also generate employment and export opportunities.
The ICT industry has been lobbying strenuously for the trans-sector approach and it was great to see that the government – all the way up to Prime Minister Rudd – supports this concept. It is a monumental task to bridge the various government silos and get them to work together within the trans-sector approach, but good progress has been made. The Government’s Broadband Forum in December 2009 was squarely aimed at bringing all those sectors together and creating that level of synergy.
Within this policy concept it would make complete sense to also align R&D efforts with these NBN and trans-sector initiatives. In all, $43 billion will be invested over the next decade or so and R&D could piggyback on this. Any R&D initiatives linked to these large-scale nation-building plans will benefit greatly from the activities that are going to take place; and, as well as this, the effect of R&D investments could also be increased in relation to new economic activities such as the creation of new jobs linked to digital economy and export opportunities that will flow from the innovations that we will be able to develop in Australia.
It is truly an opportunity too good to be missed.
It is very important to realise what this trans-sector approach means. This is not just a telecoms policy. It involves the transformation of the healthcare, education, electricity, energy and public safety sectors. If national R&D policies were to be linked to the national trans-sector activities it could support all of these sectors, connecting them horizontally so that R&D for one sector could also be used by the others (with the underlying NBN infrastructure as the facilitator for coordination and cooperation).
We see other governments (eg The Netherlands) specifically targeting trans-sector innovation in their R&D policies, and Australia, given its abovementioned leadership position, should be in the forefront of such an approach.
Unfortunately it appears that the R&D policies announced in late December 2009 are not at all aligned with these other massive government investments. On the contrary, on the surface at least, they are counter-productive for the following reasons:
- First of all they discourage R&D undertaken by commercial firms, leaving R&D in the domain of Science and Research organisations.
- Furthermore, the new measures discriminate against software development, the core element of the ICT industry – the new requirements will be also difficult to administer because of subjective definitions that will lead to uncertainty. Therefore they will be largely beyond the reach of small companies in ICT, who are the backbone of the emerging digital economy.
- Commercialisation, the conduit in transporting innovation to products & services is ignored.
The net effect of these R&D changes will significantly diminish the long term multipliers that should be rippling through the economy from the NBN and the trans-sector conversion of ideas to new products. All of this will be facilitated by the new infrastructure that will form the foundation of the new digital economy and R&D should be an integral part of that process.
Paul Budde
Australia – National Broadband Network – Overview & Analysis
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Critical Considerations
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Competition and Regulations
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Deployment Strategies
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Early Projects
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Industry at crossroads
- Australia – National Broadband Network – NBN Co and Infrastructure
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Overview & Analysis
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Telstra
- Australia – National Broadband Network based on Trans-sector model
- Australia – National Broadband Network Trans-sector projects
- Australia – National Broadband Network – Government’s Trans-Sector Conference
