Abstract
The Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) program has been one of the flagship programs of Australia’s National Innovation System (NSI) for 30 years. But compared to other members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), statistics indicate that Australia has persistent low levels of business expenditure on research and development (BERD), while World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) reports highlight poor diffusion-of-innovation characteristics. In response to reports of this ilk, and in line with the generally evolving nature of NSIs, the CRC program, and the Australian NSI system, has developed and matured. In a wide-ranging longitudinal review of the program’s policy documentation, we discover that a number of changes have affected the language used within the program, the targeted organizations, and, crucially, the duration of the funding periods. We conclude that, within the confines of the nation’s historical and geographic context, the CRC program exhibits similar characteristics to NSIs elsewhere. In addition, there may be scope for Australia to split the CRC program into separate streams, and that even further support for integration into the Asia-Pacific markets is likely to be beneficial to the diffusion of Australian innovation.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 15-34 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Policy Design and Practice |
Volume | 2 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 10 Jan 2019 |
Bibliographical note
2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
Keywords
- collaboration
- cooperative
- innovation
- Research
- university-industry
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations
- Public Administration