Professor Mark Perry
Professors Mark Perry and Paul Martin have recently submitted an application to the Australian Research Council Discovery Projects to fund a project that will commence in 2021. Having previously collaborated with researchers from North and South America, Europe, India and New Zealand the Professors will develop further their research on innovation systems and intellectual property. A successful application will strengthen the UNE law school’s leadership in the governance of technologies.
Although clear Intellectual Property (IP) rights contribute to innovation and commercial investment, their implementation needs fine tuning to support rural innovation. For example, joint ventures need to ensure ownership issues are settled before the involvement of parties, but research groups often treat this as a subsequent question, which slows their progress.
The Australia Innovation and Science Australia Performance Review of 2016 and the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Global Innovation Index 2019 rank Australia poorly in both national and international measures of commercialised innovation, even though the country has some excellent scientific resources. The proposed research will fill a policy gap by investigating the extent to which Australian IP processes support commercialisation and the application of innovation, what financial impediments the IP system imposes, and the effectiveness of IP in knowledge dissemination. The research will focus on Australia’s agricultural sector, as a leading industry and contributor to GDP.
The project will focus on improving national innovation performance by suggesting improvements to IP processes. Working with stakeholders it will identify mechanisms to remove IP limitations on innovation deployment and propose ways to reduce financial and other transaction costs of IP.
Professor Paul Martin
The hypothesis that process improvement can deliver innovation benefits will be tested by questioning the assumed benefit-to-cost relationship of the current implementation of Australia’s IP frameworks. The need to consider process reform is based on four findings: a previous study which showed Australia has not been successful at creating commercialised IP consistent with its national investment and assessed capabilities; a 2016 Productivity Commission inquiry finding that IP rights in Australia are overly broad, and disadvantage Australia in some markets by failing to achieve optimal incentives and user benefits; the high costs of the IP process; and that IP frameworks do not address some innovation types that are potentially valuable to Australia, such as ‘rediscovered’ ancient medicinal knowledge about plants which are not included as IP.
Australia’s IP frameworks are primarily driven by international conventions and trade agreements. However, their ability to attain better innovation outcomes for Australia depends on processes for the implementation and use of these IP frameworks. This project will provide practical guidance about how to reduce “roadblocks: to innovation to improve Australia’s innovation performance.
