I think there are three things that are hugely important innovation that make Australia so
attractive.
The First is the natural talent.
Lots of great people both Australians and the many international students who have come
to study in Australia so there is a pool of very well trained people and really first
class minds.
The Second is deep tradition of innovation, we don't think about ourselves that way but
you only have to mould wi-fi, the black box recorder, the bionic ear, you can see a long
tradition back to the stump jump plough and so on, a long tradition of innovation and
of carrying it into industry.
So again though we don't think of Australia as a highly industrialized nation actually
we got long tradition of great industries that develops skills.
And I guess the third is an openness to ideas, when you sit on the periphery of the world
you have to look outwards.
And So Australians engage very early with new technology, they are very great adapters
and adopters of new things that are new and they are interested in new ideas and that
combination seriously skilled people a long tradition of translation of research into
industrial product and a natural curiosity, I think makes Australia a very interesting
place for innovation.
Well I am really excited about what's happening at the moment with bionics and this is a nice
example.
So 30 years ago people started wondering how they could use electronics to help people
who were hearing impaired improve their hearing particularly the profoundly deaf and the development
of the bionic ear began as a research project at the university of Melbourne led by a Professor
Graham Clark and over time it developed 1st prototypes and then commercial versions of
a revolutionary type of hearing aid actually embedded in the cochlear of the ear and providing
information to the brain of quite an extraordinary sophistication compared to an earlier generation
of hearing aids.
We are only 2 % of the world's population and yet we punch them out of our way.
We do have a series of great innovations we can point to as examples of what Australia
can do.
But we've got lots of opportunities to take this further.
University of Melbourne has been engaged with India since independence, since this became
one of the world's great nations.
Many Indian companies are developing an interest in Australia and they see Australia as a potential
source of research as well as markets to sell into and of course we are interested in working
side by side with Indian researchers.
Exciting!
But the other way of doing this is to think globally so one of the big research presence
in India is IBM who has a series of important facilities across India and a world class
laboratory in Bangalore which is in some years in the building and does remarkable research.
Well the university of Melbourne works closely with IBM which just a few years ago established
its 1st and only laboratory in Australia at the University of Melbourne and many of the
people they have hired to run that laboratory have worked in Bangalore or are IBM staff
who've been recruited from Bangalore.
And this is great, great exchange of people and ideas and projects between Melbourne and
Bangalore, and between Australia and India.
So not all research partnerships are just university to a company or even one company
to another, global companies and India has its own set of global companies and emerging
powerful companies work across the globe and you can build into their programs something
in Australia.
So we see lots of opportunities but very early days.
The University of Melbourne is Australia's leading ranked university and it's in the
global top 40 universities and it works closely with a no. of Indian universities to build
mutual projects but increasingly the focus is on working with Indian industry around
research problems, around some of the shared grand challenges that we all face and some
of those are commercial, many of them are in public health and there is lots of opportunity
to work here in India as well as for Indian institutions to engage in Australia.
I think India and Australia face some grand challenges together, around public health,
around the environment, around the economy and research from both places, and universities
in both counties and from University of Melbourne can be important in addressing those grand
challenges.
And, so what I very much hope to see is the development of research with scholars from
Australia spend time in India and vice versa, students and PhD's.
So that we build a group of people who know each other's country well, who can identify
similar problems and who can test how ideas developed in one nation, might help in the
other and I think that's what a great research partnership brings and I think the University
of Melbourne can along with other Australian universities play a really important part
of that dialogue, that exchange, that sharing of innovation that over time will benefit
us both.