Wellington
As agriculture’s orphan child, laden with centuries of tradition and structure, coarse wool hasrecently exhibited a refreshing turn of mind to attempt to spin a new future.
The realisation that wool industry participants weren’t interested in co-investing in genericprojects if individual companies didn’t end up owning their own piece of intellectual property hasbeen a major catalyst for change.
Just before the Ministry and Foundation for Research, Science and Technology morphed into theMinistry of Science & Innovation,
This has two components.
1.Industry good investment – essentially doing what’s done today, better. The consortiumitself retains/owns the IP
2.Company specific investment – ideas are co-invested/funded, andout of this leveraged funding, the project sponsor owns the IP
WIRL general manager Ian Cuthbertson says the second form of investment, being a new path forcollaboration in R&D, has taken participants a while to come onboard.
“For the first six months, we didn’t have any co-funded (30-50%) projects,” he says.
“Now, moving into our second year, we have over $900,000 of industry cofundingcommitted.”
However, despite the sponsoring or co-funding company having the rights to any IP generated outof new wool research, it does come with a couple of caveats.
WIRL retains a lien on the IP. Once the outcome of the research is confirmed, a sensiblecommercialisation target is negotiated to be delivered within an agreed period of time - typically acouple of years.
Cuthbertson says that’s fair, as both taxpayer and wider industry money is being spent on theresearch, which ultimately benefits the individual company.
“We have to ensure that value is created for NZ from the investment,” he says. “The companycould go belly up, or not commit the resources to commercialise properly, or simply change itscommercial strategy.”
“We retain the caveat that the R&D needs to be exploited to a reasonable commercialvalue.”
He says that a couple of these co-invested projects will probably be made public by the industrypartners over the next couple of months, and that “there will be real value to the wider industryresulting from most.”
The change to a co-investment, with companies keeping the IP model is a total change in the waythat wool related R&D funding had been carried out in the past.
Previously, funding capability and project selection had more been aimed at researchers – whowould often, because of the system, be carrying out science in isolation from commercialreality.
“Now we have truely commercially driven R&D, though there is still a core responsibilitywithin the consortium’s investment for fundamental research,” says Cuthbertson.
Such industry good research is driven by a wool industry advisory group from across thesector’s total value chain.
“However, most of the research is more applied, and we’re saying to companies, if you have agood idea, we’ll help you with the science to create the opportunity, you own the IP as long asyou take it to market,” he says.