Peter Goodenough Memorial Lecture 2015: Properly funding and commercialising Australian research

Description

The world's leading economies such as the US, China and Germany are focusing on the knowledge economy because that is where fifty per cent of all future jobs will come from. Innovation and commercialising our world-class research as a driver of economic growth is fundamentally important to our future. Sadly, we are doing very poorly at it. As a result Australia is in the process of being left behind the rest of the developing world with a serious threat to our future living standards. It is the single most important challenge facing Australia's economy post the mining boom. Indeed it is the country's major challenge.

Speaker

Peter Beattie AC was Premier of Queensland between 1998 and 2007, and for most of that time was also the Minister for Trade. He is Director of the Medical Research Commercialisation Fund; Ambassador for Life Sciences Queensland; a joint adjunct professor at The University of Queensland’s Australian Institute for Bioengineering & Nanotechnology & Institute for Molecular Bioscience and a member of The University of Queensland's Industry Engagement Council. He was awarded a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) in 2012, and won the Biotechnology Industry Organisation’s inaugural International Award for Leadership Excellence in 2008.