It's a Marathon not a Sprint

Perhaps I can share some observations based on a few (😊) years involved in Agricultural Research Development and Extension (RD&E). Interestingly, these observations are supported by a growing number of reviews of our innovation system nationally and within sectors.

I preface this by saying we have truly AMAZING people investing and working in ag RD&E in this country. This is not a critique of them or the wonderful things they are creating, delivering and implementing with our farmers, agribusinesses and communities. It is not a criticism of the system itself – we have organisations and structures in our innovation system that are the envy of the world. It is, however, an acknowledgement of the increasingly difficult conditions in which we work and a suggestion of one thing we could evolve that might improve it.

My lived experience working across the spectrum of RD&E in Australia as a researcher, research manager, investor and customer of our agricultural innovation system is that, right now, we have –

• Organisations - big and small, public and private, profit and not for profit – in full cost recovery mode, often unable to carry excess capacity in their businesses and often depending on external funds for delivery of core activities;
• Limited capacity - a shortage of people and/or unallocated time to work on key RD&E priorities, whether they be skilled researchers or skilled extension and adoption practitioners;
• Limited capability – not always the right combination of experience and/or currency of experience in key functional areas of RD&E; and
• Truly significant, largely public good RD&E imperatives around climate change, ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance), food security and biosecurity for example that would seem to require a coordinated and targeted response from the innovation system in order for us to transform in the timeframes set.

Given how tight our people resources are, I paused to wonder how the innovation system might evolve to firstly, make the best use of what and who we have and then, to grow that resource over time. 

Something I have increasingly struggled with is the competitive, short-term (less than five years) grant process with its quick turnaround grant rounds, an approach we often have for our RD&E investments.

And it’s not because I’m not competitive (those who know me will laugh). Competition is a great driver for individual performance and team success. It rewards hard work and smarts. It has a fundamental role in the efficient allocation of abundant resources.

But is it serving our innovation system well now, given the capacity constraints we face and the timeliness of the imperatives we are asked to solve?

My experience is that the predominance of short-term competitive grants right now -

• Supports the scarcity mindset – the feeling that we (i.e. all of us working in the agricultural RD&E ecosystem) don’t have enough people to do the work, we don’t have enough money to employ more people, money is only available in fixed amounts for short periods and we don’t know when the next grant will be available; so therefore we will take what we can now resulting in a fully ‘booked’ up system.
• Undermines collaboration –  short term competitive grant rounds exacerbate the feeling that we can’t share because we already don’t have enough money to do everything that we need to (and want to) do right now. And the turnaround time to deliver a proposal for a particular grant round is so short that we can’t truly develop new collaborations or authentically co-design projects for impact, so instead we will go it alone or work only within existing partnerships.
• Creates high administrative burdens – we chase every grant round with hundreds of hours poured into every proposal even though success rates can be as low as 5% - we do this like we are on a hamster wheel! The system requires those working in Australian agricultural RD&E to have lots of small projects, with lots of complicated contracts with lots of RD&E investors, all in order to maintain cashflow, staffing and activity – let alone have a positive impact through our RD&E. We all lose months of productive project time in contracting and project start-up followed by intensive ongoing reporting and months in final reporting and project wind-up.
• Makes us focus on the short-term outcomes – we don’t design long-term or even medium-term projects that have the potential to be transformative or even incrementally great because the funding most often isn’t there. We don’t even get to design a series of short-term projects that build to a long-term outcome because there is no certainty that any of the future (potentially more transformative) stages will be funded. We struggle to offer employees jobs longer than our grant agreements, so we can’t offer career paths that allow for expertise to be built and refined or a satisfying career of impact mapped out.

All of these things exacerbate our capacity constraints and often result in less progress on issues and opportunities than we hope for.

I know why we have competitive processes, and those reasons are absolutely valid – good governance, probity, value for money, generating and identifying new ideas and new providers, focussing individuals and organisations on the pursuit of excellence and delivery of outcomes. All fundamentally right. Can we conceive a collaborative model where those principles are honoured without the negative impacts we currently experience?

Of course, there are good and great examples of longer-term investments developed in collaboration between strategic partners for targeted outcomes. Where sharing resources, creating specialisations supported by partnership, focusing effort around common goal/s and broad stakeholder engagement in design and delivery of RD&E programs are key features.

I simply wonder if more of this might be possible?

Or even better, could we build an investment strategy within the current innovation system founded on the principles of people-centred design with multi-disciplinary, cross-industry collaboration and sharing of scarce resources at its core, that preserves the probity and pursuit of excellence inherit in competition and is long term in its commitment?

Perhaps in doing so, we would enable greater progress in the areas that matter, establish clear career paths for RD&E experts, build capacity and capability and achieve a more efficient allocation of RD&E dollars and effort.