Jeff Connolly, chair of the government’s expert panel on research translation spoke, carefully, at the Universities Australia conference last week

He mentioned incentives to connect universities and industry and the importance of mission-driven research.  And as to how to do it – “there isn’t a single answer to this challenge but it does involve scale it does involve focus on those areas we select and it requires a suite of measures that are much more holistic and point industry, the university sector and government towards each other.”

But, a learned reader asks, does industry know it needs to get involved?

Mr Connolly reported that there had been 45 responses from researchers to the panel’s discussion paper, 38 from research organisations, seven from government and 38 from business and industry associations.