In the 1950s an Australian scientist named David Warren invented the black box flight recorder — the device that has since made air travel the safest way to move a human being across the planet. Australia never manufactured a single one. They were built in Britain and America, and we bought them back. It is one of the proudest inventions this country has ever produced, and one of the clearest examples of a habit we have never shaken: we back the research, and we forget the researcher.
A national habit
Warren is not an outlier. The technology that became Google Maps was built by a small Sydney start-up before it was sold to Google and folded into an American giant. The wireless networking in the phone in your pocket came out of a CSIRO lab in Sydney — and we then spent years suing the rest of the world to be paid for our own invention. Martin Green’s team at the University of New South Wales developed the solar-cell technology that now sits in most of the world’s panels; the industry that grew from it is dominated by China. Brilliant Australian idea, foreign industry. Over and over again.
We fund the discovery, not the company
The problem is not our researchers. They are world-class, and we are right to be proud of them. The problem is what happens the day after the discovery. That is the moment a breakthrough needs capital, speed, and someone willing to bet on building a company around it — and that is exactly the moment Australia goes quiet. We will fund the grant, the lab and the paper. We will hold the awards night. What we will not reliably do is back the person who wants to turn the invention into an industry. So they do what any determined founder does: they go where the money and the momentum are. We keep the credit and export the company — and the industry that grows out of that innovation.
The difference between the companies we keep and the ones we lose is not the quality of the idea. It is whether anyone backed the builder.
It does not have to be this way
We know it can be done, because sometimes we do it. Graeme Clark’s bionic ear became Cochlear — an Australian invention that became an Australian company, then a global leader, employing Australians and paying tax here. Atlassian was built by two Australians who backed themselves and stayed. These are not flukes. They are what happens when the researcher, the founder and the capital line up on the same continent at the same time. The difference between Cochlear and the black box was never the idea. It was whether anyone backed the builder.
Fund the valley of death, and build failure into the equation
Closing this gap does not require Australia to out-spend anyone. It requires us to spend differently: to put support behind commercialisation and the founder, not only the discovery; to move at something closer to the pace I wrote about in bringing Shenzhen speed to Australia; and to accept that many of those bets will fail, wind them up quickly, and back the next one. Smart government support and private discipline, pointed at the researcher who wants to build — that is the whole game. It is far cheaper than funding research and then giving it away.
Turn $10m into $330m
Every invention we let slip is not just a company lost. It is entire industries — the jobs, the tax, the expertise and the next generation of founders and engineers that would have clustered around it, all of it built somewhere else. We have spent a century being the clever country that hands its best ideas to the world for free. The fix is not more genius; we already have that. The fix is to back our own people the day after the breakthrough, and to keep the industry here.
We have demonstrated a model that delivers — and it is agnostic as to the technology. In one case, about $10 million of targeted government support, alongside roughly $5 million from investors, helped build an enterprise worth some $330 million. That is more than thirty dollars of value for every public dollar in — and support that will be repaid many times over in tax alone. This is not a forecast about a particular technology; it is a proven result of the model.
Back the research, by all means. But for once, let’s not forget the founder — and the industries that follow.
← Back to all writing