Sparking innovative new concepts with diverse partners across government, the education sector and business is all in a day’s work for Victoria’s Chief Scientist Dr Amanda Caples. At the forefront of the latest developments, the crucial role is a huge driver in the state’s economic development, with Victoria’s advanced manufacturing and digital capabilities, research in gas exploration, and even the rapidly growing commercial space sector at the top of her agenda. Here, we speak to Dr Caples about the topic she lives and breathes.

In what ways is the Victorian government demonstrating leadership in public sector innovation?

Innovation to me is a mindset and a behaviour to constantly challenge ourselves with answering the question – how can we do this better? To support ideas in response to answering this question, the Victorian government has a Public Sector Innovation Fund, a grants program to facilitate collaborative projects that address a public sector need. Earlier this year, the Public Sector Innovation Fund partnered with LaunchVic to launch CivVic Labs, an accelerator program that applies innovative and agile startup thinking to government needs. We hope that this program will contribute to scaling Victorian startups and creating more jobs.

Is public support for innovation projects, eg space, robotics and health as strong as it could be?

In a general sense, there is incredible support in the community for science and innovation, but I’m not sure we capture the full value of this interest. To give visibility and coordination of the broad range of activities and events across the calendar year we have established the Inspiring Victoria Board which I chair. Our common goal is to promote community engagement with science and maximise the impact of National Science Week (held in August of each year).

What are some of the current projects your office is leading to strengthen business collaborations with research institutions?

One of the first steps I took coming into the role, was to establish the Deputy Vice Chancellors’ Research and Enterprise Forum, where all Victorian universities are represented. The purpose of this is to engage with our universities to connect their capability to solve the problems that both public and private sectors are facing. An area of current focus is transport. The Government has a great deal of data on transport usage that we use to inform planning. But we know that there is a lot more we could learn from the data if we had more data scientists. The universities are looking for work integrated learning opportunities for their students. And students want to work on real-life problems. This seems like a perfect opportunity to align and connect interests on an issue of considerable importance to the community, to harness greater knowledge from data and ultimately yield better outcomes for mobility in Victoria. The department has also partnered with the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry on the Ignite program. 

Australia ranks last in the OECD tables for collaboration between business and research. Can you pass some comment about what more can be done to enhance university/business engagement and identify opportunities to build the scale of activities by facilitating partnerships?

A key area of my focus is to bring the leadership of our universities around the table to have discussions on this very topic. Part of the problem I think with our ‘innovation ecosystem’ is that there are too many programs, which are disconnected and poorly understood in terms of their policy objective. What I would like to do is bring as many of the key stakeholders together, including staff from our government business offices and from the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, to co-design a system that starts to address these problems.

You are a strong advocate for the importance of strengthening students’ performance in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM). How crucial is it for innovation and ICT to be a part of the current curriculum?

I think of innovation as a mind-set and a behaviour and so the enquiry-based learning approach is a great way of building this in students. ICT and technology mostly are tools to achieve the job that needs to be done. It’s crucial that every student has a sound understanding of these tools. Data science has the potential to solve some of our most complex societal problems. While the field has boomed in recent years due to advances in computing capability, data storage and mathematics, the supply of data scientists has struggled to keep up. To be globally competitive we need to address this shortfall. Increasing participation in STEM is one way to achieve this.