Published on the 09/02/2016 | Written by Beverley Head

Australia’s peak research body CSIRO has confirmed an overhaul which will have the organisation and its researchers focused more on innovation than invention…

CSIRO scientists may have invented WiFi, and in the process delivered billions of dollars of royalties to the organisation – but they never innovated, developing the smartphones that leveraged WiFi and have sold internationally by the billion. It’s that balance between invention and innovation that CSIRO CEO Larry Marshall is now seeking.

News emerged last week of a major shakeup of the organisation, which will also impact Data61 – the newly merged entity combining CSIRO’s ICT group and NICTA.

In a statement describing CSIRO’s Strategy 2020 Marshall said; “We have planned new investment in digital technology and big data, largely through our newest business unit – Data 61. We’ll also use big data to find the next generation of resources, and will work with industry and universities to get more from ore. Precision agriculture is an area where we can get huge productivity gains and our health services are also ripe for this type of disruption so we will be accelerating our work in both these spaces.”

However Marshall also confirmed that the organisation would be exiting some areas, although he was adamant that there would be no net loss of jobs – even though 350 current employees will be retrenched over the next two years as a result of the reorganisation.

Data 61 will face some job losses, though largely due to duplication following the CSIRO-NICTA merger.

The retrenchments were condemned by the Community and Public Sector Union and CSIRO Staff Association. CPSU National Secretary Nadine Flood said that; “The fact this gutting of the CSIRO is being modelled on Netflix and Silicon Valley shows how hollow and warped Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s innovation rhetoric really is. Taxpayer spending on science should be about improving Australian lives now and in the future, not moving CSIRO to a business model based on speculative investment rather than real science.

“IT start-ups might be agile, but deep science cannot be simply switched on and off again. Just because there are less buzz words to describe a laboratory that excels in detailed, long-term measurement, analysis and modelling, it does not make it irrelevant.”

One area under threat is climate science, with Marshall saying that the raw science would be left to university researchers.

Australian Academy of Science president Andrew Holmes said that there was now “serious concern about Australia’s future capacity to conduct climate and environmental science and our ability to contribute to the global monitoring of climate change.”