Tomorrow is "Day One" for new institutes representing Bioeconomy Science and Earth Science, combining six of the seven current Crown Research Institutes (CRIs). While this is said to be the biggest reform in over 30 years, how much is actually changing?

When announced, the public good aspect of the merged organisations was played up, calling them PROs - Public Research Organisations. Yet the freshly minted Statements of Core Purpose make it clear the three new organisations are still very much CRIs, just bigger, with no clear policy to encourage the spinoffs and spillovers that bring big benefits to NZ Inc's bottom line over the internal accounts of the organisations. This leaves us asking if the two bigger new entities (ESR is getting a re-branding, but not merging with any other organisations) will end up feeling more like the supermarket duopoly than the solution to our nation's research needs.

The Bioeconomy Science Institute will combine Plant & Food, AgResearch, Scion (Forest Research Institute), and Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research.

The Earth Science Institute will combine NIWA and GNS Science, and also include Metservice as well as the Measurement Standards Laboratory (formerly part of Callaghan Innovation).

The future for these bodies was discussed in a May Webinar, with MBIE's Iain Cossar pointing out that the structure of our organisations has not delivered for our economy as intended. He says this doesn't reflect the quality of our researchers in the organisations.

We all hope the reform helps – but will it? 

Shortly after the webinar we had an announcement that the main funding mechanism for getting research to deliver for the economy and other national outcomes, the Endeavour Fund, would suspend accepting proposals for a year. And the 2025 Budget confirmed a pattern that research funding would be reprioritised, continuing if aligned with the Government's economic agenda, but cut in other areas in order to reprioritise funds to the management of the reform. 

MBIE correctly points out that there is no way (except for contestable funding rounds) for the system to prioritise funding. While already making reprioritisations, the PM's Science and Technology Advisory Council is supposed to be the mechanism for doing so, yet lacks expertise on climate change, hazards and environment.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) is one of the critics of the approach being taken to the reform, taking the remarkable step of penning a letter to the Prime Minister. Since the current PCE set up the present system as a minister in the National Government of the 1990s, his criticism carries particular weight. Select committee proceedings reveal the position of environmental research has been discussed but is unresolved. In short, the needed funding to better manage the demands our economy makes on the environment, particularly in the face of climate change, is not aided by the split across the two new CRIs. From my perspective, key issues such as erosion and wetlands require knowledge, skills and technology from both institutes, but their institutional incentives could still favour holding intellectual property for commercial gain rather than sharing for the public good.

Improved focus on intellectual property settings associated with investment is one bright spot. But IP is a small part of a much bigger problem leading to suspicions this change is driven by what appears to be a false hope. Our system has mostly failed miserably at commercialisation, with only spotty successes. Instead, up to 50% of revenue to Crown Research Institutes is derived from commercial consultancy. Thinking that commercialisation will somehow save the day has been a dangerous distraction that everyone inside CRIs has seen many times over the last 30 years, and was explicitly called out in the Science System Advisory Group report delivered in August last year. This report, which provided the main hope that this sequel to previous science reforms would go far better than the last, was not released until January when the CRI mergers and IP reforms were announced. The reform agenda implemented to date has pulled very selectively from the report.

The SSAG report went to great length to point out that no research institutions globally have ever been able to rely on commercialisation as a main source revenue. Instead, national success requires investing about 0.6% of GDP into a public foundation in the research system. Put another way, that's a bit more than a quarter of our now abandoned target to lift R&D spending to 2% of R&D, and that our failure to first fund the foundation is why we've given up on that target.

We're currently dropping to about 0.3% by my accounting and about $300m behind 2019 levels of support for foundational public science, after adjusting for inflation. The irony is that the government is now reprioritising cuts to that foundation of public research funding in order to support management of change, attracting investment, and even setting up the gene tech regulator.

The most quoted commentary likened the approach the government was taking to trying to squeeze more juice from previously squeezed lemons, rather than trying to grow more lemons.

The SSAG report (PDF footnote 15, p31) ) favours an analogy where a hydroelectric power station is being asked to generate more power without regard to inflows and reservoir levels. 

Whether we're squeezing lemons or running down our reservoirs, my view remains that the reason we have the largest "valley of death" for commercialisation is not IP or the structure of our system, but the problem that plagues all our crumbling infrastructure deficits. We simply don't invest in the needed foundation of skills, equipment and connections that would allow us to bridge from existing knowledge into the science and innovation that solves big problems. We also aren't succeeding in getting our science system to support our policy and legislation as it should, nor are we getting the improvements in productivity we once did. 

Yet, the government's messages and reprioritisation continues to double down on commercialisation messages. Discussing that on Nine-to-Noon, NZAS Co-President Lucy Stewart points likens the approach we're seeing as focusing on training sprinters to run the last hundred metres of a marathon. 

The cost of change appears to be very high – if the rates senior and principal scientists charge everyone from the government to clients is any guide. Trying to justify this to a Parliamentary Select Committee, the GNS Science Chief Executive expresses confusion that it is ok to pay over $400 an hour for a lawyer but not a scientist. But lawyers might take home most of this, while scientists watch increasingly efficient institutions take three quarters or more, up from about half which was the norm 15 years ago and remains true for universities. How can we not see the model for reinvesting in CRI buildings, equipment and all the work and management that forms a foundation for 'chargeable time' is simply broken and spiralling out of control, with the evidence being that the chargeout rates are so far outside the sectors norms both nationally and internationally that collaborations have become nearly impossible to arrange equitably, and most scientists at the beginning and middle of their careers are losing hope that they can find ways forward.

Perhaps "Day One" will mean the institutes continue to get on with business as usual, with some incremental gains. Perhaps the biggest mystery is whether Universities, who also have had two big advisory reports delivered to government, will also see significant reform in exchange for increased or changed funding, or simply be allowed to continue on without the cost of significant change.

-Troy Baisden (NZAS Co-President) 

The NZAS Presidents welcome enquires -- President(at)scientists.org.nz

We also have a press release on this topic

Also, check out our page with key documents from past science reforms, back to 1986.