I have been talking to a lot of people about the Advanced Technology Institute (ATI). All the papers that went up on the website of the Science and Innovation Group of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (the organisation formerly known as MSI) were helpful as well. Some of the people I have talked to have been calm and some quite agitated. I think the calm ones make me feel agitated and vice versa.
As it happens I have worked for all three of the organisations that will feed into the new Crown Agent and a couple of projects from my time at Industrial Research Ltd (IRL) come to mind. When I first started working there – indeed not long after IRL started up and I could, had I been interested in such things back then, have read a Cabinet Paper telling us how IRL would solve all the manufacturing industry’s issues – we were approached by a company with a serious problem. They were using a process to extract complex carbohydrates from sheep placenta (if you use an expensive face cream, don’t ask). This process worked fine in the lab but gave a highly variable yield in the factory. Could we help? We could.
We applied for a large Technology for Business Growth (TBG) grant and had a lot of samples sent up from the factory. We went down to visit to watch them use the process and took a lot more samples. The process involved many steps, so by careful trial and monitoring the results we took some out and increased the yield. But there was still a huge loss at one filtration step in the factory but not the lab. As you might guess, filtering a tonne of partly digested sheep placenta at 60oC is not so easy and the factory used a lot of stuff called ‘filter aid’ from a container out the back to make it work. It turns out that the complex carbohydrates in sheep placenta are very negatively charged (which is why they make such nice moisturisers) and filter aid, well, there are a lot of different filter aids around and the one they were using was quite positively charged. A lot of the product was going into the skip.
I learnt a lot of things from that applied project that have been useful in life – among them what it takes to bail a 1000 litre tank of warm placenta digest when the outlet has been blocked by a plastic bag some canny farmer’s child has used to up the weight of placenta they sell to the factory. But it was back in the lab on government money that I learned the structures of the glycosaminoglycans in placenta and what they bind tightly to.
About seven years later another client rang with a problem. Could we develop a new product for them that didn’t infringe a competitor’s patent? Yes we could (and yes, I have apologised to the competitor). Since our efforts with the sheep placenta we’d spent a lot of time working on complex carbohydrates. We used a $1,500 Technet Grant (sadly missed by all who used them) from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology to try out a process at lab scale, piggybacked the bioassays onto a run for another project and away we went. As soon as the bioassay results were out we filed a provisional patent application and I took the paperwork to start the licencing negotiation down with me when I went down to help with the first run through the factory.
So I was ready when the manager’s son came to me at the end of the first day and said, “The final filtration is going a bit slowly, could we use…”
“Filter aid? No. Let’s try decantation, we’re not in a hurry and if we mill the result a bit finer it will still look nice and white.”
The point is, and what makes me a little agitated when I consider the ATI, is that it takes a lot of experience to do what the manufacturing industry asks within the costs and time frames it expects. In the first instance a team with good general knowledge and broad factory experience spent a lot of time working through to an answer in an industry it hadn’t worked in before. In the second case the team knew the area, the equipment and, just as importantly, the people and was able to solve a problem quickly and effectively. Companies aren’t going to pay to build that level of knowledge themselves – why would they? It can go on to benefit their competitors. The government has to fund the background development and maintenance of knowledge and skills so there is some science to apply when industry comes looking for it. If a company doesn’t get what it expects in a timely and responsive manner from the first approach to a research group it isn’t going ask for a follow up. The work we did for the first company cost them and the government a lot of money and took a long time and in the end I don’t think anyone was really happy with the result.
When I read through some of the background material on the ATI I think that this issue is so obvious that it can’t be missed. There are pockets of depth and experience in a range of institutions that give industry what they need and these areas can be supported and broadened to benefit more of New Zealand’s industrial base. And then I read some of the other material and it looks like we’ll lose the depth and experience we have and replace it with a system that will never be able to build the knowledge to quite know what it is doing. I can’t see that improving New Zealand industry’s experience of research and development or supply it with the innovation it needs.
It’s like with the rowing. How many kilometres were actually rowed to make those last two produce gold?
