As NZ overhauls its science sector, officials look to Singapore and its shared research hubs for inspiration
Targeted investment in research hub infrastructure will bolster hopes of a lucrative science sector, says an expert who employed the strategy in Singapore.
Conversations at the Building Nations infrastructure conference in Wellington focused on resilient infrastructure, an updated road user charges scheme and bipartisanship. But as the country looks to galvanise its research and development field, one speaker described how Singapore relied on shared infrastructure to achieve a similar goal.
Longtime Singaporean civil servant Andrew Tan told Newsroom the secret to success in this field was to invest in infrastructure “clusters”, which enabled the country to attract and retain world-class talent. His suggestions echoed calls made by Kiwi academics as the science sector enters a major overhaul.
The coalition Government has oriented the science sector to be commercially driven, with the Prime Minister and minister of science and technology pointing to Singapore as a role model for this type of research and development sector.
Speaking at the conference – which Finance Minister Nicola Willis called “the Superbowl of infrastructure” – Tan outlined how Singapore rapidly developed its infrastructure portfolio.
Tan spent three decades in the Singapore Administrative Service across various portfolios including transport and the environment, and he credited much of Singapore’s success to building in “clusters”: shared areas with dedicated infrastructure designed to be inhabited by a particular industry. In Singapore, the country’s Science Park is the flagship research cluster.
Set up in 1980, the Science Park now hosts 350 companies and laboratories with international connections, all of whom can benefit from the efficiencies of shared infrastructure.
By bringing together industry bodies and experts into a designated area, Singapore was able to maximise efficiency across various sectors. Tan suggested New Zealand could do the same with its research sector.
The idea came as figures were released by the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment describing how New Zealand’s new Institute for Advanced Technologies was funded: in part, by reprioritising funding away from various research programmes such as the Marsden Grant.
The institute was announced as one of four new Public Research Organisations. Compiling New Zealand’s seven Crown Research Institutes into the four new bodies was a step towards Tan’s “cluster” approach, though not as far a step as was originally recommended.
Advice prepared by Sir Peter Gluckman on the science system redesign called for the creation of a flagship entity rather than the four that eventuated: a vision in line with Singapore’s research cluster strategy.
In any case, a clustered approach would be able to better leverage the sharing of infrastructure: one of two key factors identified by Professor Frédérique Vanholsbeeck, a physicist at the University of Auckland – the other being a healthy population of startups. She saw adequate infrastructure as a way to ensure those startups grew and remained in the country.
Vanholsbeeck had previously described to Newsroom the importance of investing “not just in research funding, but in infrastructure for those hubs of innovation”. Infrastructure made it “harder for you to be discarded”, she said.
Both Tan and Vanholsbeeck identified the lack of a “critical mass” of research and development experts in their country’s ecosystem. Singapore’s investment in research clusters and associated infrastructure was able to mitigate this.
In Singapore’s case, Tan said “we don’t have that critical mass. But what we do is we make ourselves attractive enough to attract all these world class talents in all the thematic areas that we think are important to Singapore and to the global market”.
To attract those talents, Singapore’s government chose areas of expertise and invested heavily in their development; Tan cited investments in life sciences and biomedical or advanced manufacturing.
Vanholsbeeck said we don’t have that critical mass in New Zealand, either. Singapore had been able to excel by being “a lot more drastic than New Zealand about picking priorities” for research, and then funding those areas adequately.
Like all areas of infrastructure, certainty and continuity was discussed in relation to science infrastructure. While Singapore’s People’s Action Party has governed continuously for more than 60 years, New Zealand’s frequent changes of government and changes in infrastructure policy create a hurdle to achieving meaningful long-term planning and investment.
More work has been done to foster a bipartisan approach to infrastructure, but fundamental differences between different parties’ infrastructure policies remain. For Tan and Vanholsbeeck, aligning on a dedicated priority was paramount.
Tan said “obviously, you have to play to your strengths. New Zealand is resource rich, it also has strong capabilities in agriculture, in ag tech, and also renewables”.
But picking favourites would not be successful without the funding to back up aspirations. “You need to provide both funding for the research as well as create these physical spaces where researchers can come together and co-create,” Tan said.
The creation of a new advanced technologies institute signalled an area of interest for the Government.
This was a potential boon for Vanholsbeeck, who said “we know researchers feel there’s insufficient prototyping infrastructure here in New Zealand”.
But without funding to match Singapore’s level of investment, she said: “Whether the NZ Institute of Advanced Technologies remedies that remains to be seen.”
Infrastructure ‘clusters’ key to profitable research system, says expert
