Opinion
The SERD consultation is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, but architecture alone won't deliver transformation
The federal government’s Strategic Examination of Research and Development (SERD) is the most significant review of Australia’s innovation system in decades. As the report is released and the Minister for Industry and Innovation and colleagues consider the Government’s response and a potential action plan, the sector is watching closely.
The review’s ambitions are the right ones: extract more value from public investment, grow business R&D, and align the system to national priorities. However, a close read of discussions to date (and the preceding Issues and Discussion Papers) identifies a deeper problem—one that is implicitly acknowledged, but that we don’t yet have the tools to solve.
Successfully delivering the once-in-a-generation change imagined by SERD requires change in all parts of the ecosystem. The system currently is fragmented, knowledge flows poorly across sectors, and incentives don't reliably reward the hard work of integration and emergence. We know our task ahead will not be easy. As the Federal Treasurer challenged us when he framed the national appetite for strategic evolution: “Can we, as a people, make big reforms to make our country better, even if it’s hard? Or are we too selfish, too myopic, too complacent?”
Australia does not lack excellence. What we lack is a reliable way to genuinely coordinate our individual perspectives, approaches, and enterprises at speed and at scale to become more than the sum of our valuable parts. This raises a higher-order question: does the sector have a detailed understanding of the cultural attributes and leadership levers that will best deliver the sustainable, mission focused, systemic benefits that are expected to flow from the SERD?
Consilience: More than collaboration
The SERD has highlighted the need for cross-system alignment and accelerated translation. Improving our potential for “consilience” across research collectives, institutions, and the sector will help. Consilience is not just a fancier word for more collaboration. It is the deliberate, repeatable integration of knowledge across boundaries (disciplines, sectors, and jurisdictions) achieved through shared problems and frameworks, boundary-spanning roles, translation practices, and enabling governance. Consilience is the individual, social, and organisational capability that makes emergence, and the SERD’s ambitions, feasible rather than aspirational.
Think of it this way. The review encourages a national governance model, long-term strategy cycles, and performance management that ties research to broader social and economic outcomes. These are necessary, but not sufficient. Governance only works when the system (and its components) can actually integrate: when researchers, businesses, and public agencies share common datasets and standards; when integrator roles are recognised and resourced; and when incentives reward the complex work of cooperation, translation, and co-creation—not just a tally of publications or patents. Without that integrative tissue, coordination risks becoming another layer of meetings.
The same logic applies to scaling. The review’s interim papers made the case for “radical acceleration” and stronger mechanisms for collaboration and translation. Yet experience, here and overseas, shows that scaling without integration simply multiplies silos. To scale impact rather than just activity, Australia needs to engineer knowledge flows across boundaries: university–industry–government, STEMM–HASS, national–state. This not only means designing physical and virtual spaces where diverse teams can do genuine integration work, but calibrating incentives so that businesses and universities are rewarded for shared problems, practices, and outcomes, not just co-badged outputs.
The sector already knows this
The review panel has been frank that current settings do not consistently catalyse ambitious, breakthrough R&D. Stakeholder submissions during the consultation echoed this point. For instance, Universities Australia called for coordinated governance and incentive architectures that reduce administrative drag and reward cross-sector collaboration. The Business Council of Australia argued for globally competitive incentives and deeper business–research partnering to translate excellence into growth. Both perspectives, from quite different vantage points, converged on the same insight: build rules that optimise for integration, not isolation.
However, there is a deeper structural tension that a future SERD action plan must confront.
For at least the last decade, national assessment exercises like the ARC’s ERA and EI, global rankings, and competitive funding mechanisms have trained universities to behave as sovereign entities, each optimising for metrics that reward institutional standing rather than system-wide outcomes. Collaboration has been encouraged in name (at local and lower scale levels), but the incentive architecture has consistently pushed universities to accumulate prestige, concentrate talent, and compete for finite pools of funding against the very partners we are asked to collaborate with. The result is a sector that is world-class at institutional strategy but largely unequipped for system strategy. ERA did not ask whether a discipline’s excellence was integrated with another’s to solve a national challenge, and rankings do not measure whether knowledge effectively moves from a university lab into a regional supply chain.
If we are serious about mission-driven R&D and “radical acceleration”, then implementation of SERD must recognise that the shift required is not simply from less collaboration to more, but from a system designed around sovereign entities to one that operates as a sovereign system. This is a fundamentally different design problem, one that demands new incentives, new institutional roles, and a shared understanding that the performance of the whole matters more than the ranking of the parts.
Three shifts for the action plan informed by the science behind systems
Crucially, the architects of the SERD action plan should not assume we already know how to do this well. The SERD has diagnosed fragmentation and proposed architecture. What we now need to know is what works, for whom, and under what conditions. A good place to start is to treat consilience as the operating system for the review’s action plan.
Before we can build consilience, we need to be able to see it; or more precisely, see where the potential for consilience exists and where it is being suppressed. That means developing new ways of assessing the integrative capacity of research groups, institutions, and the system as a whole: not as a static audit of structures and org charts, but as a dynamic picture of how functions actually interact.
In any complex research system, people and teams are constantly adjusting their work to meet shifting conditions (with finite time, incomplete information, and competing demands). Typically, those adjustments are what make things work. But the variability they introduce also can combine in unexpected ways: sometimes amplifying into genuine breakthroughs where knowledge resonates across boundaries; and other times dampening progress such that promising connections never form. A meaningful measure of consilience potential would map these everyday functional interactions (how knowledge, people, and resources actually move and combine) and identify the conditions under which productive resonance between functions is likely to emerge. Applied at increasing scale, within and across individuals, disciplines, institutions, and sectors, this kind of dynamic assessment could tell us, not just where integration is happening, but where the system is ripe for it and what is getting in the way.
As first steps towards this goal, three immediate shifts and near-term research investments would pay off quickly.
First, boundary-spanning governance. Australia needs a national framework that takes integration quality seriously: common data protocols and standards that function as shared reference points across sectors, recognised broker and integrator roles that carry professional standing and career pathways, and conflict-resolution norms that prevent authorship and IP disputes from derailing cross-sector work before it begins.
Adopting the approach of other jurisdictions, we could begin with discrete governance experiments: piloting different models of cross-sector decision rights and accountability within the proposed national coordination framework, and evaluating their effects on time-to-agreement, shared IP arrangements, and downstream translation.
Second, incentives that drive genuine integration. The current incentive architecture overwhelmingly rewards activity within rather than across siloes and sectors. Instead, the government could trial system-wide incentives such as premium rates or credits (e.g., within the R&D Tax Incentive or other targeted programs) for business-university projects that demonstrate verifiable integration practices and shared outcomes (as advocated by stakeholders to accelerate business R&D) to start to shift behaviour, and then compare uptake, private sector co-investment, and translation outcomes with business-as-usual. There is a rich methodological and evidence base in behavioural economics, which suggests that careful incentive design and well-targeted nudges can reshape institutional behaviours in the way that SERD demands.
Third, measurement that matches ambition. The review flags performance management, but this must go beyond single headline numbers. Effective measurement of an integrative system requires stage-appropriate evaluation: early measures of shared problem focus, collaboration readiness and integration processes, mid-stage indicators that track whether ideas actually are moving across sectors, and later outcome evidence. Relying solely on lagging output counts will tell us what the system produced, not whether it is learning to work differently.
The Australian Research Council’s developing Research Insight Capability could play a natural role in genuinely useful knowledge-flow mapping: building national dashboards that track how ideas, people, and data move between sectors and jurisdictions; using such data to identify blockages and guide investment in platforms and precincts that function as genuine spaces of exchange (not just co-location); and identifing sector-wide gaps and complementarity within and across disciplines.
The difference between projects and prosperity
Why insist on a research program for consilience now? Because the review’s ambitions—more value from investment, greater business R&D, mission-driven outcomes—all depend on integration, and integration does not emerge by decree. It is built through design, incentives, and measurement that align aspiration and behaviour across the system. Consilience supplies the “how” that makes the SERD’s recommendations work together rather than sit side by side.
If the Strategic Examination gives us the structure, consilience gives us the capability. If we want an R&D system that can deliver a “Future Made in Australia”, we must invest not only in research but also in the science of how integration happens and how leaders can enable it. That is the difference between producing more projects and producing more prosperity.
Addendum: What Do We Mean by Consilience?
Drawing on Edward O. Wilson’s use of consilience as the “jumping together” of knowledge across domains, consilience is not simply more collaboration, nor alignment by design alone. It is the individual, social, and organisational capability to form genuinely shared problems, coordinate across different ways of knowing, and produce emergent outcomes that are more than additive.
In practice, consilience depends as much on people and culture as on structures and incentives: shared language and frameworks, boundary‑spanning roles, second‑language learning between disciplines and sectors, and everyday coordination practices that allow knowledge to move, combine and resonate. Architecture can enable this work, but it cannot substitute for it.
Seen this way, consilience is less a fixed state to be achieved than a readiness within the system: the conditions under which diverse expertise can connect productively when it matters most.
Ross McLennan is Pro Vice-Chancellor, Research Services and Amanda Barnier is Pro Vice-Chancellor, Research Performance and Development – both are from Macquarie University.