I welcome the wide-ranging review of Australia's national innovation system, as announced recently by the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator Kim Carr – and, in particular, the renewed focus on industry development and public good outcomes for the CRC Program.

 

The Australian property, design, construction and facilities management industry, with its tight deadlines and culture of disjointed knowledge sharing along the supply chain, has traditionally been reticent to take a long-term and industry-wide view of R&D.

 

However, I believe the will is now there to tackle problems collaboratively at a national, state and local level — which is important as it takes motivated people, not just policy, to affect cultural change.

 

This is where Construction Innovation — with its 27 industry, government and research partners — plays a vital role. In our unique position as national facilitator of industry R&D development, we have achieved several recent outcomes of national and international significance that demonstrates the impact people can achieve by working together.

 

The development of the Guide to Best Practice for Safer Construction is a good example of such an approach. This project involved a collaborative approach from industry associations representing the infrastructure and building industry across the supply chain including Engineers Australia, the Association of Consulting Engineers Australia, Australian Procurement and Construction Council, Master Builders Association, Property Council of Australia, Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Australian Institute of Building and Office of the Federal Safety Commissioner.

 

The project team, led by Tim Fleming, Operations Safety Manager for John Holland Group, included Bovis Lend Lease, the Western Australian Department of ? Housing and Works and researchers from RMIT, QUT and Curtin University of Technology. (See further details of feedback to this project elsewhere in this newsletter.)

 

To build upon this unprecedented level of industry collaboration developed through major projects like Safer Construction, Construction Innovation convened an Industry Stakeholder Forum in Sydney in December 2007 to determine future R&D priorities for Australia's property, design, construction and facilities management industry.

 

The forum was attended by senior representatives from 10 industry associations and major industry partners across the sector. The forum highlighted the importance of delivering triple-bottom line sustainability outcomes (environmental, economic and social) and confirmed our future mandate as the Sustainable Built Environment CRC.

 

We look forward to maintaining this engagement process with critical stakeholders in developing detailed projects for our 2008/09 CRC renewal process.