This article was written with the assistance of AI and is part of [[The Translation Series]]. First published in [Linkedin](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/recommendation-nobodys-talking-elliot-duff-ttzhc) on March 31, 2026 from the original in [Obsidian](https://publish.obsidian.md/elliotduff/Published/Articles/The+SERD+Recommendation+Nobody+Talks+About)  The Strategic Examination of R&D — "[Ambitious Australia](https://www.industry.gov.au/publications/ambitious-australia-strategic-examination-research-and-development-final-report)" — landed two weeks ago with 20 recommendations for reforming Australia's innovation system. The commentary has been immediate. Governance. Funding. Tax settings. Superannuation. Skills. Procurement. All important. All being debated. The most important recommendation in Australia's innovation review is the one nobody is discussing. Recommendation 20 calls on the Australian Government to "create a national narrative that persistently demonstrates the benefits of RD&I to the community here and abroad." It is the last recommendation in the report. It sits under a section titled "Drive cultural change." It is, by some distance, the least discussed recommendation in the public response to the SERD. The recommendation about building a national innovation narrative has no voice in the national conversation about innovation ### Why this one is load-bearing Here is the logic chain that every other recommendation depends on. No narrative means no public connection to R&D&I. Most Australians cannot name an Australian innovation beyond Wi-Fi and the Cochlear implant. They do not know that the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme is an Australian innovation in health system design, or that the Torrens Title system — invented in South Australia in 1858 and adopted across the world — is a regulatory innovation that underpins every property transaction in the country. They interact with Australian innovations every day without knowing it, because nobody's job is to tell them. No public connection means no social licence. Australia gives social licence to sports stars, to soldiers, to medical heroes in a crisis. It does not give social licence to innovators. Without it, innovators are invisible. They can't attract talent, they can't attract capital, they can't attract public support. Parents don't encourage kids into research or engineering careers. Industry sees researchers as academics, not partners. When an innovator's funding gets cut, nobody notices — because nobody knew what they were doing in the first place. No social licence means no political will. If voters don't connect R&D&I to jobs, health, housing, defence, or their children's future, there is no electoral incentive to protect it. Innovation funding becomes discretionary. It is the first thing traded away in a budget negotiation because nobody outside the system will notice. No political will means no sustained funding. Every Australian innovation review since the 1980s has followed the same arc: commission, report, partial implementation, budget cut, repeat. The machinery changes. The outcome doesn't. Because the social licence to innovate in Australia was never built. Recommendation 20 is not a communications exercise. It is not investment attraction. It is the social licence to innovate — and it is the precondition for the other 19 recommendations surviving contact with an election cycle. The SERD panel knows this. Section 6.6 says it plainly: "RD&I is not currently seen as a national priority in Australia's culture or identity." It draws the comparison with sport — we celebrate our sporting prowess while failing to recognise scientists, innovators, and entrepreneurs to anything like a similar extent. That observation is correct. But look at what happens next. --- ### A narrative recommendation with no narrative infrastructure The implementation pathways under Recommendation 20 are: - NIC to develop a "national RD&I investment narrative" - Treasury to update the foreign investment framework - A whole-of-government access point for investors - Austrade and state trade offices to run marketing campaigns and trade missions Read that list again. The recommendation about cultural change proposes no cultural mechanisms. The recommendation about narrative proposes investment attraction. The recommendation about telling Australia's innovation story proposes trade missions. This is Maslow's hammer. The SERD is an R&D review, so it consulted R&D people, who proposed R&D solutions to a problem that is not an R&D problem. Building a narrative is a storytelling and communications challenge. The outcome suggests that nobody from marketing, media, or communications was in the room — because the room was defined as R&D. (1) [Australia keeps asking the wrong people the wrong question](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/australia-keeps-asking-wrong-people-question-elliot-duff-rlkpc/) And here is a question the SERD does not ask: who in the Australian Government is responsible for marketing Australia to Australians? Austrade markets Australia to foreign investors and exporters. Tourism Australia markets beaches and wildlife to international visitors. The domestic audience — the one that votes, the one that creates political will, the one that grants or withholds social licence — has no channel. There is no institutional home in the machinery of government for telling Australians what their innovators do and why it matters. The implementation pathways under Recommendation 20 reflect this gap precisely. They default to the only tools the system has — Treasury, Austrade, trade missions — because the tool that is actually needed does not exist. Where are the stories? The word "narrative" appears seven times in a 136-page report. The word "stories" appears once — in the paragraph immediately before Recommendation 20, where the panel says Australia must "share the stories of breakthroughs." But the implementation pathway contains no mechanism for collecting those stories, documenting them, or making them accessible. You cannot narrate without stories. And you cannot have stories without people and projects. ### We had storytelling infrastructure. We dismantled it. This is not a new problem. Australia once had national innovation storytelling — and chose to get rid of it. [The Inventors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inventors_\(Australian_TV_program\)) ran on the ABC from 1970 to 1982. At its peak it was one of the ABC's highest-rating programs. Over 60 percent of the inventions featured on the show made it into production. It did exactly what Recommendation 20 now calls for — it connected Australian innovation to the Australian public, weekly, in prime time, for twelve years. It was axed in 1982. The [New Inventors](https://iwiki.au/index.php/New_Inventors) revived the format in 2004. It ran for eight seasons and over 200 episodes, each one documenting a real Australian invention, the person who built it, and the problem it solved. That is a ready-made story bank — exactly the raw material a national narrative needs. It was axed in 2011. And the archive has since been closed. Meanwhile, Australian Story has run continuously since 1996. Nearly thirty years of telling Australian stories — sports stars, survivors, community heroes. When scientists appear, they appear as medical heroes, not as innovators. The story is about saving lives, not about what the innovation system produced or why it matters. Australia doesn't lack storytelling infrastructure. It has Australian Story. It has the ABC. What it lacks is any deliberate, sustained decision to point that infrastructure at innovation. You can't build a narrative with an R&DTI. You build it with stories. And Australia has spent forty years choosing not to tell them. ### When the IP leaves, the story leaves with it When Australian IP is commercialised offshore, there is a triple loss. The value leaves. The story leaves. And the voice leaves. In July 2025, Sanofi agreed to acquire Vicebio — [a company commercialising the University of Queensland's Molecular Clamp vaccine technology](https://news.uq.edu.au/2025-07-billion-dollar-deal-takes-uq-vaccine-tech-world) — for US$1.15 billion upfront, with potential milestone payments of up to US$450 million. It was the largest deal involving IP from an Australian university. Three UQ researchers — Keith Chappell, Daniel Watterson, and Paul Young — had started the work in 2012. Twelve years of research, commercialised through UniQuest, acquired by one of the world's largest healthcare companies. It barely made mainstream news. The Australian, on the same day, headlined with a 25-year-old who had made money in property. That is not a criticism of The Australian. They are a commercial operation. They publish what their audience reads. Property is a story Australians are already invested in. A billion-dollar vaccine deal from a university lab is not — because nobody built the audience for that story. The editors were responding to a culture that the absence of narrative created. And who should have told it? UQ put out a press release. That is institutional communications — it reaches the university's audience. The Department of Industry has no storytelling function. Austrade is outward-facing. The ABC cancelled The New Inventors fourteen years ago. There is no one in the system whose job it is to take a story like the Molecular Clamp deal and make it matter to ordinary Australians. But there is a deeper structural problem. If Sanofi had been an Australian company, there would have been a domestic lobby group, a peak body, a minister with a constituent interest, a question in parliament, a mention in Hansard. The deal would have entered the political record. It would have become part of the national story because there would have been domestic actors with an incentive to make it one. Sanofi is French. Vicebio was created by a European investment firm. The acquirer has no interest in Australian politics, no lobbyist in Canberra, no reason to make this visible to the Australian public. The IP left the country — **and the story left with it.** **The value** — the economic return accrues to the foreign acquirer. **The story** — no domestic company to champion the win, no Hansard mention, no media incentive. **And the voice** — the successfully commercialised entity is no longer an Australian constituency, so it never appears in the next policy consultation. That third loss is the one that closes a trap. The SERD consulted universities, peak bodies, VCs, accountants — the people who are still here. The companies that successfully translated Australian research and then exited the country were not in the room. They are the evidence that the system can work, but they have left the jurisdiction. They are what I have elsewhere called the **exited constituency.** So the next review asks the same people who are still inside the broken system what is wrong with it. The successes are invisible because they have gone. The failures are overrepresented because they stayed. And the policy response is shaped by the voices that remain — which are overwhelmingly the voices asking for more R&D funding, not the voices that could say "here is what actually worked." This is not a new pattern. David Warren invented the flight data recorder — the black box — in the 1950s at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories in Melbourne. Australia did not adopt it. British and American firms commercialised the technology. The value left. And the story nearly left with it. Australian aviators knew about Warren, but the definitive account of his invention was not written by an Australian. It was written by Janice Peterson Witham, a Canadian, whose 2005 biography ensured Warren received the global credit that had been overshadowed by the foreign companies that commercialised his work. It took someone from outside Australia to tell one of Australia's most significant innovation stories — because Australia had no machinery to tell its own. This is also why the SERD's implementation pathways for Recommendation 20 fail on their own terms. Austrade and trade missions are designed to attract foreign investment. But when foreign investment acquires Australian IP, the narrative benefit flows out, not in. The very mechanism the SERD proposes works against the narrative it says it wants to build. ### The missing supply chain Australia does not have the raw material for a national innovation narrative. Not because the stories don't exist — but because nobody collects them. Australia does not systematically document its innovation projects. The [EU's CORDIS](https://cordis.europa.eu/) database catalogues over 133,000 research projects — searchable, linkable, each one a potential story. Australia has no equivalent. Projects finish, teams disperse, knowledge evaporates. The raw material for a national innovation narrative does not exist in any accessible form. (see [Where have all the projects gone?](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-have-all-projects-gone-elliot-duff-wq5ac/)) This is not a data problem. It is an infrastructure problem. If you wanted to write the story of Australian autonomous mining — how we went from CSIRO and ACFR research in the 1990s to Rio Tinto running fully autonomous haul trucks in the Pilbara — you would need to reconstruct it from scattered papers, archived press releases, and the memories of people who are retiring. There is no registry. No project history. No institutional memory that outlasts a funding cycle. The SERD recommends building a narrative. But a narrative is the output. The inputs are projects, people, and the stories that connect them to the public. Without a system that captures and preserves those inputs, the narrative recommendation is an instruction to build a house with no bricks. There are exceptions. The [Australian Computer Society](https://iwiki.au/index.php/Australian_Computer_Society) and [**Pearcey Foundation**](https://iwiki.au/index.php/Pearcey_Foundation) have published a history of Australian computing. The Australian Museum and Powerhouse have exhibits that feature Australian innovators. The Eureka Prize celebrate scientific achievement annually. The [Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation](https://iwiki.au/index.php/Encyclopedia_of_Australian_Science_and_Innovation) documents researchers and institutions. These efforts matter, and the people behind them deserve recognition. But they are sector-specific, episodic, and — critically — none of them are funded by the federal government. They exist because professional societies, foundations, and cultural institutions chose to do it themselves. And even the best of these are directories, not story banks. The Encyclopedia can tell you who did what and where — but not what happened next. Not the company that was created. Not the impact on a community. Not the farmer whose yield changed, or the patient who could hear again, or the mine that went autonomous. The human chain from research to outcome — the part that actually builds social licence — is missing. Individual efforts like mine ([The Innovation Wiki of Australia](https://iwiki.au/index.php/Main_Page)) are attempting to fill that gap, but they are one person's work, unfunded and unscalable. The distinction is between pockets of commemoration and sustained national narrative. ### What a real narrative infrastructure looks like Israel doesn't just have startups. It has "Start-Up Nation" — a brand so embedded in global consciousness that it attracts capital, talent, and political goodwill almost automatically. That brand wasn't an accident. It was built deliberately through decades of storytelling that connected military R&D to civilian technology to economic growth to national identity. The United States doesn't just fund research. It has DARPA challenge narratives, NASA's public mythology, and a culture that turns researchers into founders into characters in a national story about progress. The funding follows the story, not the other way around. Australia has the raw material. Wi-Fi. The Cochlear implant. Polymer banknotes adopted by over 50 countries. The world's first handheld mobile mapping system. Autonomous trucks. Autonomous ships. A field robotics tradition that is genuinely world-leading. But these sit in isolation — undocumented, unconnected, unknown to the public who funds the system that produced them. A real narrative infrastructure would include a national innovation project registry — every publicly funded R&D project, searchable, with outcomes linked to real-world impact. It would include a deliberate, sustained, publicly funded effort to turn project outcomes into stories that connect to the lives of ordinary Australians. It would treat storytelling as infrastructure, not as an afterthought to trade missions. ### What Recommendation 20 should have said The SERD panel has diagnosed the problem correctly. Australia does not celebrate its innovators. The public does not connect innovation or R&D to their lives. Without that connection, nothing else in the report is durable. But the panel has proposed investment mechanics where cultural infrastructure is needed. Trade missions where stories are needed. An "investment narrative" where social licence is needed. Here is what Recommendation 20 should say. The National Innovation Council should be given an explicit mandate — and a dedicated budget — to market Australian innovation to the Australian public. Not to foreign investors. Not to trade delegations. **To Australians.** That means funding television and media content that tells Australian innovation stories — not once, not as an eight-episode series that gets cancelled, but persistently, in the way sport is covered. It means building and maintaining a national innovation story bank — a searchable, public record of Australian innovation projects, the people behind them, and the outcomes they produced. It means documenting the stories before the people who lived them retire, and before the archives are closed. And it means treating narrative as national infrastructure, funded and maintained with the same seriousness as research grants, tax incentives, and trade missions. And marketing needs a brand. Israel has "Start-Up Nation." Australia needs its equivalent. I have argued elsewhere that the brand already exists: [Invented in Australia.](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/invented-australia-elliot-duff-9j9uc/) Three words that could carry the whole narrative — on television, on project registries, on trade missions, on school programs. A brand that works domestically and internationally. A brand that says: this is what we build, this is who builds it, and this is why it matters. The AIS was created in the 1970s because Australia decided it was not good enough at sport. Sixty years of innovation reviews have told Australia it is not good enough at innovation. The country built an institute for sport. It has never built the equivalent for innovation. The NIC is the opportunity to change that — but only if its mandate includes the one function the system has never had: telling Australians what their innovators build and why it matters. **Recommendation 20 is the most important recommendation in the report.**Not because it is the most technically complex. Because it is the one that determines whether Australian innovators have the social licence to exist — and whether anyone remembers the other 19 recommendations in five years. And right now, nobody is talking about it. If the recommendation about finding Australia's innovation voice can't even be heard in the conversation about Australia's innovation future, what does that tell us about whether anything else in this report will be? ## Postscript I changed the front page. Creating a narrative is about storytelling — writing the book, building the documentation, and sharing it in a way that reaches the general public. I thought a scientist sharing a story around a fire was more appropriate. And I notice someone is holding a CSIRO mug. Coincidence — I think not. And it even added the Southern cross.