Centres of Excellence: All about People
Dr Gen Ford | MARcH 2024
Dr Gen Ford
ARC Centres of Excellence are large, complex beasts. Pulling one together can, and really should be years in the making. A competitive Centre bid needs a compelling proposition and a central research program that’s exciting, innovative and world leading, yet also flexible enough to respond to the break throughs that will inevitably occur across the discipline during the Centre’s lifetime.
A Centre is a consortium of university and non-university partners (government, private sector and not-for-profit organisations) with at least national and most likely international coverage. The choice of partners needs to make sense for the research program, ensuring that the research is co-designed and meaningful, and that the outcomes can be implemented in a way that will see true impact realized outside of academia.
This all sounds obvious, but this mix of partners may not be natural bedfellows. In fact, we can be almost certain this whole array of partners won’t have worked all together before. As we know, Australia’s track record of university - industry research collaboration gets bad press from time to time and keeps some policymakers awake at night. There will be pockets of existing collaborations and relationships within the broader group to build off, and there must be in order to convince the Panel that the goals are feasible, but the Centre is in many ways a giant experiment.
This brings me to the central point. Centres are about people. A large group of people who need to pull together to combine their individual research interests and talents, career aspirations and personalities to work towards a big, hairy common goal. And that’s just the bid process!
A successful Centre – and by successful I mean one people enjoy being part of, that fosters them individually and collectively, and runs as smoothly as can be expected given there’s human beings involved – is one where the pre-award and post-award experiences are congruent. While there will always be difficulties, a successful Centre bid has to start as it means to continue – with strong leadership, where everyone feels vested in the outcome, and strong governance to mitigate the inevitable tensions. This is the very definition of team work making the dream work.
A successful bid campaign will draw on every part of the university ecosystem. Particularly for the lead organization, a collaborative, respectful relationship between the Director and their team of core CIs and the university’s research office is key.
For the Centres I’ve had the privilege of being directly involved with shepherding through the bid process, it was no surprise to me that they were successful. The relationships were positive and goal focused, and in every case led by a Director who embraced the bureaucracy that springs up around a Centre bid rather than tried to fight it, had some humility through the process, and was willing to take advice and direction from ‘junior’ colleagues in the professional staff support team.
While a bid may still be successful even if there are fractious relationships or disconnection across teams and interests, such a Centre is setting itself up for unnecessary pain: this dynamic will continue. You don’t secure $35m of public money without some blood, sweat and tears, but underestimating the importance of academic-professional relationships is an avoidable mistake.
In the famous words of somebody famous whose name I now can’t remember: Don’t be a d!ck.
