Reflections on the latest round of ARC Centres of Excellence EIOs

10 July 2021 | Denise Meredyth

The ARC Centre of Excellence Expressions of Interest round closed this week, ending the first round of a long term planning, design and co-ordination process engaging many of the best researchers across Australia and beyond.
Outside Opinion has been privileged to work with ten university partners and across multiple Centre proposals.

Each is the outcome of years of work, co-ordinating teams across institutions and disciplines, working with international networks and establishing relationships with industry partners and stakeholders. It’s a real logistical challenge that demands of each Director and their teams as much vision, patience and co-ordination as they can command.

It’s fantastic for us to see the compelling propositions people are putting together, to create new research alliances across the strongest research groups in the country. Australia faces some urgent problem that can only be tackled if we reach across disciplines and get research engines working together. Advanced research is completed and specialist, and the challenge is to get the very best researchers working on the most innovative proposition about how to deepen fundamental insights across several fields while finding long-term solutions to problems that can be translated into action, invention and broader understanding. All this has to be communicated in the clearest terms to experts, non-experts and to panels made up of many disciplines.

Some observations.

In crafting a Centre of Excellence bid, planning and starting early are a huge advantage. Working across multiple bids, we saw several that made rather major changes of course and strategy during development. This only came about because they had the time and freedom to plan and discuss.

The requirement to name all of the Partner Organisations at the Expression of Interest stage has had a very positive influence on the level of preparation and engagement that applicants have had with their prospective partners. There has also been much stronger attention, this round, to research translation and potential commercialisation outcomes. There are risks here: in some bids with a large number of industry/agency partners, there is potential for the proposal to look more like a very large Linkage Project proposal than a Centre of Excellence.

There are ways to address this. In cases where the partners were legitimate and were as deeply interested in the research as in the potential outcomes, the proposal was improved by a clear explanation of the integral roles and deep participation of those partners.

Another welcome change we noticed was the generation of truly multidisciplinary proposals that genuinely attempted to bridge the divide between STEM and HASS, for instance in cases where those researching emergent technology were drawing on social scientists and ethicists to help them chart a course with social licence. Where the intended outcome or technology of the Centre of Excellence is likely to be disruptive, we suggest that they should be including one or more research social scientists at the beginning of the process, to ensure seamless uptake and translation when the time comes. Centre teams we have worked with made good use of Research Impact Pathway workshops and advice to guide their proposal through logical steps at the earliest possible point.

Many HASS applications would benefit from scaling up their goals and objectives to be as aspirational as possible. It was good to see so many HASS applications combining the expertise of researchers from numerous disciplines but many of these applications would benefit from building stronger narratives about the discipline mix, specifically about how a particular grouping of disciplines would work together to solve the 'problem' and why this mix would work better than another grouping.

There is still scope for Centre research teams to give more thought, as early as possibly, to longer term planning that goes beyond the imperative to investigate and solve the research problem. We did notice a lack of attention, in drafts we saw, to outputs, outcomes, communication, dissemination, engagement and impact. Planning can and should be extended to include concrete academic outputs (suited to the disciplines) and other types of impact-related outputs and communication. This might include a communications strategy including social media, addressed to specific audiences and with a feasible expectation of impact.

Finally, there is still a lack of co-ordination in the proposals being developed in similar fields. Competition is to be expected, but we do see rival Centre proposals at the EOI stage that are similar in focus, and that have missed the opportunity to put a joint team of strong researchers forward. The general lesson, as with all the points above, is that planning and intelligence-gathering is critical to a strong Centre of Excellence campaign, and that is important to win the time and resources it takes to rethink and reimagine the whole enterprise at critical stages. Fingers crossed for all the wonderful groups we worked with.

Denise Meredyth (Director), Stephen Buckman (Senior Associate), Fiona Cameron (Senior Associate) and Joanne Thompkins (Senior Associate) Outside Opinion