Margaret Gardner bristles at the notion that the innovation precinct around Monash University in Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs – where she has been vice-chancellor for three years – could be described as a bit boring.
The area – 24 kilometres from the CBD – is home to traditional electronic, tech and healthcare firms such as Bosch Australia, HP Australia, Siemens and Hospira (Pfizer), the university itself and its health centres, CSIRO, the synchrotron, centres for additive manufacturing and nano-fabrication.
But it doesn't feature many of the new breed of digital businesses – such as digital payments group Stripe and Square, transport software group Aconex, energy software firm Greensync and hubs like Inspire 9 and the York Butter Factory – which cluster in the inner city where the coffee is more aromatic and the laneways way cooler.
Peter Seamer, a former chief executive of the Victorian Planning Authority, told a Melbourne Economic Forum on planning last October that the Monash area lacks the amenity "knowledge workers want".
There's only one pub, compared to 26 up and down Swanston Street, the council had blocked the development of business hotels, "and a big day out is to drive to the shopping mall at Brandon Park".
But Gardner says Monash and its surrounding suburbs like Clayton, Oakleigh and Notting Hill compare well with some of the world's great innovation hubs which are not usually anywhere in inner cities. Gardner will give the keynote address at the AFR Higher Education Summit in Sydney next week.
No one came to Palo Alto for the coffee
"I do not think Palo Alto was a thriving metropolis before the innovation came there," Gardner tells AFR Weekend. "People did not come to Palo Alto for the coffee. People came to Palo Alto for the innovation."
Palo Alto is the heart of Silicon Valley, between San Francisco Bay and Stanford University, which encouraged tech companies such as Hewlett Packard and Xerox to base themselves there in the 1950s and 1960s and created the world's most envied innovation precinct. It is now home to Apple, Google, Facebook and Uber.
No other region has successfully replicated this, although impressive innovation precincts exist elsewhere. One telling measure of Australia's challenge is that few of the high-tech companies in the Monash precinct are homegrown, exceptions being Mayne Pharma and Marand Precision Engineering.
Even so, Gardner reckons the Monash area has the attributes to make a difference to the people and industries of the nation – and the region. They include fundamentals like good schools and affordable housing.
As well as high-tech companies and research facilities, it has Monash Medical Centre, one of Victoria's largest teaching hospitals, Monash Biomedical Imaging, and will be the site of the new Victorian Heart Centre, a specialist cardiovascular treatment centre.
This in turn supports innovation and commercialisation in medical devices and pharmaceuticals. Monash's medical strengths and world-ranked school of pharmaceutical sciences have spawned the Biomedicine Discovery Institute – which has attracted the backing of Janssen Biotech, part of global giant Johnson & Johnson – and BioCurate, an $80 million joint venture with Melbourne University to commercialise biomedical discoveries rather than see them sold offshore.
'Not just very large high schools'
"Here among the fastest-growing suburbs of the south-east you have major health infrastructure as well as major engineering infrastructure – and those two things don't exist together in many places in the world," Gardner says.
Education minister Simon Birmingham is seeking a 2.5 per cent efficiency cut from universities and Gardner says it's time for governments to recognise that universities are vital catalysts for the development of societies and industries in 21st century knowledge economies in the nation and the region.
"We need people to reframe their thinking. We are not just very large high schools."
By focusing on the educational side of universities governments miss the wider benefits and the ways in which unis can drive innovation, Gardner says.
To drive home the point, Monash had an economic impact study done by a consultancy. It showed the university accounts for a quarter of Victoria's $7.1 billion education exports – 26 per cent of its 60,000-plus domestic students are foreign – and contributes $1.2 billion to gross state product and $4.66 billion in total economic activity (every $1 of government funding generates $5.90 of economic activity).
Incredible opportunity
Still, the students are key business and Monash has to prepare them for an increasingly uncertain and fluid professional future. It is doing a root-and-branch review of curriculum within and across faculties and degrees to bring the formal tuition side up to date. It has a portal, Student Futures, which offers to develop students' "employability edge" by helping them frame their academic and extra-curricular capabilities for a range of audiences.
Monash Industry Team Initiative (MITI) is a formal program for cross-disciplinary teams of students to spend 10-12 weeks with companies. Sophie Weiner, a mechanical engineering and industrial design student in her sixth year of study, was one of a three-student team picked to work at HP Inc in Silicon Valley last summer. HP is a Silicon Valley stalwart and Weiner's team was asked to find ways for its business units to start to talk to each other, rediscover its entrepreneurial roots and shift from a transactional approach to one based on contractual relations and the notion that "everything is a service". For example, HP wants to sell not just computers but "printing workflow solutions" for the offices of the future – in which you would expect (finally) less printing to be done.
"Our presentation at the end was really exciting. We got to pitch and get feedback from different levels of management," Weiner tells AFR Weekend.
"At the end we got to pitch to the CEO (Dion Weisler, an Australian-born Monash graduate). That was amazing. A bit nerve-wracking, but an incredible opportunity."
