Australia to replicate EU climate change innovation model

Australia will adapt its own version of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) green technologies accelerator this year, with plans to copy the Climate Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC), at an advanced stage.

“We’d like to call it Climate KIC Australia,” said Mary Ritter, former head of Europe’s Climate KIC and now its international ambassador. “It will be a separate legal entity, and will sign a collaborative agreement with Climate KIC.”

The news is a welcome diversion for the EIT, which recently received poor grades from the EU’s financial watchdog.

The Australian KIC will be self-financed and independent from its European counterpart. “All the costs of the project will be borne by partners in Australia. My part-time work is the only seed money EIT is putting in,” Ritter said.

The connection with Australia was made through banking and insurance group SunCorp, the first international participant in the Climate KIC programme. Following discussions with SunCorp, Ritter made several trips down under. “I’ve been three times and had more than 100 different meetings to find out what traction a KIC could have,” she said.

This has involved meetings with state and regional-level politicians, as well as universities and companies based in Perth, Adelaide, Sydney and Brisbane. The EU’s Ambassador to Australia has also been involved.

“Climate KIC has been very encouraging,” said Ritter. “I’ve spoken in depth with Martin Kern [EIT interim director]. He’s very positive about it too.”

Climate KIC is one of the five Knowledge and Innovation Communities run by the EIT, which bring together scientists from universities, research institutes and industry around a given theme, including climate change, energy and digital technologies.

Political impetus

Ritter noted that Australia has “huge problems with climate change”, with rising numbers of deaths in heatwaves, water shortages, forest fires, impacts upon agriculture and exposed coastal infrastructure.

Conditions for starting a Climate KIC there are easier than a year ago now that climate change denier Tony Abbott – a man who once called the science of climate change “crap” – is no longer Prime Minister.

It is part of the KIC mandate to look for partners beyond Europe, said Ian Short, interim chief executive of Climate KIC, who took over from Bertrand van Ee in January. “Our agenda is global one, it makes no sense for us to be just Europe-based,” he said. “We’re looking to be the go-to for people with good climate ideas.”

Ritter believes Climate KIC will be held up as model elsewhere, with interest in New Zealand, where the government is commissioning a study on how a KIC model might work, and in Singapore.  

“Once we learn lessons in Australia, we could maybe bring them back to Europe. I hope it would inspire other KICs,” said Ritter.

Before her ambassador role, Ritter was founding CEO of Climate KIC from 2010 to 2014. “Four or five years in a top job is long enough,” she said. As well as her work with Climate KIC, Ritter is involved with the RISE (Research, Innovation, and Science Policy Experts) EU advisory group on research.

Commenting on the recent critical report by the European Court of Auditors, which concluded the EIT cannot become an effective tool for breeding innovation in the EU without “significant legislative and operational adjustments”, Ritter said it is too soon to judge.

“I think one of the problems is that it’s still young and its key performance indicators have focussed on short-term outputs. Also, the report didn’t go up to the present day,” she said. “We haven’t officially reported our outputs. For every one euro, we leverage €20 in external funding. It takes a little while to get off the ground but we are on an exponential curve.”