Most university-industry research partnerships in Australia do not fail in the lab. They fail in a meeting room, months before any real research happens, over a single unresolved question: who owns the outcome.
This is not a story about bad science or unwilling partners. It is a story about a system that has quietly optimised for protection over collaboration, and is now paying for it in lost deals, stalled commercialisation, and departing talent. Dr. Tony Granville, Innovation Manager at SPARC, the strategic research arm of the Harrison Group, has sat on both sides of this problem: twelve years running an academic research group at UNSW, followed by a move into industry to build a research division from scratch. His view, shaped by that dual perspective, is blunt: the current model of IP ownership is the single biggest point of friction in Australian research commercialisation, and it is entirely fixable.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who has tried to broker a university-industry research agreement. A lab has developed something promising or a company wants R&D done. Everyone wants to build on it, scale it, and bring it to market. And before any work begins, negotiations grind to a halt over ownership terms.
This is not an occasional hiccup, it is frustratingly close to the default outcome. It's clear that universities are wary of losing control of valuable IP, but what should take days/weeks stretches into a year, sometimes longer, and sometimes the deal never proceeds at all.
Every month spent negotiating ownership is a month the technology is not being scaled, the company is not realising the commercial benefit, and the researcher is delayed in publishing or building research capability. Multiply that across every research-active university in the country and the scale of the problem becomes clear. Australia is not short on promising research, it is short on a mechanism to move that research from lab bench to market without losing a year to legal negotiation along the way.
Two forces compound the problem, and neither is going away on its own.
The first is structural fragmentation. Every university runs its own technology transfer office, with its own processes, its own priorities, and no shared visibility into what other institutions are doing. An industry partner trying to work across multiple universities effectively needs a different legal relationship with each one. There is no national database of available IP, no shared record of who owns what, and no easy way for a company to discover relevant research without first engaging a lawyer to go looking for it. Layer on top of that the fact that most published research sits behind journal paywalls, and the result is a research sector that is difficult to navigate even for people trying, in good faith, to engage with it.
The second is what might be called institutional scar tissue. Universities have, in the past, licensed promising discoveries early and cheaply, only to watch those discoveries become commercially significant products, worth far more than the university ever received. That experience has understandably made institutions protective. The response has been to tighten control of IP terms upfront, before any commercial value has been established, rather than to structure agreements that pay off if and when commercialisation succeeds.
Both dynamics point to the same underlying issue. The system is built to protect against a bad outcome, rather than to enable a good one.
The mistake is not that universities want to protect their research. It is that they are protecting it in a way that reduces the odds of it ever generating value at all.
Holding IP tightly and negotiating ownership before any commercialisation work begins assumes that the value of the discovery is already known and fixed. In practice, the value of most early-stage research is not established until industry has done the unglamorous, expensive work of scaling it: understanding raw material behaviour at scale, adapting it to manufacturing constraints, and testing whether the market actually values what the lab thought it valued. That work routinely changes the product from what was originally developed. Universities that insist on locking in ownership terms before this process happens are negotiating over a value that has not yet been created.
There is also a talent cost that rarely factors into these negotiations. Higher degree research students who do not see a credible pathway from their research into industry increasingly look overseas, where facilities and industry links are perceived to be stronger. Every stalled or abandoned partnership is not just a missed commercial opportunity. It is a missed opportunity to keep that knowledge, and the people who created it, working in Australia.
Granville's proposed fix inverts the current default. Instead of universities holding onto IP ownership and negotiating control upfront, he argues for releasing IP earlier and structuring a royalty arrangement that pays out once the technology is commercialised.
The logic is straightforward. Industry partners carry out the expensive, high-risk work of scaling a discovery into something commercially viable. If that work succeeds, a royalty structure means the university shares in the upside, potentially for a defined period, without having spent months negotiating ownership terms before anyone knew whether the technology would work at scale. If it does not succeed, the university has lost little beyond the IP itself, which had no realised value in the first place.
This is not a novel idea. It echoes the model that characterised much of the mid-twentieth century, when close, embedded relationships between universities and industry, such as the Goodyear research presence at the University of Akron, were common. That era of tighter university-industry integration predates the current reliance on government grant funding, which has pushed many institutions toward optimising for publication metrics and grant success rather than long-term commercial relationships.
Granville also points to a lower-friction starting point that does not require universities to overhaul their entire commercialisation strategy at once: visiting and adjunct professorships, and access to honours-level student projects. These arrangements cost universities relatively little, but they open a channel for industry to engage directly with research talent and identify promising early-stage work, well before a formal, high-stakes IP negotiation is needed. It is a way to build trust before the ownership conversation happens, rather than starting the relationship with that conversation.
The core shift required is a change in what universities are optimising for. A royalty-based model, where IP is released earlier and value is captured once commercialisation succeeds, aligns university incentives with actual outcomes rather than with theoretical protection. Institutions considering this shift do not need to restructure every partnership at once. Starting with low-cost, low-friction engagement points, adjunct and visiting professorships tied to specific industry partners, and structured access to honours projects, builds the relationship and the trust that make a later royalty negotiation far easier. Longer time horizons matter as much as the ownership structure itself: partnerships that are allowed to run for several years, rather than being bound to a single grant cycle, create the space for a project to iterate, pivot, and generate multiple downstream projects, which is where the real commercial and research value tends to emerge. Finally, addressing fragmentation, whether through shared IP visibility across institutions or simply more open published research, would reduce the transaction cost that currently sits ahead of every one of these conversations.
None of this requires waiting for a national policy solution. It requires individual institutions deciding that a share of a successful outcome is worth more than full ownership of an outcome that never happens.
The Australian research sector does not have a shortage of valuable discoveries. It has a structural failure to convert them into commercial outcomes at the rate its research output would suggest. The universities that restructure their IP approach around shared upside, rather than upfront control, will not simply close more deals. They will become the default partner for every serious industry player that has grown tired of losing a year to a term sheet before the real work has even begun.
Harrison SPARC is actively looking for universities and industry partners who want to build something that lasts. If that interests you, please reach out to them directly: contact@harrisonsparc.com.au
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