Commercial Ready grants are no more – the goss is that Minister Carr always had a leaning to tax concessions, hence there is now an expanded R&D tax credit from 1 July 2010 – ostensibly to improve support for smaller firms in tax loss as well as rewarding larger firms for their R&D efforts – a 45% refundable credit for firms with turnover less than $20 million – equivalent to a tax concession of 150%.
The document that stood out was “Powering Ideas – An Innovation Agenda for the 21st Century“. Produced by the Department for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, the report clearly and eloquently looks at the history of innovation in our country and identifies Australia’s failure over the last decade to keep up an appropriate level of investment in innovation compared to our peers. The 2009 Budget is stage one in the long path towards rectifying the country’s under-investment in innovation over the last decade.
Commercialisation is an art – requires input and commitment from seasoned business executives with experience in taking promising ideas, products and services and creating profitable enterprises from them. Over the last two years in my role as a VC, I’ve looked at 340+ entities (we have backed two!).
The common theme is the genuine lack of commercial expertise in these entities to make them globally successful. Investment has to be made in this area and the Commonwealth Coomercialisation Institute (CCI) is the right body to achieve it (see HOT GOSS)
Commercial Ready didn’t rise like a phoenix from the ashes in this Budget. The amendment to the R&D Tax concession is welcomed. But many early innovators will not be around to take advantage of these additional tax credits. Many have been struggling with the cash drain of the R&D burden since CR was cut in May 2008. Many are on life support. With CR, cash payments were made in advance of the expenditure. Now the cash does not arrive until after the tax year.
Contributed by Nick McNaughton (Anthill)