It's a deficit of policy thinking. The speaker before me hit it right: You gave the most important job, which is capturing the benefits, to the universities, with their fragmented, non-scale and non-core aspects. Other nations around the world create centralized agencies, institutions or Crown corporations to manage this strategically. Until we do that, the failure will continue. It needs to be done at a proper scale, with proper expertise and focus, and it needs to be delineated ex ante upstream from the source of the funds, which is the federal government.
There's been absolutely no attention paid to this in a proper manner over the past 35 years. We've been last place in the OECD in productivity because of it. It will keep going that way until we stop approaching it with inattention.