By Peter Roberts
Now that the federal government has released the review into the six Industry Growth Centres, the big question remains – what will be their replacement and will they become true application-oriented innovation organisations we see in the UK’s Catapult Centres and Germany’s Fraunhofer institutes?
The recommendations of Industry Growth Centres Initiative: initial impact evaluation report were kept secret by the previous government, until leaked to @AuManufacturing in May 2021.
The ACIL Allen report’s key finding is that the small scale and lack of funding of the IGCs condemned their work as useful for the companies which received support, but making no difference to manufacturing as a whole.
As I have argued previously the other big issues were that the centres were essentially grant funding bodies, lacking in facilities of their own which could be put at the…
