One on One – Professor Geoffrey Brooks

AMT: Let’s start with your background and how you came into your current role.

Geoffrey Brooks: I started originally in chemical engineering. After I graduated I started working in a lot of small companies that were building and making and fabricating things. I got involved with all sorts of things; I ran a plastic fabrication business for a while. After a few years of that I did a PhD in pyrometallurgy (the science of making metals), and most of my research in the last 20 years has been in that area. I’ve worked in Canada, the USA, and I’ve been at Swinburne for the last 10 years. Personally I’m a specialist in the science of making steel, and I’ve also done a lot of work in aluminium and magnesium.

A few years ago the university asked me to take over the role of co-ordinating all the manufacturing research at the university. And Swinburne has a lot of manufacturing research across all sorts of areas: IT, electric vehicles, nano-materials – it’s a very broad church. I’ve spent the last few years coming to grips with that, co-ordinating it, trying to link it to industry, develop new facilities (particularly the Factory of the Future). I’m quite a long way from steel-making, but I’m having a good time. It’s been a positive experience.

 

AMT: What might an ordinary day involve?

GB: One of the things I most enjoy is visiting companies. I’m amazed at how many clever people there are. That’s the experience I get from going to all these companies. It’s quite inspiring. Of course there are negative stories, some people are struggling, but there’s a lot of people with good ideas, and it’s quite exciting.

I do a lot of walking around factories, trying to see if I can help people. One problem is that a lot of companies would like to be more innovative but they struggle, they don’t know how to do it. They know how to do one part but they lack some other part, and they’re looking for help. Another barrier is that they’ve got this sense there’s some clever people at the university who could help them, but they’re not sure how you work with them, and they fear they might end up wasting their time. I try to address both of those problems. I try to find out what they’re really interested in and try to find a way to help them.

 

AMT: Encouraging research collaboration and the pooling of knowledge is often cited as a big obstacle for Australian manufacturing.

GB: It is. What universities are researching is often very disconnected with industry. There was a study two or three months ago that showed that, when you talk to companies in Australia, 50% of what they’re interested in researching is something to do with engineering, and 30% of what they’re interested in is to do with IT. But when you look at Australian universities, I think the numbers were 9% of all research is on engineering, and 3% or 4% is on IT. There are good reasons for that: medical schools and all those good things obviously. But there’s a very large mismatch. It’s probably less of an issue at Swinburne – we have a lot of engineering research and IT research. But in general, there’s a mismatch between what universities work on and what industry’s interested in.

And the structures are a problem. A good example would be the Government’s official system for doing research through the Australian Research Council. You put in an 80-page document, and nine months later you find out if you’ve got the money or not. That’s completely out of sync with the business cycles of Australian industry. It’s not just an issue of having the expertise, it’s an issue of the systems we have. We could be a lot cleverer in that area.

AMT: How can those problems be overcome?

GB: There have been good attempts. Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) have their strengths and weaknesses, and I agreed very much with the recent review into CRCs and those issues. We need systems that are much more responsive to helping industry directly. A good example of a system that works like that is the voucher system that the previous Victorian State Government had, which I think the current Government is relaunching. That’s an honest attempt to help companies innovate on an affordable scale. We should have more of that.

The other side is industry having more sophisticated ideas themselves. There’s universities having the right systems and the right thinking to help industry, but you also need clever ideas within industry. When we say ‘industry-led innovation’, that’s a responsibility as well. It’s asking: ‘Beyond my narrow interest of making my business work better, how am I going to help industry in general? What sort of research do we have to do?’ And that means groups like AMTIL have a role as well, which is to get people to talk, to think. That’s an important aspect.

They’re all problems, but I think they’re solvable.

 

AMT: Tell us about some of the projects underway at Swinburne right now.

GB: One of the more interesting ones is we’ve just got a new research centre funded by the Government developing new bio-devices. What’s interesting about it is that the projects are defined by industry partners in collaboration with the students. The structure is that the companies sign up for it and get some government money to help the whole thing work, and they define projects with PhD students. This is trying to do two things: it’s trying to get new bio-devices and new ideas in a promising area; but it’s also a new model for how PhDs should be done. A lot of PhDs in Australia are disconnected from industry; this is actually intertwining the process from day one. The dream is that we end up with all these clever, well-educated people who understand industry and products very well. That’s an exciting project.

We’re also doing a lot of work bringing lightweight materials into structures like cars, trains; we’ve got some really good people in that area and we’re trying to bring that kind of thinking into electric vehicles. We’ve got a lot of work with the Malaysian government trying to develop electric buses. It’s not just lightweighting, it’s how you make the battery system efficient, how you make it part of an interconnected network. That’s an exciting area.

 

AMT: More generally, what do you think are the biggest challenges facing Australian manufacturing today?

GB: Ultimately I think it’s developing new products, or improved products. In a highly competitive global scene, making products that are “just okay” is not a good long-term game, and we have a bit of that going on. We have to shift to making things that are special or different or highly desirable in some way. Then not only can we sell in our own markets, but people outside the country want to buy those products, and they can withstand fluctuations of currencies.

If I could just illustrate: I’m sure movements of the euro and the Australian dollar will influence whether people buy BMWs, but generally speaking we think BMWs are a pretty nice car, and people are willing to pay money for a BMW car, or a Dyson vacuum cleaner, because we have faith in the product. I don’t think Australia has enough products like that. We need products that are special, different or new, that people will pay money for. Of course we have got things like that, but we need more of them.

 

AMT: Can you name a few examples?

GB: Well, companies like ANCA: they can probably live with currency fluctuations. They’re really clever and they make really nice products. I went to Wilson Transformers the other day, they make something they can sell with confidence in the Australian market, but also externally. There’s other things that are not so high-tech: you look at Jayco and they’re making a product that people are willing to pay money for, and they’re trying to get better all the time – it’s not high-tech as in precision machining, but it has its own cleverness. Part of it is just being cleverer and better in making desirable products of any kind. We have to put a lot of energy into improving current products and developing new ones.

 

AMT: What strengths do Australian manufacturers have to offer?

GB: Probably things we take for granted. We have a well-educated, well-trained workforce. We have a lot of inter-connected companies throughout Australia that know each other, circulate among each other. We have a well-regulated, well-structured workforce. And we have clever people. We are generally a bit more expensive as a workforce, but there’s certainly a lot of positives about our workforce, our cleverness.

I’m not sure if we’ve got that lined up the right way, otherwise we wouldn’t have had some of the failures we’ve had recently. Obviously the closure of the auto industry is hardly something to be happy about, but I see other industries opening up. One spin-off from our university is Minifab: they started off as one professor (Errol Harvey) who took his ideas and started a company making specialised medical equipment, and they’re doing well.

So we’ve got some clever people, we have a well-trained workforce, we’re a well-regulated, well-run country. These things are heavily in our favour. We just need to be focussed on maximising those advantages.

 

AMT: What would you like to see Government doing to help?

GB: I would like the Government to have a bit more focus on how it invests in R&D. It needs to make sure it’s putting money towards things that have got a big chance of succeeding, and avoid just propping things up. If industry is willing to try to get to a smarter place and needs some assistance, that’s worth putting money into. I think the Government knows that, but I wish they were a bit more committed to it. I get the impression there’s a lot of money in our innovation system spread out fairly thinly.

Another important thing is to talk up Australia’s cleverness, highlight what we’re clever at. All of us should have a discussion about what sort of country we are. We hear all this discussion about manufacturing that’s just in terms of economic benefits, but that’s very narrow. We should ask ourselves what sort of people we are. If we stop making things or we can’t make things, what does that say about us? I’m sick of manufacturing being presented as this issue about jobs and money. It’s also about who we are. What country do we visualise ourselves as being?

The country I find inspirational and that we could learn a lot from is South Korea. They’ve got a fantastic steel industry, they’ve got a great car industry, they’ve got a great electronics industry and they’re very good at shipbuilding. And that’s not an accident! It was a concerted effort over a long period of time. Back in 1976, Australia did pathetically at the Olympics, and people quite rightly said: “This is not who we are. Australians are not people who are third-best. We aim to be really good at sport. How are we going to do that?” And wasn’t that a spectacular success?

People bought into that because we believed in it. We need more of that in Australia. And that means talking up our manufacturing successes. It’s not just an issue of making money. It’s an issue of what sort of people we are, what sort of things we are doing. I personally think that our country would be a richer and nicer country to live in if we had more emphasis on making stuff.

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