New Royal Society fellow pushes for greater recognition of applied science education and business leadership
Last month, Callaghan Innovation food technology team leader Owen Catchpole, who pioneered the supercritical extraction process used to make high-value food products such as supplements, was made a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi.
It’s a major honour (he’s the first Callaghan Innovation scientist to receive it) and he’s pleased the Royal Society properly acknowledges the importance applied sciences and engineering - something he thinks much of society doesn't do a good job of.
Applied science is the practice of turning scientific discoveries into something useful, often resulting in commercialisation.
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“Everyone can name the person who split the atom but very few could name the engineers and scientists who designed the first nuclear power reactor,” Catchpole said.
He said that lack of recognition, along with ingrained technophobia and unclear career pathways or pay for prospective students, led to low numbers of scientists in business leadership.
“Applied science is essentially what companies who have an R&D function do; they've got to turn basic discoveries into useful commercial products.
“The companies that are very successful at this are driven at the top by people who understand the benefits of innovation and investing in R&D.”
Catchpole said major tech companies in the US all had some form of STEM background, and had then gone on to get business rigour through completing an MBA, but this wasn’t the case for New Zealand.
“Science and engineering bring an ability for problem solving and a strategic lens, but also understanding the benefits of innovation and investing in R&D to create new high-value products and services that enable you to compete on the world stage.”
For a country that prides itself on innovation, New Zealand doesn’t rank highly on research and development spend per person compared to well-known innovators like South Korea, United States, Japan and Israel.
Historically most of New Zealand’s R&D has gone (very successfully) towards more effective and cheaper ways of producing our commodity products: “What we haven't succeeded in is getting customers to pay more for those products and that's where we're falling behind as a nation.”
Not all New Zealand companies have that mindset: think Rocketlab and Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, which Catchpole said did a good job of spending a large proportion of revenue on R&D and were constantly innovating to meet the anticipated demands of a global audience.
If other countries do a good job in encouraging STEM education and leadership, where did New Zealand go wrong?
Catchpole points to New Zealand’s export heyday of the 1950s and 60s when our primary products fetched a high price, and the difficulty in diversifying away from those industries.
“It's easier to sell a commodity or a business-to-business product and take a lower margin than it is to make a me-first product where you have to establish the market and then for others to compete with you.”
He said to develop that high-value economy, STEM needed to be seen as a high-status career valued by New Zealand society alongside the likes of law, accounting and economics.
Unlike technophilic countries like Japan or Switzerland, where STEM is a highly respected career path either inside academia or in a corporate setting, the perception in New Zealand was "definitely not the path to riches and to recognition and reward".
