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Australia, coordination

Cooperative Research Centres programme

Australia's Department of Industry reported that its Cooperative Research Centres portfolio facilitated 304 businesses establishing research-focused collaborations in 2023–24, across 114 CRC and 190 CRC Projects partners, above the year's target of 248.

Australiasince 1991still operatingbears on University-industry collaboration

304 businesses, businesses establishing research-focused collaborations, 2024. 248 businesses, portfolio target, 2024. Australian Department of Industry, Science and Resources, Annual Report 2023–24, retrieved 2026-08-31.

The move, and what it needed

Australia funds industry-led research centres for three to ten years and shorter CRC Projects for up to three years, giving firms and researchers a shared programme, matching resources and a governance structure for applied work. The long and short formats let a mature collaboration and a focused translation project coexist.

Preconditions

  • Universities, research organisations and firms able to define a problem together and commit staff or cash
  • A competitive public grant process with independent assessment and enough duration for trust and technical work to accumulate
  • A centre-level governance and intellectual-property framework that can turn joint research into adoption or further investment

Where it travelled: University–industry centres travel when public grants buy durable shared capacity and firms own a consequential problem; short networking schemes without governance, matching effort or a path to adoption produce thinner ties.

Limits: The partner count measures collaborations facilitated through grant agreements, not completed research, commercialisation, additionality or university-only links. It is an administrative portfolio measure whose reporting and retrospective calculations can change, and partners include research organisations and community bodies alongside universities and businesses.

This record describes what Australia delivered. It is linked to University-industry collaboration because no comparable dataset measures that capability. It does not affect the score or confidence.

More from Australia

1 other delivery from this country.

  • Compulsory voting

    Australia has required citizens to vote since 1924 and turnout at the 2025 federal election was 90.7 percent of enrolled voters, a level no large voluntary-voting democracy reaches.

Every delivery from Australia

The same gap elsewhere

3 deliveries linked to University-industry collaboration in other countries.

  • The Fraunhofer contract-research model

    Germany funds the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft's institutes in proportion to what they earn from industry, and in 2025 the society performed 3.2 billion euros of contract research, 966 million euros of it paid by industry.

  • Knowledge Transfer Partnerships

    UKRI reported more than 1,000 Knowledge Transfer Partnerships running at one time and more than 1,100 Associate projects in May 2026, joining businesses with universities or other research organisations through jointly supervised innovation work.

  • Portugal's CoLAB applied-research network

    Portugal's Agência Nacional de Inovação reported 41 recognized Collaborative Laboratories (CoLABs), and its 2024 innovation report recorded 639 highly qualified staff contracted by CoLABs, 32 percent of them PhDs.

Every delivery under coordination