Very good, but where is the customer service bit asks Rick Boven about the Ministers’ recent announcement of the CRIs statements of core purpose (SCP)?
The director of the New Zealand Institute says that the SCP of each CRI is a concise document with very good content, but has some questions about “what’s not there.”
He says that up till now the CRIs haven’t “established a strong reputation for being easy to deal with. It would be helpful to make it clear that they are service organizations, or not..”
It should be clear whether they are expected to provide service to customers or to help build successful businesses and industries. If they are not going to be service organisations then they should be required to consider how they can best contribute to economic success.
Boven would also like to see the CRIs aspiring to be world-class. There’s no benchmarking or performance criteria in the SCPs he says.
Boven also notes a lack of reference to basic or fundamental research. This may be signaling that universities are to carry out the basic research, but he questions how far such a pendulum should swing.
One of the fundamental rules of strategy is that with multiple objectives, one must prioritize and apart from defensive considerations, one must go after one objective. Failure to follow this rule generally leads to failure to succeed. The governments have been quite clear: CRIs are there to get a return on investment. They are intended to raise money, which is why small New Zealand companies get little benefit from them: they can’t afford to use the CRIs. A similar situation occurs with science funding. For a period at least, the value of the science, the value for money, and most other “business” values were overwhelmed by the need to tick a number of other boxes. I was once chastised for not having a formal “Human Resources” policy written into an application, with no formal weekly meetings to review the various people’s progress. This for a proposal for one person to work at 0.4 FTE!