NSW offers $24m in grants for businesses to solve five big problems

Other issues the government hopes to fix are improving communications in rural and remote areas and helping passengers with vision impairments access public transport.

New ideas will receive funding in stages – from a feasibility study, for example, through to scoping and commercialisation activities – with the ultimate aim of the NSW government becoming an early customer.

“It was the way that government can play a really powerful role,” Ms Upton says. “We have the problems, we spend the money, why should we just buy a product off the shelf when we can create new ideas and new jobs?”

Praise for moving quickly

Mr Gonski, who chaired an advisory council that included Commonwealth Bank chairman Catherine Livingstone, company director Jillian Broadbent, quantum computing leader Michelle Simmons, Business Council CEO Jennifer Westacott, venture capitalist Daniel Petre and former Telstra boss David Thodey, said the program can play a role in fostering what he calls translational research.

While NSW has no shortage of great research coming out of the state’s 11 universities and is good at helping established businesses grow, Mr Gonski argued it is the part “in between, taking that idea and translating it into something that will go forward, where we are not great”.

Mr Gonski praised Ms Upton and Ms Berejiklian for moving quickly to roll out the new program.

“It’s important at any time but coming out of COVID I think that we need opportunities to go forward. This is a step to the future. What are the things that we’ve got that we can use to take the state forward and the lives of the community forward?” he said.

Mr Thodey, who also chairs the CSIRO, said the council had tried to avoid “boiling the ocean with good policy” and instead wanted to focus on a small number of initiatives where taxpayers could get the best bang for the buck. Tapping the government’s vast procurement power to help SMEs with the eternal problem of finding initial customers for their ideas was a smart solution, he said.

“This is a classic example of where governments can step into a place where there’s market failure,” Mr Thodey said.

“You need really pragmatic, real things to make a difference. They’ll never be perfect but you’ve got to get going and keep going and make changes along the way.”

The new program will be run by R&D NSW, an arm of the new state development agency, Invest NSW.

Mr Gonski said while many of his fellow council members had worked together before, it was “the first time for many of us that it was totally state-based and that’s a big plus”.

“The resources of the state are large but are perhaps not as co-ordinated as some might wish. This allowed for some real co-ordination,” he said.