In comments published in The Australian coinciding with the release of their FY19 financial report, Cochlear has called on the Australian government to adapt policies to ensure Australia remains competitive in attracting global investment in R&D Activity. CEO Dig Howitt noted specifically that the R&D Tax Incentive must be subject to a stable policy platform to address Australia’s declining R&D Expenditure when quantified as a proportion of GDP. Dig Howitt had previously mentioned at the AFR Innovation Summit that […]
The AFR has reported that Industry Minister Karen Andrews (whose responsibility includes oversight of the R&D Tax Incentive) recently met with representatives of high profile Australian start ups and parties from venture capital firms. Attendees at the meeting included personnel from Airtasker, who had a previously lodged R&D claim found to be ineligible by regulators, which had been previously highly publicised in the media. Ms Andrews was quoted within the article as: being concerned by the dropping level of business […]
This week, the Australian Financial Review (AFR) hosted its annual Innovation Summit involving presentations and discussions by technology sector and industry leaders. The importance of stability in innovation policy (and in particular, the R&D Tax Incentive) was a largely uniform view among those participating in the summit. Key notes from the presentations include the following: A representative from CSL noted that the timeline for commercialising drugs required thinking in 10-15 year cycles, and that frequent changes to innovation policy made […]
A recent report published from the Office of the Chief Economist has found that government assistance (such as that available from the R&D Tax Incentive) has a positive impact on a company’s ability to generate external finance. The report referenced previous papers investigating the effectiveness of R&D Tax Incentives which found substantial evidence that receiving R&D tax subsidies improve the likelihood and amount of external financing available to a firm, especially when the firm is small and high-tech (Lerner, 1999; Feldman […]