Canberra funding needed, NEC

NEC has told the federal government that a greater focus on commercialising Australian communications research and development is required to get multinationals to invest here.

NEC Australia executive director, Brendan McManus, warned that the government's 'shotgun' approach to funding scattered across national research facilities, cooperative research centres, Australian Research Council grants and other channels lacked a focus on commercial development.

"Instead of just spraying that money around without a clear requirement of commercialising the output, my key message was that we must link it to the output," said McManus. "I think there needs to be a little more control around what they are doing, not to stifle anything they're doing but to get the direction right and ensure there is the commercialisation spin off at the end of it."

"When I took Mr Nishigaki [NEC President] to visit the Prime Minister at Kirribilli just after the Olympics, Mr Nishigaki said 'I have got $75 million in my pocket and I want to spend it here on 3G. I want NEC Australia to design the third generation handset and the UMTS handset'," McManus said.

NEC though has been hampered by a shortage of local 3G skilled engineers, and is looking to the government for assistance to develop centres of excellence and expand the Cooperative Research Centre program to increase the output of skilled graduates. "We want to use them at the highest skill levels here in Australia where we are actually doing the total technology design," McManus said.