David Thodey - sitting down with our new Chair

[Music plays, CSIRO logo appears on bottom right hand corner of screen, and text appears:  David Thodey: sitting down with our new Chair]

[Text changes to Tell us what you know about CSIRO]

[Image changes to show David Thodey, Chairman, CSIRO]

David Thodey:  Well I’ve known the CSIRO for many years because the Chairman of Telstra was Catherine Livingstone and of course Catherine was Chair of CSIRO going back, what now, ten years ago.  So Catherine’s told me a lot about CSIRO over many years. 

But also my time at IBM, we did a lot of work with CSIRO and then at Telstra we’ve had various interactions.  I think that if I characterised it they’ve been stop/start to be quite honest and yet the more I’ve got to know about CSIRO it’s an incredible depth of talent and capability and I think there’s just such a wonderful opportunity, we could talk about that but – so I’ve known CSIRO for a long time, it is one of the great brands of Australia really.

Telstra’s been a great journey, it’s a wonderful Australian company and in fact has many similar connections back to the government as CSIRO and it’s now gone through a privatisation program .  But it’s a very strong retail brand, it’s about very strong engineering culture.  And in fact I would say a bit like the CSIRO in many ways, it has some of the best engineers, telecommunications engineers and is known around the world for its leadership, more so than what Australians really rate it.  And I think sometimes it’s a bit, you’re not recognised in your own backyard and I think CSIRO has some of those similar characteristics where we have outstanding Australian people and we need to really celebrate that and really celebrate their recognition on a global scale.  So that’s a little of my background.

[Text appears on screen: What are some of the big changes you’ve seen over the last few years?]

[Image returns to show David Thodey]

Well I have seen enormous change in technology and the rate of change of innovative new ideas and I think we’re in a unique period right now.  But I remember I come back, you know in technology terms I go back to the mainframe and I lived through the PC era and then distributed computing and then the Cloud.  Well in fact I should say the internet and then the Cloud and then big data analytics and now artificial intelligence.  But we’re in a very unique point that impacts research and science right now because the rate of change of technology innovation, I’ve never seen it happen faster. 

I spent a lot of time in the U.S and I spent a lot of time in Europe and when you start to see this technology innovation plus new business models all coming together, this rate of change, this rate of innovative ideas, we’ve never seen a period like it.  Because technology is touching everything.  So let’s take big data or artificial intelligence, even Cloud computing, the cost of computing is dropping enormously and no matter whether you’re a scientist or a business person or even someone in public policy you’ve suddenly got access to this enormous amount of data that can be changed to information that drives into knowledge.  And if you can take that and then look at new business models you can start to change industries, change the way societies work, bring innovation into very thin verticals, you’d probably see them in food processing, agribusiness sector.  And that's what’s so exciting now. 

But you still need pure science and you still, then you need to look at how you can take that and apply it into real life situations.  And that could be business or it could be societal, and that’s what’s so exciting.  So I’m seeing an enormous change right around the world.  And I’ve never seen a time where its touching everything I know.  There’s been periods when we’ve had like the PC era or maybe it was a little bit of the internet, it was bit but not this big.  So that’s what is so exciting now and I think for the CSIRO I think we have this unique opportunity to really collaborate and really drive this change for the good of Australia.

[Text appears on screen: What do you see as some of the challenges facing CSIRO?]

[Image returns to David Thodey]

I think we need to do a better job at attracting people into the science, technology, engineering and mathematics field.  The truth is in Australia at the moment that we’re not getting enough people coming through, both tertiary, even coming through at secondary school and it’s such a wonderful career.  Its stimulating, its great people, its challenging and that’s what you look for in a career.  I mean yes you look for money but there’s other things that people look for and if you want to make a difference I’d say go for that career. 

And I think we as a community working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics we need to reach out more and to talk about how good it is.  And it’s not, you know sometimes you get the geeks’ brigade, it’s not, I mean wonderful rich people, and that you can make a difference in society.  That’s what gets people excited. 

So I don’t have, I don’t find it hard to talk about what a wonderful career you can have and I think CSIRO is the pinnacle organisation where people aspire to come to work and that is just wonderful.  So we need to encourage that.  But we want to create lots of different opportunities right across the industry, all industries, because science, technology, engineering, mathematics is such a critical part of it.

[Music plays, CSIRO logo appears with the words Big ideas start here]