Regional industries produce much of Australia’s food, fibre, energy, minerals and other essential products and services. They create significant economic, social and environmental value and underpin the prosperity of regional communities and Australia.

However, the conditions that enable regional industries to remain competitive, productive and sustainable are becoming increasingly challenging.
Rising input costs, climate variability, water constraints, workforce shortages, supply chain fragility, increasing compliance requirements and persistent value leakage are placing pressure on regional industries and communities across Australia.

These pressures are not only economic. They also affect workforce attraction and retention, mental health, service access and patterns of migration that influence community capacity and long-term regional viability. In turn, they affect whether regions can attract and retain people, sustain community wellbeing and remain places where individuals, families and businesses can thrive.

Many of these challenges are no longer confined to a single sector, value chain or organisation. Their causes, impacts and potential solutions increasingly span multiple industries, institutions and policy areas.

As a result, many of the most significant opportunities to improve industry competitiveness, productivity and sustainability, and support regional prosperity, now sit at the interfaces between sectors rather than within them.

Despite significant investment and many successful initiatives, progress on some of the most important regional challenges remains slow because their causes and solutions extend beyond the boundaries of any single sector, organisation or policy domain.

The Regenerative Regions CRC will undertake industry-led research that helps regional industries address these shared challenges, unlock new opportunities and create, capture and retain more value within regional Australia.

Many of the biggest challenges facing regional industries are not isolated problems. They are interconnected systems of people, infrastructure, markets, institutions, natural resources and technologies.

Within each challenge, multiple factors influence one another. For example, workforce capability depends on housing, skills, liveability, infrastructure and investment. Access to affordable clean energy depends on technology, networks, markets, regulation, finance, social licence, land use zoning and demand.

These challenge systems are also connected to one another. Energy influences manufacturing. Manufacturing influences employment. Employment influences regional growth. Regional growth influences infrastructure demand, workforce availability and investment.

As a result, industries often experience the combined effects of multiple interacting challenges rather than a single issue in isolation. The interactions between these systems can create both constraints and opportunities. Actions in one area often produce effects elsewhere, amplifying benefits or creating unintended consequences.

At the same time, many of the most significant opportunities for innovation, productivity improvement and new value creation emerge at these intersections. New technologies, business models, partnerships and industries often arise where sectors, resources, infrastructure and capabilities connect in new ways.

These opportunities and challenges are:

• Interdependent – the elements are connected and influence each other; relationships within and between systems can create feedback loops that reinforce or counteract outcomes
• Structural – outcomes are shaped by the ‘architecture’ of the system – the underlying rules, incentives, infrastructure, governance arrangements and market conditions that influence behavior
• Systemic – outcomes emerge from interactions across many organisations, industries and individuals rather than from any single one
• Adaptive – lasting progress requires changes in behaviour, business models, governance, investment and collaboration alongside technical innovation.

This is why solutions that address only one part of the system often deliver limited or short-lived results.

Understanding these interactions helps identify the leverage points where research and innovation can deliver the greatest impact. It also highlights the importance of experimentation, demonstration and continuous learning, particularly where proven solutions do not yet exist and where success depends on coordinated action across multiple organisations and sectors.

The issue is not a lack of capable organisations, good projects or investment. Rather, many significant and emerging industry challenges and opportunities no longer align neatly with the way research, funding, governance and delivery systems are organised. As a result, no single organisation can fully address them, even where substantial capability and investment already exist.

Most industries, organisations, agencies and programs are structured around a sector, industry, discipline, technology or policy domain. Their funding models, partnerships and delivery pathways are designed to optimise outcomes within those boundaries.

This approach works well for sector-specific challenges. Increasingly, however, many of the highest-value opportunities and constraints facing regional industries span multiple sectors, institutions and systems.

For example:

• Reducing regional energy costs may involve agriculture, energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, finance, communities and government
• Natural capital influences production, insurance, lending, investment and market access
• Regional processing opportunities may involve energy, logistics, waste streams, workforce capability and infrastructure simultaneously.

Many projects and programs are also constrained by short-term funding cycles, fragmented delivery models or limited ability to address long-horizon challenges that require coordination across multiple organisations.

Regional industries operate within interconnected economic, social and environmental systems. Yet research, investment, governance and delivery are often organised around individual sectors. This mismatch makes it difficult to address challenges and opportunities whose causes, impacts and solutions span multiple systems. Regional systems therefore require integrated solutions if they are to deliver enduring local benefit.

Each organisation can improve outcomes within its own domain while the overall regional system continues to underperform. Similarly, opportunities that depend on coordination across sectors can remain unrealised because no single organisation has the mandate, incentives or capability to pursue them end-to-end.

Yet these same interfaces are often where the greatest opportunities for innovation, productivity gains and new value creation emerge, making them a critical focus for industry-led research. This is evident in major transitions such as renewable energy, digitisation and circularity. While often planned and implemented through sector-specific programs, their success depends on how they interact with local industries, infrastructure, communities and landscapes, and how effectively they are adapted to regional contexts.

As a result, we see higher costs, duplicated effort, reduced resilience and missed opportunities to create and retain value locally. Coordinated, industry-led research and innovation at these interfaces can unlock opportunities, reduce system-wide costs and generate greater productivity, resilience, sustainability and regional value retention than isolated interventions alone.

We will focus on important opportunities and constraints facing regional industries that are interdependent, where the causes, costs, benefits and solutions are distributed across multiple industries, institutions and value chains.

We will work at the intersections of sectors such as food, energy, water, transport, waste, natural capital and digital systems, where connected and coordinated action has the potential to create outsized benefits.

We do not seek to address every regional issue. We focus specifically on industry-defined challenges where cross-sector research can create substantial regional and national benefit.

By taking a regional systems view and a regenerative approach, we will help unlock opportunities and create, capture and retain more value locally while strengthening the economic, social and natural systems that regional industries depend upon.

We examine how regional systems function in practice, identify the factors that drive outcomes and test interventions in real-world settings. This helps reveal where coordinated action can reduce costs, manage risk, unlock new value and strengthen regional competitiveness.

Rather than asking how to optimise one industry in isolation, we ask how multiple industries can work together to reduce costs, manage risk, create new revenue streams and retain more value locally for more people.

Research projects will typically involve multiple industries, institutions and knowledge domains. Solutions will be developed and tested in real regional environments and evaluated against commercial, environmental and social outcomes.

The aim is to generate evidence-based solutions that can be adopted across regions rather than remaining isolated pilots.

We will enable:

• Connection and coordination across multiple systems.
• Alignment of incentives, investments and timing across sectors and actors.
• Shared infrastructure, data and standards.
• Investment and benefit-sharing models that no single-sector program can deliver.
• Connected, coordinated solutions that generate multiple benefits rather than shifting costs or risks elsewhere.

Those organisations and programs play important roles, but they are set up for different purposes and operate at different scales.

For example:

• Industry bodies focus on industry priorities.
• Research and development corporations focus on industry productivity and sustainability
• Government agencies focus on policy and service delivery
• Existing CRCs often focus on specific sectors, technologies or value chains
• Regional organisations focus on economic development and coordination

Their funding models, partnerships, governance and delivery pathways are designed to optimise outcomes within those boundaries. They are not designed to solve the cross-sector regional challenges that sit between them.

Regional economies, communities and ecosystems do not operate in neat sector boundaries. While sector-based organisations are highly effective at improving individual industries, many of regional Australia’s most significant challenges and opportunities sit between sectors and systems.

We focus on industry challenges at a regional scale where ownership is fragmented, incentives may be misaligned and benefits are shared across multiple participants. We examine how geography, infrastructure, natural assets, community dynamics, industries, knowledge and capital interact, and where value is created, constrained, lost or leaked across the system.

By zooming out to a regional level and looking at how value and risk flow across multiple sectors and industries in a region, we ask different questions.

INSTEAD OF ASKING
“How do we improve productivity or derisk this value chain?”

WE ASK
“How do energy, freight, water, land use, data and natural capital interact and where are the opportunities to reduce total system cost, create new revenue, reduce risk and retain more value locally?”

We will act as a force multiplier by connecting, extending and applying existing research, capabilities, infrastructure and investments to industry challenges that no single organisation can effectively address on its own.

Thriving regional industries depend on thriving regions, and thriving regions depend on competitive, productive and sustainable industries.

Regional scale is where industries, communities, infrastructure, natural assets and institutions come together. It is where value is created, where costs and risks accumulate, where trade-offs become visible and where the benefits of innovation are ultimately realised.

The performance of agriculture, energy, manufacturing, tourism, transport and other industries is shaped not only by what happens within those sectors, but also by how they interact with one another and with the places in which they operate. Regional value is created through these interactions.

Many of today’s most significant opportunities and constraints therefore no longer fit neatly within a single sector. Their causes, impacts and solutions span multiple industries, sectors and institutions, yet they are ultimately experienced and resolved in places.

The RRCRC focuses on these interdependent challenges and opportunities at a regional scale because this is where integrated solutions can be designed, tested and adopted under real-world conditions to support thriving regions.

Our focus is not simply on improving individual industries, but on strengthening the conditions that enable industries to create, capture and retain value. By improving the systems that support regional industries, we can enhance competitiveness, productivity and sustainability while helping regions retain more of the value they generate.

A ‘Champion of Change’ is a business or person embedded in a regional community that will act as community anchors and ensure the legacy of the Regenerative Regions CRC continues long after a project or initiative ends. Our goal is to create over 500 ‘Champions of Change’ over the course of our 10-year program. We’ll achieve this by organising in-person workshops, mentoring and training opportunities, and formal accreditation.

For us, regenerative means designing solutions that strengthen the systems that create value rather than simply extracting value from them, and deliver compounding, long-term benefits for a wider group of beneficiaries, including nature and communities.

The objective is not only to improve performance today but to enhance the long-term capacity of regional industries and communities to prosper.

Regenerative goes beyond sustainability and circularity. Sustainable approaches aim to reduce harm, while circular approaches improve resource efficiency; both are useful, but neither necessarily restores the health, resilience or adaptive capacity of the whole system.

Yes, the term is contested, especially in agriculture. The main debates are around inconsistent definitions, evidence (how can claims be substantiated) and scope (what’s in or out).

We use regenerative in a context-specific way, grounded in the principle of restoring and strengthening the systems regional industries depend on.

We are not prescribing a fixed set of practices in advance. Instead, we look for demonstrable improvements across environmental, social and economic outcomes.

Yes, the RRCRC is being developed through a co-design process.

Partners help us define priority challenges, shape research questions, test assumptions and design pathways to adoption and impact.

The current framework will be tested, challenged and refined during bid development.

The practical value includes lower and more stable operating costs, reduced first-mover risk, faster access to proven solutions, and new revenue opportunities from under-used assets, residues, data or natural capital.

It also supports stronger market access, better strategic decisions and improved regional conditions that help businesses perform over time.

Co-investment gives organisations access to a shared innovation portfolio. Organisations can test and validate solutions in real regional conditions.

Co-investors gain access to capability, networks, data and partners, including First Nations, that would be hard to assemble independently.

Cooperative Research Centres or CRCs as they’re commonly known are an Australian Government grant mechanism that supports industry-led research collaborations to solve industry-identified problems that improve the competitiveness, productivity and sustainability of Australian industries, in line with government priorities.

They’re ‘designed to contribute to the Department of Industry, Science and Resources’ Outcome 1: Support economic growth, productivity and job creation for all Australians by investing in science and technology, growing innovative and competitive businesses, industries and regions, and supporting a strong resources sector.’

In practice, CRC grants fund medium to long-term research programs, typically running for up to 10 years and involving investments in the tens of millions of dollars.

Government funding usually contributes up to 50 percent of the total program cost. The remainder is matched by partners through cash and in-kind contributions.

CRCs are expected to meaningfully involve First Nations communities and include industry-focused education and training, PhD capability, SME R&D capacity building and pathways for industry uptake.

A CRC bid is a competitive application developed by a coalition of partners to define the problem, design the research program and show a credible pathway to adoption and impact.

Developing a CRC bid is complex and time-consuming because it requires aligning a large and often diverse consortium around one shared opportunity. That means testing the problem definition, confirming partner commitments, shaping the research agenda and proving the pathway from research to real-world application.

The strongest bids are tightly integrated: they show not only what will be researched, but why it matters, who will use it and how it will create value.