ProfessorSteven Maguire

An important stream of Professor Maguire’s research focuses on technological and institutional change driven by the emergence of new risks to human health and the environment, theorizing the role of non-market actors in shaping the adoption or abandonment of particular technologies. He has particular expertise on chemicals management, serving on the Government of Canada’s Chemical Management Plan ‘Challenge’ Advisory Panel during 2007 – 2011 as an expert on the ‘precautionary principle’, and working currently on research with scientists from Health Canada and Environment Canada. He is a strong advocate for engaged, multidisciplinary scholarship, and he currently works closely with scholars from multiple faculties and scientific disciplines

Risk and Innovation

Professor Maguire is an internationally recognized expert on ‘institutional entrepreneurship’ and ‘risk’. After studying for many years the exit of toxic substances from the economy because of the risks they posed to human health in the environment, he turned his attention to the innovations that are required to achieve sustainable development from the new disciplines of green/sustainable chemistry. In 2009, he became a founding member of the Centre for Green Chemistry & Catalysis at McGill University – the sole social scientist to play this role. He has since researched and written about the evolution and development of green chemistry and the role of ‘risk translation’ therein.

Risk translation refers to changes in meanings related to risk, as when chemical risks to human health and the environment that are produced by a company, due to toxic substances in its products and/or manufacturing processes, are translated into legal, reputational or operational risks to the company, which can lead the company to implement cleaner technologies. As a result, risk translation creates opportunities for the commercialization of sustainable chemistries, and Professor Maguire is currently researching sustainable chemistry start-ups. 

Engaged Innovation Research for Impact

“Australia is in a $1.6 trillion global innovation race, where the prize at stake is a bigger share of global wealth, better jobs, and the best access to the products of innovation for addressing societal challenge” … “Innovation and Science Australia’s vision for 2030 is that Australia will be counted within the top tier of innovation nations. We will take pride in our global reputation for excellence in science, research and commercialisation.” (ISA, 2018)

Achieving ISA’s vision by 2030 represents a grand challenge for Australia, especially in light of the country’s historically poor performance along metrics of innovation. For example, Australia ranks only 20th in the 2018 Global Innovation Index.

Clearly, business as usual by organizations within the Australian innovation ecosystem is insufficient to realize the vision. New approaches are required, including – if not particularly – in universities, which have long been recognized as engines of innovation and entrepreneurship, but rarely approached as ‘living laboratories’.

‘Engaged Innovation Research for Impact’ refers to the systematic translation, application and production of knowledge about innovation by Business School &/or other social science scholars who have been embedded alongside natural science researchers as members of multidisciplinary research groups. While studying innovation “in the making” to produce and publish new knowledge about innovation using ethnographic and qualitative methods, embedded Business School &/or other social science researchers also assess, then mobilize in a timely manner, what existing knowledge about innovation is required to position their research group advantageously for identifying and capitalizing upon opportunities for innovation, commercialization, and entrepreneurship.

In August of 2019, Professor Maguire was appointed as the inaugural Innovation Catalyst at Sydney Nano. Working with other professors from the Discipline of Strategy, Innovation & Entrepreneurship from the University of Sydney Business School, as well as with the leadership of Sydney Nano, the research program will help Sydney Nano’s members and multidisciplinary teams to become more user- and customer-focused and, by making their research outputs more commercialization ready, amplify their societal and economic impacts.