The Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who is returning to Australia to head science agency that has lost one-fifth of its workers, says his first priority is to raise morale

Australian scientists have a “duty” to start companies and need to think like entrepreneurs to attract funding, the incoming chief executive of the CSIRO, Dr Larry Marshall, said in his first official remarks.

The Australian venture capitalist, who is returning from Silicon Valley to head the national research agency in January, also told Guardian Australia his “first priority” was to lift spirits in the CSIRO, which has lost one-fifth of its workers in the past two years and seen morale plummet, according to staff surveys.

Speaking at the sidelines of the 2014 Edges of Astronomy conference in Canberra this week, Marshall said staff at the agency needed to hear that “we’re done with cuts”, but said he could not rule out further job losses.

“The federal government still has to figure out the budget, and I’m hopeful that we can get to a place pretty quickly where we can honestly say the cuts are done, but we can’t say for sure until the budget comes out,” he said.

But the entrepreneur, who has started six companies in the US, added: “You don’t hire a guy like me to cut. You just don’t. And I think that was the best message that the board and the government could’ve given the organisation, to hire a guy like me, who’s a company builder.”

Marshall told the conference of astronomers and physicists that Australians were risk averse by nature but that scientists had a responsibility to “break that mould”.

“We need more scientists to start companies. We need to teach scientists that its OK to start a company. It’s your duty,” he said.

Marshall said that “solving big problems” was in the agency’s DNA. “The reason CSIRO was formed was to go solve the prickly pear problem … The second one was the Murrumbidgee irrigation area, a big problem in land and water. And as we got more successful, somehow we drifted away from the national challenge focus,” he said.

“I think [CSIRO scientists] are hungry to be entrepreneurial, I think they’re hungry to increase their customer awareness, but they just don’t know how to do it because they haven’t done it before.”

He said entrepreneurial thinking could help pay for the next-generation square kilometre array (SKA) telescope, a network of dishes in South Africa and Australia that will be ten thousand times faster and fifty times more sensitive that existing radio telescopes.

“There’s no question that we should do [the SKA], but the question is how do we fund it. And I think the government has given us a wake up call that, ‘We’re willing to fund pure research, but we want you to be more entrepreneurial, go figure out who else cares about what you’re doing’.

“And maybe industry don’t care about the Square Kilometre Array. But maybe they care about the data processing capability, or the supercomputer asset, or some other aspect of that where we can get more entrepreneurial in our thinking.

“So we can connect with industry and get them to help shoulder the burden of building this amazing science project.”